A Second Day of Testimony from a Master Storyteller
As the ECCC got down to business Tuesday, you could feel the sense of anticipation in the courtroom for the second day of testimony of Elizabeth Becker. The experienced foreign correspondent was filling in the details and adding colour to the grisly detail of life under the Khmer Rouge and its aftermath.
After failing toidentify Chow Sang, a former Member of Parliament whom Co-Prosecutor Koumjian said was arrested on the instructions of Son Sen and Nuon Chea, Ms. Becker said that she was not told during her 1978 trip of anyone she had requested to interview being arrested, killed or having died. She was not accused of being CIA during these travels but she had had a history at the time of writing critically about the war in Cambodia as had Richard Dudman. Dudman had also written critically about the Vietnam War and had been held captive for 40 days by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge cadres. Ms. Becker said that Dudman had advanced that the US invasion of Cambodia was “a continuation of mistakes made in being involved in the war in Vietnam.”
Mr. Koumjian wanted to know more about the background behind how she, Richard Dudman and Malcolm Caldwell were chosen by Democratic Kampuchea for the 1978 junket to Cambodia. He asked Ms. Becker to position the Washington Post. Ms. Becker defined the newspaper as one of the most important. It was the newspaper of Watergate, the newspaper of the capital of the United States; and that under Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post “had risen to the top of the ranks.” Richard Dudman worked for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “a good regional paper,” not a national newspaper. Ms. Becker felt that, through his long experience writing from Washington, Richard Dudman “had a profile higher than the newspaper” for which he wrote. Malcolm Caldwell was known for “having an affection for all poor revolutionaries whether Vietnamese, Thai, or Cambodian,” and, as such, was “extremely upset” at the thought of a war between Vietnam and Cambodia.
The Co-Prosecutor moved onto the geo-politics of the regional situation in 1978. Ms. Becker said China was a potential military ally of Cambodia in any war with Vietnam. There were a lot of Chinese in Phnom Penh during her visit. Most of the passengers on the plane down from Beijing had been Chinese; the Chinese Embassy was very large; and “the Chinese presence was palpable.” When Kong Sam Ong objected to a question about what the effect would have been on Chinese-Cambodia relations if a Chinese official had been murdered in Cambodia as hypothetical, Mr. Koumjian withdrew it but Ms. Becker said she could not answer it in any event. Mr. Koumjian did take the opportunity to remind all in the courtroom that, as Ms. Becker was an expert witness, she was allowed to draw inferences and opinions from the facts when she was able to do so.
Mr. Koumjian quoted from Ms. Becker’s writing that it took 2,000 workers to build a gate and 20,000 to build dykes and canals, and then asked Ms. Becker if there was work ongoing on the 6th of January dam when her group visited the site. She replied that they were doing repairs. When they arrived, she had taken pictures of soldiers running away carrying their weapons. The cadres had refused to acknowledge the soldiers, how many there were or why they were needed. Similarly, she knew that the people were not allowed to leave the cooperatives although the visitors were not told this by their handlers. Ms. Becker learned something about the system of controlling movement after she had gone out alone and been caught. She was told not to wander around “because of security considerations and the requirement to have permission to leave.”
Interviews were the next topic. Ms. Becker had wanted to interview Prince Sihanouk but had been told he “was occupied, busy.” Her requests to interview Hu Nim and Hou Yuon “were ignored.” Mr. Koumjian read in from Ms. Becker’s interview with Ieng Sary, in 1976, about the categorization of the people. Sary had admitted this “had caused great confusion, that even people who were long time “base people” were accused of being Lon Nol supporters.” Sary maintained divisions had not been ordered by Pol Pot, not ordered from the top to the bottom, but were started by Sao Phim and Ros Nhem. Later on, for the sake of unanimity, the leaders had collectively decided to accept division into three categories: “base people,” poor people from the cities and people who supported Lon Nol.
The Co-Prosecutor was interested in the purpose of the divisions. Ms. Becker said Sary had talked only about the divisions ideologically but that it was “a system of privileges”. The “new people” did not fare as well with food rations, with work assignments. “It was a hierarchy.” Mr. Koumjian was puzzled about why there were separate divisions for the “base people” from the countryside and the poor people from the cities as the proletariat (the poor people) was normally the base unit in such revolutions. Ms. Becker put it in the context of the US bombing and the war with the Khmer Rouge. These two events had caused the population of Phnom Penh to triple in population. A lot of people were only there temporarily having been displaced from the countryside. She had clearly seen this phenomenon when she had lived in Phnom Penh from 1972-1974. “There was a huge infusion because of American bombing, land and villages were destroyed.” She felt that, until August 15, 1973, when the bombing stopped, most people were fleeing the bombing and its destruction. The refugees had said that they had nowhere else to go to be safe but into the city. Other factors included that the country was being divided by armies and people were coming to the cities for supplies. Summarily, Ms. Becker said: “Some were fleeing Khmer Rouge zones; some were finding relatives; some were fleeing the fighting.”
Ith Sarin, a former school instructor, had written on the fleeing in his book Regrets for the Khmer Soul, a diary-like discussion of what was going on in the Khmer Rouge zone. Ms. Becker said it “was like the notion of a pineapple with eyes that can see everything but that the peasants would not be cheated as they were under Lon Nol.” She emphasized that “the lack of a political basis for the fleeing was notable.”
Mr. Koumjian asked the expert researcher if she remembered any radio appeals pre-April, 1975, or at anytime. She had. Ms. Becker recalled that there was a regular appeal to rise up against the Khmer Republic. Prince Sihanouk earliest appeals to villagers for support had been very effective. She did not remember any appeals for the people to leave Phnom Penh.
Ms. Becker was quite familiar with the life of Prince Sihanouk. After she first met him in 1979, she interviewed him on multiple occasions in the 1980’s when he was a member of the Democratic Kampuchea coalition against the Vietnamese occupation and in Phnom Penh after the United Nations brokered a peace agreement. Ms. Becker knew that Sihanouk had been under house arrest by the Khmer Rouge for two years “with only a radio and Khieu Samphan to keep him company.” Ms. Becker had written in her book that he was freed “on the strong insistence of the Chinese and taken to meet Pol Pot.” Pol Pot told him that it was then time for the Prince “to help diplomatically,” and Sihanouk was sent off on missions to China and New York. Sihanouk “repeated Ieng Sary’s lies to the UN,” including that the revolution had been self-sufficient and that there was no need for foreign aid. Then he announced he was going on an eleven-country tour, went to France and promptly defected. Sihanouk “then contradicted everything he had previously said at the UN. He said the DK had thrown out the liberal program, that he feared the refugees’ stories were true and that he was afraid to go back to Phnom Penh.” He pled for political exile. Ms. Becker averred that it was public knowledge that Andrew Young, US Ambassador to the UN, counselled Sihanouk against going into exile on the basis he “would lose his standing as an independent leader.” Sihanouk had told her over dinner that he had children and grandchildren inside Cambodia at this time but not the details of them. She later learned that some of them were killed.
The Co-Prosecutor quoted from Ms. Becker’s book that Sihanouk had feared that, when Vietnam withdrew from Cambodian, “there would be another Khmer Rouge bloodbath.” Ms. Becker claimed that Sihanouk was “inconsistent in his views of the genocidal regime. At other times, Sihanouk had seen a necessity to work with them.” She could not remember Sihanouk in the 1980’s, ever denying the human rights abuses, the Khmer Rouge killings.
Ms. Becker outlined how she had used the story of Sisowath, a member of the Me (spelling?) family, and a Kampuchea Krom born in Cambodia, to “give her book a human face.” Ms. Becker knew a lot about the Muslim minority from her interviews with Sisowath. The Krom suffered from “basic racial biases, were criticized as lazy and exotic.” During the war, Malaysia and Indonesia had an interest in protecting them. Then they were targeted by the Khmer Rouge. They wore different clothes and headwear of scarves for the women and hats for the men; they worshipped in mosques, and the men were often bearded. Mr. Koumjian quoted from her writing that, at first, the majority of the Chams joined the Khmer Rouge but by 1973 “their lifestyle was called counter-revolutionary.” Their mosques were destroyed or used as granaries, pig stys or prisons; their leaders were murdered; their schools (as were all schools), were shut; they had to choose Khmer names, shave their beards, and were forced to eat pork; families were broken up so that they could not pass on their culture to a younger generation. When the Chams rebelled against the Khmer Rouge, whole villages were slaughtered. They were relocated to cooperatives, forced to wear regular clothing, prohibited from using their language or practiceing their faith and forced to integrate.
At this point, Mr. Kobbe objected on the basis that he had received an email listing the five topics for Ms. Becker’s examination and the treatment of the Cham was not one of them. He wanted a clarification as to the meaning of the email: “Was it just a suggestion?”
Judge Fenz explained that the email had been sent “to avoid having the expert on the stand for two weeks.” The Cham are part of the case but the bench wanted balance to be used and not to focus on this one issue. Mr. Koumjian said he could finish with the topic in five minutes or less and the judge told him to “go ahead.”
International Civil Party Lead Co-Lawyer Marie Guiraud contributed that the civil parties had specific issues around victims in groups and that they considered the Cham among these groups “vis-a-vis their questioning.”
After the morning break, Ms. Becker revealed she had interviewed Chams both before and after 1979. She did not see any mosques during her 1978 trip or any Christian churches. She said even the main French Cathedral kitty-corner to the Le Royal Hotel had been completely torn down.
Mr. Koumjian asked Ms. Becker to explain the steps the regime took to eliminate the family as a meaningful unit of society as she had stated in her book. How had they “subordinated the family by ignoring it” or “shifted from family to revolutionary authorities” as she had written? Ms. Becker reported that families were not kept together; the children were removed from the parents. The children “were discouraged from seeing their parents as authority figures.” The cadres were. “Parental responsibilities (feeding, clothing) became (sic) the state.” This could lead to conflicts of children against parents “under the rules.” Ms. Becker said this was a “night and day difference” from when she had lived in Cambodia in 1972-74. Cambodians have strong families with a huge network and this was “an irrational family net.” Family was the center of Cambodian life. After the fall of the regime, families regrouped as quickly as possible.
During the trip, Ms. Becker travelled 2,000 miles with “an inordinate amount of time spent in cars or on boats.” During all this touring she saw no Cham in traditional clothing. She said the rationale given for why even babies were killed was that since everyone was accused through a network, the network included the children. But, she decried, “if nothing else, this was irrational.”
Bophana was a story of a young woman who had been severely tortured, sexually abused and killed at Toul Sleng along with her husband. Victims of jealously and suspicions, their crime was trying to subvert the rules in order to live together. Her diary was one of the few that portrayed the emotional life of going through the troubles. Ms. Becker’s story about Bophana was made into a documentary by Rithy Panh,“A Cambodian Tragedy,” which plays at Toul Sleng.
Going on to more geo-politics, the Co-Prosecutor outlined how Zbigniew Brzezski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, had encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot and counselled the Thais to help Democratic Kampuchea, but questions had remained of how to help the Cambodian people. Ms. Becker said that “the US had played a foundational roll in forming an alliance of the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk and Son Sann of which Sihanouk was to be head. In that way, the Khmer Rouge could keep their standing at the UN.” Mr. Koumjian was perplexed at how the US could support Pol Pot if they thought him an “abomination.” Ms. Becker explained that this was the “last major piece of the Cold War to be resolved. The US sided with China; Vietnam sided with the Soviets. After the Vietnamese invasion, the US was instrumental in convincing Europe to embargo Cambodia for a decade and to tighten the existing embargo on Vietnam. This was just when Cambodia was trying to recover from the Khmer Rouge.”
Civil Party Lead Co-Lawyer Marie Guiraud focused on the problem of recruiting by the military.
Ms. Becker observed that by the time Hun Sen had joined with the Vietnamese there had already been a significant loss of military due to purging or flight. This posed the problem of from where to get recruits for the impending battle with Vietnam. Ms. Becker took a lot of photographs of very young soldiers when she was on the eastern front specifically because their “age was so markedly young.” She thought them to be not yet teenagers although it was hard to get their ages or the information received about this was “vague.”
Ms. Becker told the court that refugees had told her about the Cham’s plight before her visit to Cambodia. Ms. Guiraud asked her what Buddhism represented before Democratic Kampuchea?
The knowledgeable author and researcher had much to say about how Buddhism was part of what Cambodian society officially was, a proud Buddhist country. Buddhism was the very fabric of life found in every aspect of the culture: the language, the holidays, the calendar, at funerals and weddings, in the charity to the monks. Some of the pagodas had even fomented independence in Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge had called Buddhism a “reactionary faith”, defrocked the monks, and prohibited the practice of the religion. Ms. Guiraud followed up with a reference from the witness’s article “Cambodia is Seeking Self Sufficiency and Independence Regardless of the Cost” and the “erasure of Cambodian culture” that had taken place. In 1978, Ms. Becker had felt “Cambodia had lost its soul.”
Judge Lavergne quizzed Ms. Becker about who had given her the information about family relations and the need to get permission to marry? Prasith had told her that the permission had come through the cooperative leaders. She had brought it up with senior leaders in the context of determination of when to marry to ensure population growth, who to marry and how to live together or not live together. She did not make a link between marriage and population growth but it was important to Democratic Kampuchea to increase the population. She learned the details later regarding the cooperatives approval of the marriages. But, in 1978, she had seen the unisex dorms and realized these seem to be contradictory to population growth. She was sure that Prasith had been the source of her knowledge about this. Whenever she asked him a question, he had the numbers available as per “the rules and regulations.” For example, that a person might get 1 kg. of rice to eat a month. She “got tired of writing down all the numbers” she was quoted on working conditions, rice production or whatever.
Ms. Becker had heard the term “Kampuchea Worker Peasant” so often that she did not notice who said it. It meant that “peasants took the role of the working class in a more urbanized setting. In context, the most common, basic class.”
The expert thought that the wiping out of community as had been known did not alone lead to the “erasure of a personal identity, that that was putting a lot on one concept.” Rather, under the class system, there was a redefinition of community and individuality was a block to this. When she asked about “ethnic purity,” she was told “one Cambodian nation, one Cambodian people.” She read about ethnic purity more than she heard about it. Most of the research she did on it was after Democratic Kampuchea was over thrown and it boiled down to “very much a pure Khmer race, men looking alike, women looking alike, just one Cambodian nation.”
Just before lunch, Seng Leang read into the record the names of the four individuals that Malcolm Caldwell was to have enquired about who had gone missing on their return to Cambodia. And Judge Lavergne also had a clarification for the record that the book by the Cambodian who lived underground with the Khmer Rouge was Regrets of the Khmer Soul, by Ith Sarin.
Victor Koppe, Nuon Chea Defence Counsel, led the next session and was quick to challenge Ms. Becker’s observations and conclusions. He began by determining when Ms. Becker had done her primary research. As it turns out, mostly before 1986, some research into 1992. Ms. Becker rejected Mr. Koppe’s assertion that she had done no major research for the last 23 years saying that she had kept up with secondary sources. And, her contemporary research on modern Cambodia “has bled into Democratic Kampuchea.”
Citing as examples, Steven Morris’s material from the Soviet archives, Sambath Thet and Gina Chon’s movie, and Geng Biao’s report on the situation in the Indo-China Peninsula, Mr. Koppe asked why Ms. Becker had not used these sources in her book, When the War Was Over. He could find no reference to them in the bibliography. Further, why had she not given the Chinese and Soviet perspectives?
Judge Lavernge interrupted to complain that the counsel had not given the proper dates and reference numbers so the parties could determine the relevance of this line of questioning. The information was supplied and Mr. Koppe moved on to ask the witness to explain what materials she had shared with Kiernan, Chandler, and Heder saying he was trying to determine if she relied on more than one scholar. Nayan Chanda had shared his research on Vietnamese diplomatic history; Kiernan contributed the documents from Toul Sleng on Malcolm Caldwell’s murder; Heder gave her translations of documents. When questioned about Douglas Pike of the US State Department, Ms. Becker said he was more a Vietnam specialist than a Cambodian specialist and she did not talk to him before her 1978 trip. She did use the Congressional Report of 1978 in writing her book.
Richard Dudman, who had accompanied Ms. Becker on the press junket, was experienced in US foreign policy. She said he has a good reputation but that his major career had been in Washington with him making only the occasional trip abroad. He received the George Polk Lifetime Achievement Award for taking on dangerous assignments “because Cambodia in 1978 proved to be very dangerous.” Ms. Becker strongly disagrees with Dudman’s 1990 “Op-ed:” “Pol Pot: Brutal Yes, but No Mass Murderer.” Mr. Koppe précised for the Tribunal that Mr. Caldwell had written that the US had been pushing for policy changes that would lead to Cambodia’s conquest by Vietnam and that, under DK, there had been “irrational fanatics, a wrecked economy and a genocide that was poignant but statistically insignificant.” The article also hypothesized that first the Cambodian refugees (who were largely middle and upper class) and then the Vietnamese had exaggerated what had gone on for their own purposes. Ms. Becker countered that, by 1990, Toul Sleng had been open for years and “the evidence is clear and overwhelming;” that Mr. Dudman had not gone back to Cambodia since 1978 to see the evidence to the contrary; that his ideas are out of date and he does not even mention all of the archives. She was emphatic that “the evidence is that this was an incompetent, murderous regime.”
Mr. Koppe quoted Dudman saying that, on the 1978 trip, he had found the population generally healthy, there was a normal demographic mix of men, women and children; and he did not see any distended stomachs or brown hair indicative of malnutrition. He was told that the workers were in the fields 7:00AM to 7:00PM, which he considered “not unreasonable during the harvest season” and that the rice exports had returned. Ms. Becker exclaimed that “this was ‘single-source reporting,’ what you get when government officials restrict what you see and one message is all you get.” Even when counsel read from the scholar, Roeland Burgler’s book, Eyes of the Pineapple, that had depicted Mr. Dudman as “the most insightful of the visitors,” Ms. Becker ‘took the high road,’ refusing to criticize Mr. Dudman personally but firmly stating that her book was quoted extensively and she was confident in her reporting. She did agree with Dudman calling the visit “a conducted tour” but disagreed with him when he had written that “despite the restrictions”, they gathered “significant information” about the then “new Cambodia since the revolution four years prior.” She said they had spent just too much time “stuck in cars or on boats.” Ms. Becker and Mr. Dudman have a history of debating on television.
Mr. Koppe asked for Ms. Becker’s comments concerning Mr. Dudman’s assertions that, in 1978, “the physical conditions for the vast majority of the populations might have improved; the Cambodians were not being starved to death; work was regimented but they received regular food and clothing. They couldn’t find refugees and there was no sign of cadres giving orders or armed guards, although everyone seemed to know what was expected of them.”
With this, Ms. Becker had a major disagreement. She said Mr. Dudman had not been to Cambodia before 1978 so he had nothing with which to compare what he saw, that he was making “comparisons to nothing.” She protested that they did see armed guards, that they were frequently stopped by armed guards.
More from Dudman: “Quitting time was obviously 5:00PM although the harvest required night work on moon-filled nights but they didn’t see workers after dark; they did not see any evidence of starvation; there was an adequate if plain diet; happy children were running around playing and had no distended stomachs; there were many pregnant women not women who were barren due to starvation; rice exports were a spectacular international achievement.” Ms. Becker rebutted that they were not even out at night; that housing was not as good as she had seen it before; that the hundreds of people they saw did not reflect the millions that they did not see; rice exports were required and “they had seen the ships.”
Mr. Koppe said that as Mr. Dudman was an experienced journalist who had covered big stories such as the Cuban Revolution and the assassination of Kennedy, he was puzzled about the discrepancies between Mr. Dudman’s reporting and Ms. Becker’s. Ms. Becker simplified her argument: Mr. Dudman “did not know Cambodia and he did not want to go back to Cambodia.”
Counsel argued that observations of starving children do not require prior knowledge of Cambodia. Ms. Becker parried that she had taken pictures of very thin children, and that her group was not allowed close enough to see signs of malnourishment.
The thrust of Mr. Koppe’s argument switched to Douglas Pike and a report he had written for the State Department on the role of Vietnam in relation to Democratic Kampuchea and Southeast Asia. Mr. Pike’s first conclusion was that the Vietnamese had always considered that the “federation of Indo-China was the ultimate configuration of the peninsula.” Ms. Becker said that the “debate is rich and old and continues,” but that she did not think that it was “a static idea.” And she did not believe Vietnam fought the war to take over Cambodia. As it was the State Department who had told her before her trip that, if Vietnam did invade, troops would only go as far as the eastern shore of the Mekong, she concluded that it was not the opinion of the State Department either. Ms. Becker added that Pike was one of the architects of the “domino theory that had Vietnam invading Southeast Asia not Cambodia.”
Pike’s second position that the internecine border war had been going on since 1970 and that “neither state was an instigator or a simple victim,” Ms. Becker negated by referring to Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Embers of War which gives the Soviet and Chinese interests in Southeast Asia.
Ms. Becker opined that “there was nothing new” in Pike’s third premise that Cambodia’s behavior was not irrational when viewed in the light of Cambodia’s history. She stated that the war had proved that the policy did not make sense and said that the Warsaw Pact versus NATO concept is the model of irrational.
Mr. Koppe protested that there had been Soviet military advisors in Vietnam to which Ms. Becker shot back, “Yes, and Chinese advisors in Democratic Kampuchea but NATO troops? Warsaw Pact troops? The idea had been so irrational that she took it out of her report. Mr. Koppe said that there was no mention of NATO troops in the Black Paper. Ms. Becker disagreed and said for him to listen to the translation done by Kiet Chuun, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. NATO did not become the centerpiece in the conflict. She lectured that this was about US and China as evidenced by Tiannamen Square. It was “close to the divide” (Ed. Note: as discussed in her testimony of February 9, 2015). “US policy towards Cambodia was determined by policy towards China. There was a major change in 1970 when the US supported a coup against Sihanouk. Chinese spread across the country. Vietnamese communists took up the fight against Lon Nol. It was not a border war.”
Ms. Becker suggested that Pike’s fourth idea, that the inconclusive rise and fall in battle would turn Cambodia into a “client” state which was best for Vietnam “but is one fraught with danger,” was unproven.
Mr. Koumjian objected that Mr. Koppe was representing Pike’s report as the views of the Department of State. The forward indicates he was a scholar in residence and the findings are those of Mr. Pike and not the views of the Department of State.
When Mr. Koppe said there is information in Vietnam archives to prove Mr. Pike’s fourth point, Judge Fenz jumped in to reprimand counsel stating that she “would appreciate it if (he) wouldn’t testify but just ask questions.”
From Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia, Mr. Koppe quoted Steven Morris as saying the Soviet Ambassador to North Vietnam said “it was Vietnamese policy to replace the regime in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to create an Indo-Chinese federation.” Ms. Becker was “not surprised.
The Soviets had poor relations with both sides, but the Soviets were not much interested in Southeast Asia. They were into Europe. This allowed Ho Chi Minh to have his party.” She did not know whether the Soviet views were in line with the perceptions of Douglas Pike but, in any event, she was unsure “whether it could be called US policy or Soviet policy.”
Mr. Koppe reminded the court of Deng Ziaoping’s statement that the Vietnamese “were the hooligans of the East.” He went on to raise Geng Biao’s theory that Vietnam invaded Cambodia congruent with “longstanding malicious intentions.”
A peeved Judge Fenz broke in to criticize counsel for “presenting the opinion of one person as the opinion of a country.” She accused him of evaluating a piece of evidence and to “stop it.”
Mr. Koppe defended himself stating “it was accepted generally that Geng Biao was presenting China’s foreign policy.”
Judge Lavergne wanted to know if it was an official Chinese document. Mr. Koppe replied that “all scholars refer to the report as the view of the Chinese government.”
Judge Fenz was out of patience and told Mr. Koppe that “there has been a ruling. Please adapt your language to it.”
Using some discretion, Mr. Koppe asked Ms. Becker what China’s views were on the matter. Ms. Becker reported that the “public view” was that China would use Vietnam’s attempts to re-establish an Indo-Chinese federation as “an excuse to invade Vietnam and teach them a lesson”.
Post break, Ms. Becker said that Sihanouk had described in a five-hour press conference in Beijing what it was like to be under house arrest. Then Sihanouk went to the UN and on to France where he had wanted to stay but “they would not let him.” Throughout, Sihanouk had taken the position that Vietnam was going to invade. Ms. Becker did not remember that Sihanouk had compared the invasion of Cambodia with the Nazi invasion of Poland, “like a big boa constrictor slowly swallowing Kampuchea.” Ms. Becker said all the Democratic Kampuchea leaders would use the phrase “swallowing Kampuchea,” that that was the “standard speech.” The Soviets and China did not agree on what Vietnam was up to. “No one questions that Vietnam was close to the Soviets and fearful of China.”
Mr. Koppe tried to draw Ms. Becker out on the influence of the Brezhnev Doctrine applied in Czechoslovakia on the issues in Southeast Asia. He described the policy as a warning of what would happen to communist countries which do not “stay in line”. Co-Prosecutor Koumjian offered a restatement of the doctrine: “When the forces that are hostile to socialism turn towards capitalism, it is a problem for all communist countries.”
Ms. Becker could not see how it affected Cambodia and she did not remember any official Vietnamese statement that the Brezhnev Doctrine had informed their invasion of Cambodia.
She denied the suggestion that Vietnam was a Soviet satellite. In explication, she said Vietnam was poor after 1975 due to an “incredible embargo.” Vietnamese were sent to work in factories all over Europe and they hated it, but Vietnam had to pay back debt with workers. Vietnam was not a satellite; it was just poor. She asserted that Fredrik Logevall would not have called Vietnam a satellite either. And, after 1975, “human rights were abysmal (hence the one million boat refugees) but the government is still in power so there has been no access.” She said the boat people from the south went to the West. The ethnic Chinese in the north were suspected of supporting Cambodia and were driven out, with many going to Hong Kong.
Ms. Becker maintained that there was no doubt that the war was a border war and not a “humanitarian intervention.” She scoffed at the idea as “no one ever accused the Vietnamese of doing a humanitarian invasion,” that that excuse “was stuck on” when Vietnam tried to get UN support of its action.
Ms. Becker also disagreed that the war resulted in a different faction of Khmer Rouge being installed. They were former Democratic Kampuchea but they had split off from the DK and were fighting the DK.
Mr. Koppe was running out of time so hurried through questions concerning the split in the DK (Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, et al versus Sao Phim, Ros Nhem et al) before the Vietnamese invaded. Ms. Becker thought it was “a purge from the top and not a split.” She saw it as “an attack on the regions to take more power” that had started in the regions in 1977. The records show “it became a snowball.” She said that in the confessions, the enemy was no longer the CIA; it was Vietnam. Policy divisions were not cited. The center claimed a general betrayal. They had the power and went systematically through the regions. Ms. Becker took “with a grain of salt,” the two cadres claim in Sambath Thet and Gina Chon’s Behind the Killing Fields that “everyone knew about a plot to overthrow Pol Pot’s leadership.” She said it was only two isolated interviews, way after the fact and with no documentary proof. It was the line of the DK leadership. “In Toul Sleng, everyone of them said it.”
Mr. Koumjian jumped on Mr. Koppe accusing him of misstating facts, that it was not for counsel to evaluate evidence that he hoped the Chamber would hear in the future. Right on top of that objection, Mr. Koumjian was back on his feet objecting to Mr. Koppe not asking questions but rather making statements and then asking for a reflection. The Co-Prosecutor wanted questions without which he does not have an opportunity to object.
The President upheld the objection ruling that Mr. Koppe must ask questions so he can get proper responses “to get the truth.”
Mr. Koppe quoted Richard Dudman’s statement that Richard Caldwell had been killed “in an apparent effort to embarrass the government of Cambodia.” “If pushed”, Ms. Becker said that it may have happened because “some people were not happy Ieng Sary had opened up the country to non-friendly foreigners.” She did not see why Vietnamese cadres would hurt Caldwell and termed Mr. Koppe’s theory that it could have been done by opposing factions acting on orders from Vietnam “a stretch that (she) just couldn’t see.”
It was a late adjournment but there was much to contemplate before court resumes on the morrow.