By Luke Hunt
As the trial of former senior Khmer Rouge members continues, debate rages over how much China’s leadership knew about a key slave labor project.
On a 300 hectare expanse in a remote part of central Cambodia, a massive airstrip capable of handling the heaviest of bombers lies abandoned. A Cold War relic, the 1.4 kilometer runway has rarely been used. Still, it goes to the heart of an enormous travesty.
Ey Sarih knows this full well and has stood guard at the airstrip’s gates for more than 20 years. At 46 years of age, he has three children and a wife who runs a small roadside drinks shop. And he remembers very clearly the Khmer Rouge and what they did here.
“Most of the work was done here over 1978,” he says. “Then they killed a lot of people. They deserve to be there in front of the tribunal.”
Back in the capital, the Khmer Rouge tribunal has wound up after a controversial year, but with the three most senior surviving leaders in the dock for crimes against humanity as part of Case 002. Other charges of genocide, murder and torture are expected to be laid later.
Among the latest revelations were that members of the all-important Standing Committee had routinely visited the site of the airstrip, where Khieu Samphan, a former head of state, had pressed laborers to work ever harder.
There are several estimates on how many were deployed to work here, but tribunal sources put the number at 30,000 people. Those sent here were put to work constructing the runway, access roads, blast walls and a control tower that remains useable to this day. But conditions for laborers were allegedly so appalling that many preferred suicide, throwing themselves under passing trucks. Hanging, drowning and poisons were also used by workers to take their own lives. Then, nearly all those who survived until the end of 1978 were killed.
Ey Sarih says the dead were buried around the airstrip and at a nearby mountain where secret tunnels were dug to house Chinese logistics and computer equipment linked to the control tower.
The crimes were, of course, part of a much greater atrocity. Between 1.7 million and 2.2 million people died under Pol Pot, whose tyrannical rule lasted from April 1975 to January 1979. These were the darkest days of Cambodia’s 30 year war that ended in 1998, when efforts to kick start a war crimes tribunal finally gained some traction.
How much Beijing knew about the atrocities as they were being committed has been the subject of much debate among academics and military analysts. China has said nothing about the airstrip or its support of the Khmer Rouge, except to say the tribunal and prosecution of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders was an internal matter for Cambodians to resolve.
At the time, China also had its problems. Back in the 1970s, the Cultural Revolution was at its peak, and the leadership in Beijing was in disarray following the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976. The one man considered powerful enough to intervene, Deng Xiaoping, had been exiled to the countryside. Deng returned and took control of China in December 1978, the same month Vietnam invaded and ousted Pol Pot from power. Beijing, in support of the Khmer Rouge, retaliated by launching a cross border incursion into northern Vietnam.
The airstrip would have allowed the Chinese to stage short-range bombing raids over southern Vietnam and its near-completed status, some military analysts have argued, was also likely in Hanoi’s thinking and partially responsible for its invasion of Cambodia.
Ey Sarih says the reason the airstrip was constructed is a matter for the Extraordinary Chambers for the Courts in Cambodia (ECCC) to establish, although he adds that “Chinese people came here to build the airport for fighting.”
Photo Credit: Luke Hunt
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Throughout its history China (in various forms) has always tried to dominate and control Vietnam in particular, and Indochina in general. China’s support for North Vietnam in the Vietnam-America War is well documented, but its support (materiel, manpower, ideology, and diplomacy) is not as well documented. However, it was known that tens of thousands of Chinese ‘advisers’ were evacuated (by ships) from the country ahead of the Vietnamese forces in 1979. Taking into consideration the Khmer Rouge’s Mao-inspired agrarian revolution and policies once they took over the country in 1975, the presence of thousands of Chinese advisers provides a strong indicator of their non-agricultural roles. Deng Xiaoping’s decision to invade Northern Vietnam provides another clear indication of China’s role in supporting the Khmer Rouge (i.e., to relieve the pressure facing the Khmer Rouge leadership as the Vietnamese troops neared Phnom Penh). Another tragedy of this case was America’s decision to join the Chinese in tacitly supporting the Khmer Rouge through the recognition of their seat at the United Nations, all in the name of the Cold War geopolitics! Jimmy Carter, for all his human qualities in his post-Whitehouse time, made a really terrible mistake in such decision.
Even as China has become more prosperous since its economic opening to Capitalism, its foreign policy continues to seek out advantages for itself, even at the expense of human rights in other countries. One needs look no further than China’s involvement today in many African countries ruled by oppressive dictators. China has not, and does not seem to be interested to contribute to world peace and well-being of other peoples. So much for China’s slogan of “Peaceful Rise”!
Sam_Khmer
Communist China supported KR allies with weapons during the early 70’s. After the fall of PP Gov. in April 1975, China wanted their pay-back from KR Gov.. KR then have to pay to the Chinese Com. Gov. with rice and other natural resources, and that’s why all Khmer people went starvation with no rice to eat.
KR also got supported from Sihanouk during that time.
In the eye of all Khmer people, China Com. Gov. and Sihanouk himself needed to be in the box of this UN Tribunal to answer along with those senior KR’s to find the real truth.