I am honored and humbled to have been accepted as the new coordinator for South and Southeast Asia reviews in the Journal. I have been on the "job" less than a week. I therefore have no book or literature reviews that either I have done, or that others have submitted. I also do not have any input for what I hope will be a regular summary of significant happenings in the FAO world as reported by South and Southeast Asian FAOs. What I am pleased to present, however, are biographical sketches of two retired US Army FAO colonels who work four floors above me in the State Department. Both of these esteemed gentleman served 30 years in our great Army and both, coincidentally, started as China FAOs before expanding their horizons into South and Southeast Asia. Both began work in the State Department as civil servants within the last six months, and their comments and lessons learned can both motivate and educate us.
Colonel (RET) Jason Greer was commissioned an Armor officer in 1969 and retired in 1999. After completing Chinese language training at DLI in 1979 he served the next 20 years in FAO assignments including Pakistan CGSC, Pakistan National Defense College, AARMA Islamabad, ARMA Islamabad, Army DCSOPS Middle East/South Asia Desk Officer, State Department Pol-Mil Bureau Middle East/South Asia Desk Officer, OASD/ISA Country Director for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, and Director for South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council. In short, Colonel Greer was the epitome of the professional FAO, serving alternating tours in the field and in Washington. His in-depth knowledge and experience drove him to the very top levels of the US Government as evidenced by his selection for an NSC Director position.
Although Colonel Greer single-tracked even when it was discouraged, he still sees the need "for FAOs to have a firm grounding in their basic branch." For FAO training he places the highest value on the in-country experiences. He supports OPMS XXI "because of its potential for allowing FAOs to fully utilize their FAO skills." He also supports alternating between field and HQ assignments so that the big picture and the small picture views of U.S. foreign policy can be seen first hand.
As for the State Department, Colonel Greer served a tour in the political-military affairs bureau as a Lieutenant Colonel. After retirement he found his current job on the Office of Personnel Management web site (www.usajobs.opm.gov). He is the director of the Political-Military Affairs Bureau's Office of Congressional and Public Affairs. He serves as the primary liaison between the pol-mil, legislative affairs, and public affairs bureaus. Outside the building he interfaces with Hill staffers and the media. His opinion of the State Department? "Over time, I have come to better understand State's particular strengths and weaknesses - and generally my opinion of State has become more favorable."
Colonel (RET) Tom Washburn was commissioned in the Infantry in 1970 and branch transferred to Special Forces in 1987. His FAO assignments include Chinese language training in Hong Kong, S3 and XO of 1st PSYOPS Battalion (when those positions were coded 48), and commander of 9th PSYOPS Battalion (ABN) , CGSC instructor, Branch and Division Chief in DIA, Thai language training at DLI, ARMA Bangkok, and Pol-Mil Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific. Like Colonel Greer, Colonel Washburn looked for federal jobs on the OPM web site, but it was the connections he made during his last active duty tour within the State Department that landed him the job. The vacancy in the Office of Plans, Policy, and Analysis in the Political-Military Affairs Bureau was intended for a currently serving State Department civil servant but a seldom-used provision in the Merit Promotion vacancy announcement (not advertised on the OPM site) stated that "military personnel with three years of honorable service" were eligible to apply.
Colonel Washburn is not particularly enthusiastic about the fact that OPMS XXI will take away the opportunity for FAOs to serve as XOs, S3s, and commanders, but he accepts the rationale for it. Colonel Washburn's best tour? ARMA Bangkok -- an assignment that was tremendously exciting and extremely demanding. Most disappointing FAO tour? As an instructor at CGSC Colonel Washburn was not used for the China FAO skills for which his billet was coded.
Views on the State Department? Colonel Washburn is surprised that the Foreign Service does not encourage regional or country specialization the way military FAO programs do. The Foreign Service expects its officers to be able to serve anywhere. That said, "I am impressed by the speed with which they [FSOs] move into a new job in a new geographic area and in short order become very knowledgeable and effective."
Anyone wishing to contact these two great Americans can reach them at greerjh@t.state.gov and washburntd@state.gov.
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Reviewed by Paul Marks
Kiernan seminal work is almost five years old and has been reviewed favorably in academic journals. Because Kiernan work is so well-known I intend to review it here from just one perspective a perspective that supports my own academic interests of someday explaining not only how China supported the Khmer Rouge, but why China supported the Khmer Rouge. The policy decision to throw your support behind some of the greatest killers the world has ever known is a strange one indeed, made even stranger by the fact that China appears to have made no effort to temper the behavior of the Khmer Rouge.
But first a brief word on Kiernan work for those interested in a more traditional review. The Pol Pot Regime joins Elizabeth Becker When the War Was Over, David Chandler The Tragedy of Cambodian History, and Nayan Chanda Brother Enemy as mandatory reading for anyone hoping to even begin to grasp the genocidal, pathological, hyper-Maoist Khmer Rouge. Kiernan meticulously combines survivor interviews that he has been conducting since 1980 with unearthed documents and the work of other scholars. The result is an almost week by week account of the 44 months of the Khmer Rouge regime: who was in charge, who was up, who was down, who was killing, where were they killing, why were they killing, who were they killing, how were they killing etc. An overriding theme is an explanation of internal Khmer Rouge purges. The Khmer Rouge ate itself from within in a way unfathomable to the western reader. Anyone who has been to the Tuol Sleng torture center museum in Phnom Penh will find it poignant that the more than 26,000 men, women, and children who perished there (only seven people are known to have survived) included a large number of internal enemies who had once been loyal Khmer Rouge cadre.
Kiernan makes an extra effort to shape his analysis to support a future genocide investigation and international tribunal. He spends considerable time, for instance, on the effort by the Khmer Rouge to wipe out the minority Moslems (Chams) that made approximately five percent of the population in 1975. There were times when I had to put the book down and take a deep breath, as some of the first-hand accounts of violence are particularly disturbing. There is a slight inconsistency where in one chapter ethnic Cambodian Chinese are killed because they are Chinese, but in another chapter those same Chinese are killed because they are bourgeoisie -- and Kiernan thus concludes that the charge of genocide would not stick.
Perhaps the only aspect of this book that makes its scholarship somewhat dated is the fact that none of the interviews are with the killers themselves. Since the wholesale collapse of the Khmer Rouge in 1996 it is now possible for researchers to meet with former Khmer Rouge cadre to seek details from their side of the equation. This remains to be done, and it is also a potential mechanism for answering the question I will pursue forthwith: what were the full details of Chinese support to the Khmer Rouge?
What we learn from Kiernan about Chinese support to the Khmer Rouge is some interesting particulars of the what and the when, but not the why. We learn that the "when" began years, even decades, before the Khmer Rouge took power. Promising revolutionaries went to China for training in various technical skills that were intended to pay dividends one day. As the chance of revolution grew, the reason for traveling to China extended beyond training and into what was very likely political strategizing. We learn from Kiernan, for instance, that Pol Pot himself was visiting China in March 1970 when Premier Lon Nol led a parliamentary coup that removed Prince Sihanouk from power. Pol Pot's primary handler in China was none other than Kang Sheng, Mao's secret service chief (see Faligot and Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service, for a biography of Kang). Another Khmer Rouge leader was in China during the next major regime change in Cambodia. Ieng Sary had to be ferried to Phnom Penh in a Chinese- owned 707 on 24 April 1975, seven days after the Khmer Rouge took the city.
Following the Khmer Rouge seizure of power China began an ambitious assistance effort that continued, in one form or another, up until the end of the Khmer Rouge regime (and semi-covertly throughout the 1980s when the Khmer Rouge was a guerrilla group operating from Thailand). Pol Pot visited China in June 1975 and that same month a Chinese Defense Ministry team traveled to Cambodia to assess Cambodia's defense needs. Chinese aircraft and ships then began regular journeys to Cambodia to deliver military items, farm implements, clothing, and other miscellaneous items. In exchange Cambodia traded rice (at a time when hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were starving to death), raw rubber, and, surrealistically, animal parts. Chinese believe in the medicinal qualities of certain animal bones, skins, and organs. In one ship's manifest preserved for posterity from mid-1977, 24,760 dried geckos -- the large type resembling an Arizona Gila monster -- were sent to China along with six tons of monkey bone, 1.5 tons of elephant bone, a ton of snake skins (mostly python), 145 kg of panther and tiger skins, 73 kg of black bear skins, and 128 kg of ringmark lizard. There were numerous shipments like this. Kiernan goes so far as to compare the trading value that China provided the Khmer Rouge for the animal parts with the going price at contemporary Chinese and Taiwan apothecaries to demonstrate that China was ripping off the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps this was the least the Khmer Rouge could do for China to thank them for doing business with the devil. It's a miracle that Cambodia today still has wild tiger, elephant, monkey, and Thai crocodile (extinct in Thailand).
China provided considerable military hardware to the Khmer Rouge, as well as 15,000 military and civil advisors according to Kiernan. More recent sources dispute this figure and cite Khmer Rouge documents that tracked the number of Chinese in country to place the maximum number of Chinese advisory personnel at 800. The aid and advisory efforts required VIP visits and diplomatic coordination beyond that of the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh (one of only a handful that stayed open during the Khmer Rouge regime). General Wang Shangrong, then deputy chief of the PLA general staff, made one of these dignitary visits in February 1976 when he was responding to a Khmer Rouge demand for increased military aid. The two sides signed a military aid treaty and the weapons shipments increased. In December 1977 the leader of China's Dazhai Commune, the model commune at the time, traveled to Cambodia for a VIP tour. He was shown Cambodians laboring in the fields, but not the killing in the fields. A month later Deng Xiaoping's wife Deng Yingchao made her VIP visit to the country that by then had exterminated almost 15 percent of its population, including almost half of its ethnic Chinese population.
That basically sums up the factual information that we learn from this work about the relationship between China and the Khmer Rouge. Some of it is new, such as the animal parts trading, but much of it is available elsewhere, in particular in Chanda's Brother Enemy (1986). Although we do not learn a lot about China's motivation, we do get a glimpse of the suspicion with which the Khmer Rouge viewed their communist brothers. They were kept under constant surveillance, they had no freedom of movement, and during political indoctrination sessions in January 1976 and again a year later the Khmer Rouge leadership warned its senior cadre to "beware of China she wants to make us her satellite." It is perhaps this evidence that lends weight to Kiernan's one comment on China's motivation: "China's interest in Democratic Kampuchea had little to do with the living conditions of Cambodians or the country's ethnic Chinese. More important even than the trade in wildlife products were the strategic opportunities Democratic Kampuchea offered China to exploit divisions in Southeast Asia and outflank Vietnam."
So while Kiernan's objective was to describe the Khmer Rouge regime in toto, he does also help readers understand China's role. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his work in this regard is a footnote stating that there are 36 dossiers of Chinese-language original Khmer Rouge documents in the Cambodian National Archives that have not yet been exploited.
About the Reviewer: Major Paul Marks, US Army 48F, was a UN Military Observer in Cambodia during the United Nations Transitional Authority mission (1993), and he spent three years as the Deputy CINCPACREP in the US Embassy in Phnom Penh (1996-1999). He is currently a contingency planner in the State Department's political-military affairs bureau. E-mail:markspc@state.gov