These powers supported him because they shared his hostility toward Vietnam. In January 1979, two weeks after the fall of Phnom Penh, the Thai government, fearful of a Vietnamese invasion, struck a deal with China. The Thai would offer shelter to the Red Khmer (whom the Chinese would supply with weapons and equipment) if the Chinese would drop their support for the Thai Communist party, a guerrilla movement that had been troubling the Thai military for years. The United States, whose friendship with China had become a cornerstone of its Asian policies, did nothing to undermine this agreement and supported the seating of Pol Pot’s delegation to the United Nations. In doing so they ingratiated themselves with China and perpetuated an anti-Vietnam stance that many in Washington assumed was popular with the American public. Most countries allied to the United States and China—including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—fell in line behind those powers. By the middle of 1980, a motley collection of Communist-led refugees had been sorted into a government-in-exile, and a battered army was on its way to becoming an effective fighting force.3

For Pol Pot, foreign patronage and personal security meant that he could rebuild his military strength, reorganize his followers, and plan to return to power. To refuse foreign help without a territorial base would have been to commit political suicide, so he exchanged independence-mastery for the opportunity to stay alive. Ideologically, the loss of independence was not particularly painful in the circumstances, since his main objective—throwing the Vietnamese out of Cambodia—was shared by his major patrons.

The Discovery of Democratic Kampuchea’s History

News about atrocities in Democratic Kampuchea had been growing since 1977 when an analysis of refugee reports and DK radio broadcasts was compiled by François Ponchaud, a French missionary fluent in Khmer. His perceptive, passionate book Cambodia: Year Zero was welcomed by many when it appeared but was greeted with skepticism by those who thought it was serving the anticommunist purposes of the United States. After 1979, however, most of Ponchaud’s findings were confirmed. What emerged from his book and from subsequent accounts was horrifying to people who had thought of Cambodia, if at all, as peaceful, glamorous, and remote. Before the year was out, the interrogation center S-21 was being turned into a Genocide Museum by the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. In 1980 the first confessions from S-21 were brought out of the country by Western scholars. By then, it was clear to all but a handful of diehard supporters of Pol Pot that Cambodia’s revolution had been a disaster with few beneficiaries and millions of victims. On the heels of a ruinous civil war, the regime’s faulty analyses of Cambodian society, its utopian policies, its disdain for people, its amateurish technology, and its brutal methods had come close to destroying the country.4