By Allen Myers
Australian government funds for "human rights" activities in Cambodia are providing direct support to the political project of a right-wing Chilean Australian who is an "honorary member" of a Khmer Rouge front.
As Green Left reported last year, in November foreign minister Gareth Evans directed that $20,000 — one-fourth of the Australian budget for human rights assistance in Cambodia — be granted to the "Khmer Institute of Democracy", headed by Julio Jeldres, an Australian born in Chile who had spent a decade as an aide to Norodom Sihanouk.
Green Left at that time also reported Jeldres' position as deputy director of Khmer Conscience, a right-wing publication published by Cambodians resident in the United States.
Further information has since come into Green Left's possession which casts additional doubt on Jeldres' qualifications as an instructor in democracy to Cambodians or anyone else.
Jeldres developed an interest in Cambodia in 1968, when Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of US President John Kennedy, visited that country. In November 1968, he and other students founded the Union of Student Friends of Cambodia, an organisation which attracted the support of several Cambodian diplomats in the United States.
After Prince Sihanouk was overthrown in a military coup backed by the United States in March 1970, the Student Friends continued to support him rather than the coup government of Lon Nol. The Khmer Rouge created the Kampuchean National United Front (FUNK), ostensibly to return Sihanouk to power. Jeldres was made an honorary member of this Khmer Rouge front in 1971.
Of course, in the period from March 1970 until the Khmer Rouge won power in April 1975 and began showing their real character, many progressive people around the world supported their efforts to rid Cambodia of the pro-US Lon Nol government. But Jeldres' support continued well beyond that point.
In July 1976, more than a year after the Khmer Rouge had emptied Cambodia's cities and cut the country off from the rest of the world, Jeldres was still boasting of his honorary membership in the FUNK.
In March 1978, Jeldres wrote that he was "kept fully informed by the Cambodian Embassy in Peking". Presumably on the basis of such "information", he believed that Vietnam was the aggressor in the border fighting then occurring between Cambodia and Vietnam.
Jeldres' record in regard to democracy involves Chilean as well as Cambodian politics.
He migrated to Australia in July 1972, having decided to attend er said, because of "the impossible situation" in Chilean universities. The Allende government had not yet been overthrown by the Chilean military, and universities were centres of vigorous politics on both the left and the right.
It appears that Jeldres got along better with the Pinochet regime. In March 1978, Jeldres wrote that since the middle of the previous year, he had made three trips from Melbourne (where he lived) to Sydney at the invitation of the Chilean consulate, and that each trip had involved a "rather heavy" program.
The nature of the program is not further specified, but one would be surprised if it involved the study of how to encourage democracy and human rights.