By John Pilger
When the United Nations leaves Cambodia, it will dismantle the only national organisation clearing landmines. Training of Cambodians to clear mines has stopped and vital equipment has been removed, leaving people isolated in minefields without radios to call for help if there is an accident.
"Everything has been clawed back", said a voluntary aid worker, "with the exception of a few mine detectors. Even vehicles are now being recalled. One of them had to be almost stolen back so that work could go on. There are no UN supervisors left and there is no money. Cambodia will now be de-mined one limb at a time."
Next to the return of the Khmer Rouge, landmines remain the greatest obstacle to normality in Cambodia. They float like plastic grapefruit in the paddies; they lie one on top of the other near schools and villages. There may be as many as 10 million mines, or one for every man, woman and child.
Nowhere in the world is there a higher percentage of disabled people, most of them amputees who have stepped on mines. Doctors and paramedics perform up to 500 amputations every month; and for every victim who reaches an ill-equipped hospital, another will die without treatment.
When the 1991 UN peace accords for Cambodia were drawn up, the issue of mine clearance was given priority. "The laying of mines in Cambodia", said Colonel Alan Beave, the first UN officer in charge of mine clearance, "is one of the worst modern, man-made environmental disasters of the century".
The accords spelled out the UN's responsibility to "assist with mine clearing" (Annex 1, Section C) but this was soon "reinterpreted", according to one UN official, when it became obvious that the UN's single aim was to hold elections, to return Prince Sihanouk to his throne and to get out. "We have no mandate to clear mines", became the apologetic received truth in the UN bureaucracy in Phnom Penh.
This shocked many of the soldiers who were sent, they thought, to clear mines. One of them, Joost Van Den Nouwland of the Dutch army, told me last year that he and his men had been prevented from clearing a single mine in Battambang province. "We came here with all the equipment and knowing the job", he said, "but apart from destroying a few storehouses, we've not been allowed to do anything. It's incredible."
After 18 months of pressure, the UN finally agreed to set up a Cambodian Mines Action Centre, or CMAC, with a remit to train Cambodian mine clearers and to promote "mines awareness" in the population. With a budget of less than 7 million, this Cinderella body gained a reputation based on the well-meaning, often dedicated work of its foreign officers and the courage of the Cambodians they trained. This was the only agency in Cambodia that coordinated mine clearance, and the only source for locating most of the minefields.
CMAC people will admit that there are probably more mines now than when they began; but their efforts represented a beginning and were in striking contrast to the cynicism, corruption and ineptitude of so much of the UN operation.
Scourge
In October, the Cambodian director of CMAC, Ieng Mouly, announced "with deep regret" that all mine clearance would cease on November 1, when CMAC would be terminated "at a time when its survival is essential to Cambodia's own survival".
CMAC's remaining UN trainers have long been aware of the UN's intention "to pull the plug on mine clearing and quietly slip away". They are not letting this happen. Officers are prepared to mutiny, one of them with the backing of his government. They say that, with the end of CMAC, mine clearance will be left to Cambodians still two years away from qualifying as supervisors.
"The main point is that they are not ready", said a voluntary worker with the Indochina Project in Phnom Penh, "and this will lead inevitably to deaths in the field. And without CMAC, there won't be compensation; people won't be paid; and we'll be back to where we came in." (Mine clearance will not end altogether. There are several small private groups operating in Cambodia, notably Britain's Mines Advisory Group.)
The day after CMAC announced its closure, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an end to the "worldwide scourge" of landmines. "Of all the tasks involved in setting a nation on a new road to peace and prosperity", declared Secretary General Boutros-Ghali, "perhaps none has the immediate urgency of mine clearance".
The resolution was based largely on evidence from Cambodia that mines killed more people than any other weapon. It was "imperative", said Boutros-Ghali, "that mine clearing should continue in Cambodia after the UN left".
"The hypocrisy is breathtaking", said Robert Muller, executive director of the Washington-based Indochina Project, which fits artificial limbs to 150 Cambodians every month. "But this is just another example of the way the UN has really operated in Cambodia, in contrast to the propaganda version."
British role
The hypocrisy has a British source. The UN resolution was proposed by the European Community, of which Britain is a principal voice in the UN. In private, the British have told the Clinton administration that they will vigorously oppose any worldwide ban on landmines, regardless of a law that is about to pass through Congress banning the export of American mines for three years.
Indeed, so adamant are the British that the Americas are said to be having second thoughts. According to a State Department source: "The British position is commercial. They have a big deal coming up, selling landmines to a Middle East country. There's a lot of money involved."
Foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, who has played arms salesman on a number of occasions, notably to Iraq (1981) and Kuwait (1991), is strongly opposed to the UN and American bans.
The British attitude was vividly expressed at a conference on mines in Asheville, North Carolina, in September organised by the American Defence Preparedness Association. Colonel Alisdair Wilson of the Ministry of Defence was a key speaker. "Many pressure groups", he said, "are getting after us to ban the [mines] and are saying, 'Aren't we awful for leaving them all over the world?' ... Mines are operationally extremely effective. They kill armour, they're cheap to employ, they're cost effective overall, they save men [soldiers] and politically they can be seen to be defensive."
Colonel Wilson went on to laud "MINX", the acronym for Mines in the New Century, which he described as "the basis for our mines strategy". This "major development" will mean that, after 2001, "scatterable mine systems" will be on the open market. It becomes easier to understand why the British government, notably Douglas Hurd, went to such lengths to deny that the SAS trained the Khmer Rouge coalition in mine laying and mines technology in 1983-1991.
The mines issue casts quite a different light on the current promotion of the UN operation in Cambodia as "the most successful in peacekeeping history". A few weeks ago, the UN force commander in Cambodia, Lieutenant-General John Sanderson, returned home to Australia to a "heroes' parade" and a eulogising press. According to one report, it was Sanderson who "outsmarted the murderous Khmer Rouge": so much so that Cambodian small boys are renaming themselves "Sanderson".
In October 1992, I asked Sanderson why the UN had cleared so few mines. He disputed this and said: "Very soon, we'll make an international appeal to fund this activity. This appeal has to be launched on the basis of a properly launched corporate plan."
I asked if this meant clearing Cambodia's mines had to have a bottom line, that is, to make a profit. "Sure", he replied, "the fact of the matter is that people don't do this for fun." I suggested that Cambodia surely deserved more than a corporate plan to make the country secure. He said, "You've got to understand this is a Cambodian problem".
This view, commonly held in the UN, ignores the fact that no country has been as brutalised by foreigners as Cambodia. In the early 1970s, for example, the US spent hundreds of thousands of dollars killing hundreds of thousands of people with bombs whose tonnage was the equivalent of 120 Hiroshimas. A fraction of this lethal expenditure would clear Cambodia's mines.
This was done in Kuwait, but of course Kuwait has money and oil. The week after General Sanderson flew home to his parade, the UN's only mine-clearing operation was pronounced dead. As he would say, it is now "a Cambodian problem."
'Neutral'
As for the UN "outsmarting the Khmer Rouge", such a statement is regarded as a black joke by those middle-ranking UN officers who feel strongly that they owe Cambodia more than their promotions. General Sanderson is remembered as one of the principal appeasers of the Khmer Rouge, a central figure in the botched accommodation of a criminal group responsible for the genocide of more than a million Cambodians.
When I interviewed him, Sanderson refused to acknowledge the word "genocide", saying that he was "neutral". He may have even believed he was neutral; in fact, he allowed the Khmer Rouge to establish and consolidate their own zones, to refuse entry to UN inspectors and, on one humiliating occasion, to himself. Thus, Pol Pot was able to build on the legitimacy given him by the Paris accords and to establish supply lines to Thailand and his grip on the gem trade, which has made him the richest terrorist in history.
As Sanderson's own military situation maps show, Pol Pot's areas of operation actually quadrupled while the general was outsmarting him.
This was suppressed by the UN's very effective propaganda departments and their tribunes in the media. Lately, a long-running nonsense claiming that the UN has "isolated" the Khmer Rouge has gained new life with the "news" that up to "a fifth of the Khmer Rouge army" has defected to the new coalition government . They are, it is said, "hungry, weak and demoralised".
As an exercise in disinformation this echoes previous "defection" stories promoted by Sanderson. On close inspection, most of the current "defectors" are young teenagers only recently press-ganged by the Khmer Rouge â who recruit as many as 400 of these boys in one day, and clearly expect to lose a proportion of them. Their ideological troops remain intact. A Khmer-speaking State Department official who debriefed the defectors dismissed most of them as also-rans.
UN figures of Khmer Rouge strength are instructive. In 1991, it was 30,000, which "proved" that the Khmer Rouge were too strong to leave out of the "peace process". Within months, this had halved to 15,000. Today it is 8000 â which means that 22,000 guerillas have evaporated.
Similarly, the Khmer Rouge were said to have suffered a "major defeat" recently in the north-west against the new national army. British researcher Helen Long was the first westerner to arrive at the scene of the "battle" and found the Khmer Rouge had melted away, and that all the "prisoners" were civilians.
"I met Khmer Rouge officers in Kompong Thom", she said, "who were fit and in high spirits. They are waiting for the UN to go; they know time is on their side. It's funny, but the UN officers I met denied the Khmer Rouge were there at all. As they never went out at night, of course they wouldn't know. In Phnom Penh the Khmer Rouge have infiltrated the coalition government's administrative structure, even the national assembly. Their agents are everywhere."
The Khmer Rouge tactic of infiltration â a tactic used to bring them to power in the 1970s â has been demonstrated by the research of foreign specialists, like Raoul Jennar, Ben Kiernan and Craig Etcheson, but their views are unwelcome in much of the mainstream press, especially in the US, where the simplistic "good news" of a Western triumph in Indochina is long overdue. An amusing example of this was a recent piece by William Shawcross in the New York Times. "And what of the Khmer Rouge?", he asked. "They are weaker than ever. For them, the election was like holding a crucifix to Dracula."
The crucifix and Dracula fable is the one a number of careerists will take with them as they fly off to new contracts, promotions and doctorates, having treated Cambodia like a laboratory for foreign ideas and earned the unspoken contempt of many Cambodians they are leaving behind. One UN spokesman, having done such a good job with the foreign media in Phnom Penh, has applied for the UN job in Somalia.
One of the more successful and damaging propaganda stories was the "discovery" of a handful of demobilised Vietnamese soldiers, including a fisherman and a man married to a Cambodian. This story was given to the press, suggesting that Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia, a long discredited claim by the Khmer Rouge.
At the same time, a UN investigation into a crucial alliance of the Thais with Pol Pot was conducted in secret. The report, which carefully documented the presence of Thai troops in Khmer Rouge zones, and Thai deliveries of weapons to the Khmer Rouge, was suppressed.
Rabbit and snake
The UN's undoubted achievement was the work of its electoral volunteers; and the spectacle of the Cambodian people voting was moving. But the "democracy" this represented was undermined long before people went to the polls by the advantage the Western powers gave, via the UN circus, to the Khmer Rouge.
During the pomp of Norodom Sihanouk being crowned king, little was said about the ethnocentric, secretive regime over which he now holds sweeping powers â just as he did in the 1960s when his dictatorial ways led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Since then, he has had a relationship with the Khmer Rouge, described by a British friend as that of "a rabbit with a snake".
This is why the Khmer Rouge supported the royalists during the election, demanding that Sihanouk be given "full power as the king". Only Sihanouk, they said, would enjoy the support of Pol Pot's "military might"; and only he could resolve the issue of "national reconciliation". By that, they meant a subversive foothold in the regime. In October, Sihanouk announced an "advisory role" for the Khmer Rouge in the new government. The Khmer Rouge have demanded a role for themselves in the army.
[This article was first published in New Statesman & Society.]