Part One: Failure of Control This April, John Gunther Dean, the last US ambassador to ambodia before it fell to the Khmer communists in 1975, turned over thousands of documents to the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Ga., part of the US National Archives. In the papers, most being made public for the first time, Dean outlines his views on a controlled solution to the civil war. His efforts failed, he says, because Washington didn’t listen. Dean today says that America's failure in Cambodia 30 years ago holds lessons for today's policy-makers. This is the first in a series of VOA Khmer reports on the Dean documents and the final year of the Khmer Republic.
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| A Khmer Republic soldier carries a wounded comrade to an outpost after a skirmish with Khmer communist troops near Ang Snoul, Kandal province, in 1973. A year later, the last US ambassador to Cambodia would contend a controlled solution was necessary to avoid a brutal take-over by the increasingly powerful communists. (AP Photo) |
By February 1975, the situation in Phnom Penh was dire. Communist insurgents controlled nearly all the Cambodian countryside. Daily shelling of the capital spread fear and discontent through the populace.
The national army was in tatters. The communists had launched a spirited dry-season offensive that had blocked the Mekong River, strangling the capital. From the Royal Palace, you could see the tops of submerged ships, sunk by communists dug in along the banks. The short-lived Khmer Republic, it seemed, was nearly as sunk.
At the US Embassy, a beleaguered ambassador, John Gunther Dean, furiously cabled his boss in Washington, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He was concerned, Dean wrote, that Cambodia could wait no longer, not for the end of the dry season campaign, and not for a decision by Congress on funding for Cambodia. The communists had to be negotiated with, immediately. Deans words were urgent, terse for a diplomatic telegram, and outlined frustration that had been brewing for months.
“To be blunt, we are wasting time,” Dean wrote. “In my major assessment last June, I made clear that time was working against us. In September, I thought I had convinced everyone concerned that we would never again be in a stronger position than we were then, and it would all be downhill thereafter. Now it is February and these predictions have been borne out by events.”
Though sharper in tone, the missive was similar in content to those the ambassador had sent, repeatedly, since arriving eight months earlier, a fresh head of mission thrown into an impending disaster. A first-time ambassador, Dean wanted to bring Prince Norodom Sihanouk, then in Beijing and sinecure head of a coalition with the Khmer communists, into negotiations with the Khmer Republic, led by the US-backed marshal and president, Lon Nol. Dean wanted Washington to pursue every channel available to bring the communists into a coalition with the Republic and its standing army, religious leadership and other assets. The dwindling power of the Republic, Dean thought, would countervail the rising power of the communists. He called this his “controlled solution” and warned that an uncontrolled solution would lead to a disaster for Cambodia’s seven million civilians.
For months, Dean had pushed for and clamored for a controlled solution. By February, Kissinger was tired of the crusade. The communists were stonewalling negotiations, seeking instead a takeover by force, and Sihanouk was incapable now of bringing a settlement, Kissinger wrote Dean. Kissinger also assailed the ambassador.
“We are continuing to work on this matter through the various means open to us,” Kissinger wrote. “You will be kept informed when it is necessary for you to take some action. In the meantime, you should resist the urge to read the department the lectures contained in the [telegram].”
More than 30 years later, Dean, now retired in Paris, still wishes his “lectures” would have registered. And even if they didn’t back then, he said, maybe the lessons of the failed diplomacy to settle Cambodia’s civil war will have an impact on today’s statesmen. In an interview with VOA Khmer following the hand-over of a collection of documents in April, Dean urged today’s policymakers to pursue compromise and avoid unnecessary bloodshed and unsustainable financial expense as America fights two ongoing wars.
“If we want to extricate ourselves from Iraq, we must find a solution which may not be a good one, but will not be a tragedy or lead to a great deal of carnage and fighting,” Dean said. “And the only way you can do that is not military but by sitting down and talking with people.”
Not only should the US have tried harder to negotiate, but it should not have completely withdrawn from Cambodia, a move that led to a catastrophe, Dean says.
“The lesson of Cambodia is: you have responsibility which doesn’t end when your troops leave. You cannot just pull out,” he said.
Dean’s documents highlight a nearly unique rebellious attitude from a junior ambassador for that period, as Dean took Kissinger, one of the most powerful figures in the US government, to task for his failure to reach out to Sihanouk and the communists a year earlier.
Kenton Clymer is chair of the history department at Northern Illinois University and the author of the soon-to-be released “Troubled Relations: the United States and Cambodia Since 1870.”
“I mean, I’ve looked at a lot of different diplomatic correspondence in my time, and I haven’t seen quite that level of antagonism before,” Clymer said. Dean “was ready to resign, as he says, and if things had not been so urgent in Cambodia, he said he would have resigned because he had such fundamental differences with Kissinger.”
Clymer takes a favorable view of Dean’s attempts to bring what the ambassador called a “controlled solution” to the Cambodia crisis, which began as soon as he arrived, while Washington found it easier to continue the course of backing the troubled Lon Nol and rebuffed Sihanouk’s overtures for talks.
“I think he was very courageous, to stand up to the powers that be,” Clymer said. “Not easy to stand up to Kissinger, I wouldn’t think.”
In the wet season of 1974, Dean did stand up to Kissinger. He thought the Khmer Republic would hold back the insurgents. But the communists were closing in, and no negotiations were in sight. With the end of the rainy season would come a vicious offensive by the communists that would signal the beginning of the end of the Republic. But the ambassador never gave up on his controlled solution, pursuing it nearly to his last day, when the US mission evacuated Phnom Penh, less than a week before Day One, Year Zero.
Part Two: Assessment on Arrival
In April, John Gunther Dean, the last US ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer communists, turned over thousands of documents to the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Ga., part of the US National Archives. The documents show a man repeatedly trying to settle the civil war, while his views put him at odds with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. But years later, Dean still insists a controlled solution could have worked, preventing a brutal close to Cambodia’s civil war. This is the second in a series of reports on the Dean documents.
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| Soldiers walk amidst the rubble of a Buddhist temple in Oudong, 20 miles north of Phnom Penh, in 1974. Prior to the arrival of Cambodia’s last US ambassador, the Khmer communists captured this symbolically important site. (AP Photo) |
John Gunther Dean flew from his confirmation as ambassador to Phnom Penh on March 31, 1974. By then, President Nixon was on his way out of office, having concluded the Vietnam War and admitted to a secret Cambodian operation that some historians say fueled a national communist insurgency. The Khmer communists by 1974 were an independent, organized fighting force with a developing dogma and already brutal policies. And they were closing in, encircling Phnom Penh, the last stronghold of the faltering Khmer Republic.
Two weeks before Dean’s arrival, the communists took a key position north of Phnom Penh, Oudong, an old capital of the Khmer empire. The communists held Oudong despite an offensive by the Khmer Republic’s national army several days before Dean touched down. The ambassador presented his credentials to a stroke-afflicted President Lon Nol in a military camp that, the ambassador thought, “looked like a Foreign Legion outpost, with barbed wire and fencing all around it.”
Straight from a posting in Laos, Dean immediately began an assessment of the Republic’s military situation. Almost simultaneously, he began to look for ways to engage the communists in negotiation.
The Khmer communists had failed to gain Phnom Penh in their 1974 dry-season attacks, Dean wrote, but ended the campaign with a net gain in population and territory. The Khmer communists, or KC, were able to refill their combat units faster than the Khmer National Armed Forces, or FANK, and had shifted to a “provincial strategy,” giving them an advantage in mobility. They had made “notable progress” improving their firepower, “particularly as regards the number and accuracy of 105 mm howitzers.”
Meanwhile, the national navy had been able to keep the Mekong open from Phnom Penh to Kampong Cham.
“Morale on both sides’ ground forces is poor, but the KC’s tight discipline is a compensating factor the FANK does not have,” Dean wrote. “Neither side should therefore be capable of shifting the war dramatically in its favor during the remainder of this dry and the coming wet season unless economic and political factors intervene.”
Dean cautioned that the Khmer Republic would not last much longer. The government had a “better than even chance of surviving into the next calendar year,” he wrote, but after that the odds were against it. “We recommend a [US government] initiative towards negotiations during the next five months, well before the next United Nations General Assembly.”
Not long after Dean’s initial assessment, the ambassador began suggesting negotiations, says historian Kenton Clymer, author of the soon-to-be-released “Troubled Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870.”
“He talked about trying to negotiate a controlled solution, as he called it, as early as the summer of 1974,” Clymer said in a recent interview.
Dean had assumed that because he’d helped bring an end to fighting in Laos, where he was charge d’affairs at the US mission, he had been sent to do the same thing in Phnom Penh. But he began to learn otherwise, Clymer says.
“He certainly came to the conclusion quite quickly that he wasn’t getting the kind of cooperation that he expected from Washington,” Clymber said.
Years later, Dean would explain his controlled solution to a researcher at the Jimmy Carter library.
“A controlled solution is that if you have the desire to find a negotiated controlled solution, you can find it,” Dean said. “It may be a bad one. But my position, starting in 1974, and it got shriller and shriller as we came towards April of 1975, was that a bad solution is better than a human tragedy. The world is not white or black. It very often can be very dark grey. But at least it would not lead to turning defenseless Khmers over to the Khmer Rouge.”
The summer ended with no negotiations. The rainy season continued, and the UN was set to debate the legitimate government of Cambodia later in the year: Lon Nol’s Republic or Sihanouk’s Government Royal d’Union Nationale de Kampuchea. The Cambodian situation was looking worse and worse, and the dry season, when the Khmer communists traditionally initiated their offensives, was approaching.
Part Three: ‘Internationalization’
In May, John Gunther Dean, the last US ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer communists, turned over thousands of documents to the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Ga., part of the US National Archives. In part, the documents show the ambassador’s attempts for a controlled solution to the deteriorating Cambodian conflict, including a plan he called the “internationalization” of the Cambodian problem. This plan, he hoped, would bring an end to the conflict and prevent a one-sided, unchecked takeover by the Khmer communists. This is the third in a series of reports on the Dean documents.
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| A Cambodian Army officer, left, exhales marijuana smoke after using a homemade pipe as a soldier plays guitar in Phnom Penh. By the summer of 1974, an increasingly dire situation in the capital would lead to renewed calls from the US mission in Phnom Penh for a controlled solution. (AP Photo) |
By September, the communists controlled 75 percent of the country, with their eyes ever on Phnom Penh. In the capital, you’d be playing tennis and the rockets would crackle over the courts. At night, you might go to the cinema, but it was dangerous; communist agents had begun planting bombs around town. By then, a rumor was circulating among the population that Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the head of state of the Government Royal d’Union Nationale de Kampuchea, which included the communists, was negotiating with the Khmer Republic for a ceasefire.
In fact, the US administration was considering a Cambodian peace conference, in part thanks to ideas put forward by a fresh ambassador in Phnom Penh, John Gunther Dean. After discussions with the ambassador, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Philip Habib, drafted a secret “action memorandum” for a peace conference and sent it to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
“Purpose of proposal: primarily to achieve a ceasefire linked to a political settlement through the early holding of an international conference,” Habib wrote. “The basic rationale is that if we let matters take their present course, the trends in Cambodia, the US and Vietnam will combine to produce an unraveling of the [Khmer Republic] and a more serious setback to US interests than the compromises that will inevitably have to be made under this proposal.”
A peace conference would “remove the danger of a challenge to the Khmer [Republic] credentials” at the UN’s General Assembly meeting later in the year, he wrote. In that meeting, the legitimate seat of the government would be decided between President Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic and Sihanouk’s Royal Government. The previous year had seen the Republic win a seat at the UN in a 53 to 50 vote. Diplomats were guessing the Republic this year would “barely squeak through,” the New York Times reported, but no one was sure.
A peace conference would also “move ahead of the growing Congressional opposition to US assistance to Cambodia and to obtain, in contrast, its support for this peace effort,” Habib wrote.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had prepared a bill for a $347 million aid cap for the following year, $200 million less than the administration of President Gerald Ford had requested. Without money to prop up the Republic, many assumed it could not survive.
An international conference could be pursued, Habib wrote, first by including the Chinese. The US would not oppose Sihanouk in a key role. US military assistance to Cambodia would not be necessary, but the US would contribute to reconstruction. Lon Nol and other leaders could step aside, if absolutely necessary. If the Chinese agreed, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union would be approached, to create a “bandwagon effect” the North Vietnamese might jump on, “if they are to be invited.” The plan could include the UN secretary-general.
Even if no solution emerged at a conference, the US would be prepared to announce its efforts and endorse participation in a government by all sides, Habib wrote.
“In this declaration, we should make the points that we were, and are, prepared to accept and support the results of the conference, including the participation in a Cambodian government by all factions and that the US will be prepared to assist in the reconstruction of a peaceful Cambodia,” he wrote. The US would accept “any reasonable compromise which would establish peace and a relative political balance between the two sides, as well as among the Great Powers. The return of Sihanouk to a position of importance would be acceptable, as would the departure of Lon Nol.”
In Phnom Penh, Dean understood well the implications of such a conference, what he called the “internationalization” of the crisis.
“I believe that an international conference is the only course left to us to achieve a ‘controlled’ solution to the Khmer problem,” Dean wrote Habib on Sept. 13. “If no conference is held or no solution is found, then we must be prepared for an ‘uncontrolled’ denouement to the Khmer drama as US military and economic funds run out, the US mission is withdrawn and the [Republic] and [national army] disintegrate. Under the latter circumstances, a bloodbath cannot be ruled out.”
Syndey Schanberg, writing for the New York Times, summed up the ongoing war in story that ran Sept. 8.
“By the lowest possible estimates, more than 300 Cambodians are killed or wounded every day,” he wrote. “So far 600,000 Cambodians have become casualty statistics, nearly one-tenth of the country’s population of 7 million…. Both sides are now equipped with a greater abundance of lethal instruments than before, and the fighting is intense…. Nearly half the people of Cambodia are now refugees…. And yet there is no discernable motion toward peace talks.”
In the end, no international conference took place. The violence dragged on. When the rains stopped, the Khmer communists would be ready for a heavy offensive that would rattle the resolve of the Republican army—though not Dean.
Part Four: Mekong Convoy
In April, John Gunther Dean, the last US ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer communists, turned over thousands of documents to the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Ga., part of the US National Archives. In part, the documents show the US mission’s efforts in Phnom Penh to bring Cambodia’s civil war to a peaceful close. The documents also detail some of the war’s fiercest fighting, along the Mekong River. The outcome of the first few weeks of 1975 would determine the future the Khmer Republic. This is the fourth in a series of reports on the Dean documents.
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| Two Khmer Republican soldiers carry a wounded comrade past a machine gunner's post north of Phnom Penh, in 1975. The Khmer communists kept Republican troops busy around the capital while the communists fought for total control of the Mekong River in the south. (AP Photo) |
When the 1975 dry season began, the communists launched their annual offensive. They overran garrisons along the Mekong River while pressuring bedraggled Republican troops around Phnom Penh, keeping potential reserve forces caught up in the capital. Already, supply runs up the river were dangerous, with communists firing on supply barges with large-caliber rifles, mortars and rockets. The dry-season offensive was wounding or killing 1,000 combatants per day.
By mid-January, the river had become a crux issue, and Dean hoped for a symbolic supply run up the river. In a priority telegram to the State Department on Jan. 18, Dean informed Washington: “The next 48-72 hours will be crucial for Cambodia.”
“If the enemy succeeds in closing the Mekong from the Vietnamese border up to Phnom Penh, he will have achieved his primary objective in this dry season: to strangle the [Republic] by preventing essential commodities from reaching the capital,” he wrote.
No river supply line meant no efficient way to supply the capital, making additional funding from Congress even less likely for the beleaguered Republic. Meanwhile, an estimated 41 communist battalions, overrunning Republican garrisons, were dug in along the Mekong banks in well-fortified positions. Dean began calling the stretch of river between Vietnam and Phnom Penh “the gauntlet.”
By Jan. 19, US and Cambodian planners had decided to run a supply convoy up the river.
“It is imperative that this convoy reach Phnom Penh. The Khmers all know it—both friendly and enemy—as well as this mission,” Dean wrote.
Their attempts were first thwarted by poor weather, which delayed the operation 24 hours, and again by a communist barricade across the river. Two of four landings on the Lower Mekong were reclaimed by Republican forces, through amphibious assault, and the convoy was set for the next day. Again, the operation stumbled. On Jan. 21 the ambassador informed Washington a new bomb would be used in the conflict, the CBU-55.
“CBU-55 is an anti-personnel bomb of considerably more lethal nature than anything previously used” by the Khmer Air Force, Dean wrote. “It contains propane, not as an agent of chemical warfare, but as a highly explosive charge which triggers off continuing series of explosions over period of time. Idea is to use it against deeply entrenched bunker positions enemy has constructed along Mekong banks.”
With renewed, more powerful bombing planned and more fighting ahead, the military renewed its plans for the convoy, which was shrunk from 10 barges to just two, “pulled by the most powerful tugs available and fully protected by armored shields.”
“If they make it, it would have a favorable psychological impact upon Khmer military by signaling that the enemy had not closed the river to traffic and that friendly forces could contain the [communists], and also upon river pilots and crews waiting to take the ships up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, whose morale and willingness to sail has been undermined by scare stories about [communist] might on the Mekong,” Dean wrote.
On Jan. 22, Dean cabled Washington with bad news.
“The two ammo barges are presently stopped between the Vietnamese border and Neak Loeung, where one of the tugs is awaiting engine repair,” he wrote. “The convoys successfully navigated through the narrows north of the Vietnamese border (except for losing two shield barges), but apparently crews and captains of tugs refuse to take convoy northward to Phnom Penh and wish to return to Saigon. Even if this small convoy can be pushed through, we clearly are now facing a new serious problem, that of the civilian crews refusing to take the ships up to Phnom Penh.”
At last, a few convoys made it. But in the end, the communists held, and hope faltered. Dean sent Washington a bleak assessment: the national army was holding on by the “skin of its teeth,” and, despite propane bombs, amphibious assaults, reinforcements and powerful tugs toting armored barges, the Mekong was closed. Even if the Republican army broke the blockade, the communists were likely to exact a heavy toll on any supply runs from Vietnam.
A controlled solution looked farther away than ever, and in the months that followed, in the face of diminishing prospects, the ambassador’s calls for negotiation would turn urgent.
Part Five: The Death of Throes of Diplomacy
Earlier this year, John Gunther Dean, the last US ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer communists, turned over thousands of documents to the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Ga., part of the US National Archives. The documents show an increasingly desperate ambassador calling for negotiations that were likely too late, despite terse reprimands from his bosses in Washington and in the face of a collapsing Khmer Republic. This is the fifth in a series of reports on the Dean documents.
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| A Cambodian boy joins his father with a unit of Khmer Republican troops at a camp in Prek Phnou, in Kandal province, 1975. Toward the end, the Khmer Republic had no choice but to recruit any fighter available. (AP Photo) |
With Phnom Penh gasping for supplies and troops, in early 1975, New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg interviewed several refugee families snatched from their besieged town, Neak Loeung, by Khmer Republican forces. They had been rescued by boat on the condition the men fight for the national army. Wearing olive green uniform shirts, their wives and families in tow, the men were uneasy about their new prospects, Schanberg wrote.
“The Government took special steps to prevent the men from deserting,” Schanberg wrote. “When the boats pulled up to the river landing at 11 am, the trucks and officers that were to take them to the training center had not yet arrived, so the boats were kept from unloading for two hours. In the meantime, the military police brought some bread and threw it to the refugee conscripts.”
Such were the defense efforts of Phnom Penh, surrounded by communist insurgents and cut off from supplies by all but airlifts. As the weeks passed, the US chief of mission, Ambassador John Gunther Dean, began to feel the intense heat of his unenviable position. He cabled Washington a status report.
“Being in the kitchen and sitting in the frying pan right on top of the burner, I would like to take a few minutes to give you my assessment of the present situation and how we should proceed as perceived from Phnom Penh,” he wrote.
Dean then sketched for his boss, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the portrait of a ruined city: an undersupplied army led by morale-weakened officers, a collapsing economy plagued by corruption, refugee settlements “wiped out,” prices likely to “spiral upward dramatically,” and anti-government demonstrations imminent. Dean was unhappy that weak attempts by Washington to find a controlled solution had led to nothing in his nearly one year in Cambodia.
“The kind of picture I paint in this message was projected in the Mission’s assessment sent to the Department in four parts last June,” he wrote. “We concluded at that time that a political solution must be found to the Cambodian dilemma as soon as possible. The obvious conclusion remains that, while we will try to do our best here to maintain some form of stability in the military-political-economic-social field, we are heading towards a debacle unless a political solution can be found rapidly.”
The Americans were failing the Cambodians, Dean wrote in another cable.
“I must state very frankly that the Khmers of this side are waiting, and waiting desperately, for us to get involved…. What they must be wondering is what is holding us back?” he wrote. “They certainly are not holding us back, and if they are not, who or what is? I must say I do not have the answers to these questions.”
Dean’s argument still centered on reaching Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in exile in Beijing and the theoretical head of a government in exile for the Khmer communists and monarchists. Dean’s continuous cables were not well received. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger finally warned Dean to stop.
“As a friend, I want to give you my very personal reactions to your latest messages on how to proceed with negotiations,” Eagleburger wrote. “In utterly frank terms, these messages are seen here as confirmation that your interest in negotiations has now become an obsession. I must tell you that such cables are increasingly counterproductive.”
Eagleburger cautioned Dean that Washington had tried every channel to reach Sihanouk. He reminded the ambassador that the strong military position of the communists, who saw themselves “on the verge of victory,” meant they would not negotiate, and that Sihanouk “will not or cannot assert himself in this matter.”
“I therefore strongly suggest that you recognize that no useful purpose can be served by continued harping on the question of negotiations,” Eagleburger wrote. “Your cables cannot by themselves bring Sihanouk back, nor do they suggest any line that has not already been pursued. What they do suggest…is an attempt to build a record of your own perspicacity. I know this is not the case, nor would it be necessary in any event, since no one has any intention of leaving you holding the bag.”
His bosses were concerned Dean’s obsession was distracting him from his primary mission: “to bend every effort to keep the [Republic] together.” They also worried his repeated calls for negotiation could “rattle” the Cambodians “and increase their despair.”
Dean’s relationship with policymakers in Washington, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was deteriorating. Several weeks before Eagleburger’s reprimand, a disgruntled Dean wrote Washington to say that the US had a moral obligation to find a solution for Cambodia. Washington’s refusal to do so, he said, would be enough for his resignation, if things weren’t so bad in the war-ravaged country.
“When an ambassador is at odds with the policy pursued by the Department, it is customary under normal circumstances for him to submit his resignation,” Dean wrote. “These are not normal circumstances and such an act might be misinterpreted as a desire on my part to get out. As a disciplined foreign service officer, I will therefore desist from such action at this time.”
Dean’s letter would serve as a registry of his “profound disagreement” with the State Department’s reasoning: “that developments will have occurred [later] in the US or in Cambodia which will shed a kind light on our five-year effort in Cambodia.”
By the time he wrote these words, the chance for a controlled solution was evaporating. Sihanouk no longer had any power to broker, even if Washington could reach him, which, for whatever reason, it had not done. The communists were sure of victory and would never negotiate. By April 10, they’d broken the capital’s defenses, and the following day Dean led his people away by helicopter, famously draping the US flag over his arm, to prevent anyone burning it.
On April 11, at 9:07 am in Washington, the men who Dean worried had not worked hard enough for a solution, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his subordinate, Philip Habib, spoke by phone of the US evacuation, codenamed Eagle Pull. Habib told Kissinger Eagle Pull could not be delayed.
“[The insurgents are] very, very close in,” he said. “And the final thing is that if the Cambodians still want to do what we’ve opened the door for them to do with Sihanouk, they can do it without our presence now, because we’ve passed all the messages that we need to pass.”
“OK,” Kissinger replied. “It’s not a proud day, but we did the best we could.”
Dean left Cambodia for Bangkok feeling “terrible sadness,” convinced that Americans “didn’t live up to our responsibilities and our promises.” No negotiations ever took place. A dark curtain fell over the small Buddhist country, and even 30 years later Dean would insist that more could have been done. The last Phnom Penh heard of the ambassador and his hopes for a controlled solution were the dull thuds of helicopter rotors, as America left Cambodia to its fate.
Part Six: Reflections on the Future
Earlier this year, John Gunther Dean, the last US ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer communists, turned over thousands of documents to the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Ga., part of the US National Archives. In doing so, the retired ambassador hoped to show today’s leaders that failure to negotiate leads to tragedy. This is the last in a series of reports on the Dean documents, from Brian Calvert in Washington.
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| A Cambodian villager sits near human skulls recovered from debris in provincial Cambodia after government troops retook a village on Route 3, southwest of Phnom Penh in 1973. The skeletal remains were those of civilians and soldiers killed by Khmer communist insurgents who captured the town during heavy fighting. A former US ambassador says the tendencies of the Khmer communists were well known before they took over in 1975. (AP Photo) |
You can still feel his passion when John Gunther Dean speaks about his stint as the last US ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer communists. Deep and persuasive, his voice rises and falls, as he pounds on the table, then retreats into thought before speaking again. In his last year in Cambodia, the countdown to Year Zero, he failed to bring peace to Cambodia’s warring factions. He left by helicopter, deeply saddened by failing the Cambodians. More than 30 years later, the ambassador told VOA Khmer, leaders should learn from the “uncontrolled solution” to Cambodia’s crisis.
“What I’m saying is: it is not enough just to pull out our troops,” he said. “We have to find an ending which may not be good for us, but it may show that we do care about others as well, especially those who have thrown their fate in with us.”
The former ambassador might have been talking about Cambodia, but also Iraq, or, even Lebanon. Anyone dealing with conflict among multiple parties with disparate ideas would benefit from the lesson of Cambodia in the 1970s, he said.
“You have responsibility, which doesn’t end when your troops leave,” he said. “You cannot just pull out. You have to try to find whatever is feasible, to avoid a tragedy, or in the case of Cambodia, a genocide.”
Dean cites as an example of success a negotiation in Laos, where as charge d’affairs he’d brokered a three-party peace between American-backed forces, communists and neutralists. Dean thought as chief of mission in Cambodia he was expected to do the same thing.
Robert Keeley was Dean’s deputy during his mission in Cambodia.
“I think the problem with Washington was that they didn’t feel like addressing the Cambodia problem as a problem in itself that could somehow be solved the way the Laos problem was solved,” Keeley said. “It was an appendage to the Vietnam War, which was the central front.”
If there’s a lesson to take from Cambodia, he said, it’s that diplomacy has a role, but it must be used before one side of a war has nearly won.
“The barbarians at the gate, so to speak, that’s not the time you can use diplomacy,” he said.
In the view of historian Kenton Clymer, the barbarians were at Phnom Penh’s gate by early 1975.
Clymer, who is chair of the history department at Northern Illinois University and the author of the soon-to-be-released book “Troubled Relations: the United States and Cambodia Since 1870,” said Dean had been a strong advocate of negotiating well before the situation turned dire, but no one listened.
“I mean, [Prince Norodom] Sihanouk had been willing to meet with the Americans since 1972, or maybe since 1971. He had put out all sorts of very explicit efforts to negotiate with the Americans, and they wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has always insisted the United States continually pursued peace in Cambodia, but that the Khmer Rouge—supported by China—simply were not interested in negotiating and were committed to total military victory well before Dean’s arrival in 1974. Kissinger would write that, after the summer of 1973, “I knew that Cambodia was doomed.”
It’s not clear if greater US efforts would have succeeded in the years following, Clymer said.
“I think the point is we just don’t know, because it was never really tried,” he said.
For his part, Dean said today’s policymakers should bring all the parties in the Middle East conflict to negotiation. The rigid adherence to a military solution was the downfall of US policy in Cambodia, and that could hold true today.
“Sooner or later, the opposition is going to get closer and closer, and militarily it is time to sit down and negotiate,” he said. “It was the refusal to find an alternative to military solutions which was the great drama in Cambodia.”
Failure to negotiate could have terrible effects in the region, he said, but it can also hurt America’s image as a world leader. Learn from Cambodia, he said, but look forward too.
“Let us look to the future,” he said. “America has a role to play, and for that, sometimes we have to look backwards, but let us always think about the future and new generations who are coming on the scene.”
