Cambodian emergency
This week's issue of the Bulletin magazine has a cover feature on Cambodia by Australian journalist and film maker John Pilger. It is must reading.
Pilger describes the growing threat of the genocidal Khmer Rouge, who killed some 20% of Cambodia's population during their four-year reign in the 1970s. Importantly, he documents the responsibility which the United Nations, and the United States, Chinese and Australian governments, bear for the present danger.
Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans was a major architect of the United Nations "peace plan", under which the Khmer Rouge have vastly increased the territory under their control and their ability to sow terror through the countryside. Prior to that, Western governments and China maintained the KR with diplomatic recognition and aid for more than a decade.
For some months now, Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly has been reporting on the operation of the UN "peace plan" — in reality, a plan to replace the existing Cambodian government, which is the only force in the country both willing and able to take on and defeat Pol Pot's murderous gang.
But it can't do that successfully when its hands are tied by the United Nations and by a de facto economic blockade, while the Khmer Rouge continues to be treated as a legitimate claimant to power, and to benefit from business deals with the generals who run Thailand's foreign policy.
John Pilger is absolutely right when he says that it's urgent "to tear down the Berlin Wall that the West has erected around Cambodia. The pledges of development aid should be immediately translated into a coordinated rescue plan, so that the country's infrastructure is rebuilt. The Thais must be told that they will be subject to international sanctions if they do not get their troops out of Cambodia and stop helping Pol Pot ...
"[The Khmer Rouge] must be beaten on the battlefield. Only Cambodians can do that and their national army should not want for the kind of equipment and support that was so generously provided to the genocidists and their allies; and, if necessary, the UN should provide it."
If the worst does happen and the Pol Potists return to power, it will be clear that it is not primarily Cambodians who are to blame.