Cambodian refugee crisis

Some old folk among you may remember a time when it was usual, almost compulsory, for me at this time of the year to festoon these talks with the holly and the ivy, or at least with cheerful or ribald remarks about how Christmas was being celebrated in various moving or comical ways around the United States.

There is, I'm afraid, nothing very much to relieve the darker times we live in, except the habit of a famous lady atheist in Colorado, a habit that's becoming with her practically a Christmas routine, of suing the state's capital city to prohibit one or other of the festivals that are traditional in Christian countries. 

I ought, I suppose, to rush in with the reminder that, quite literally, the United States of America is not, and never has been, a Christian country. The men who wrote the constitution demonstrated, it seems to me, extraordinary high-mindedness considering that all of them were either practising or pretending Christians, when they wrote and approved, as the very first article of the Bill of Rights, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' They'd had enough of religious persecution one way or another and thought it would be best if the nation they were inventing made the point right away that there'd better be no official national church, that people should be allowed to worship or not to worship as they felt fit. 

A year or two ago the same article of the Bill of Rights was invoked by that passionate lady atheist to ban a model scene of the nativity from being exhibited outside City Hall. The constitutional question then came up: was the model constructed at the city's expense – that is, at the expense of the taxpayers, among whom were such devout atheists as the aforementioned lady. She had her way and the scene was dismembered. 

Now, there've been several protests, and you may be sure that the American Civil Liberties' Union is usually on hand to help, against the singing of Christmas carols in the public schools. May I remind anybody who needs the reminder that, in America, a public school is a school for the general public supported by public funds, not a private school. A few years ago, the public schools were compelled to abandon, in any community that was challenged, the recitation of prayers. Now, carols are going since our unrepentant lady and her like find such things nauseating to people who don't recognise Jesus Christ or God or, I suppose, the legend that there was a Good King Wenceslas and his revoltingly upper-class notion that he could command a mere page to 'Come stand by me'. I've forgotten the rest of the words of that carol but some of you may want to go over them and see if there's any mention of God or Odin, or any other deity. If not, it might make an interesting test case. If not, I shouldn't be surprised if some town council didn't prohibit all Christmas carols except Good King Wenceslas. 

Well, apart from that diversion, there are not many places to go for a chuckle or a merry toast. Incidentally, I'm pleased to say that Americans still wish each other a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. The... the latter-day English usage of a 'happy' Christmas has not yet come in. 

In so far as there is such a thing as the American mind, there are two things that weigh on the American mind. One, of course, is the interminable problem of the American hostages in Iran, who must, by now, even without the application of thumbscrews or gags, be brainwashed, in the sense of wishing to be out at all costs, even at the cost, which some of them have paid, of assuring us all in statements abounding with strangely un-American idioms, that they've been wonderfully well treated, are happy and would like to see the Shah return for a trial – some trial – by their captors. 

The other preoccupation, however, is one that has not been much talked or written about abroad, maybe because it has hideously fulfilled a gruesome property made long ago by such now discredited characters as Mr Nixon and Dr Kissinger. Does anyone remember what seemed like a pretty spurious defence of the American dive into Cambodia to root out the North Vietnamese in their so-called sanctuaries? It was that if the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were allowed to establish themselves in Cambodia, let alone if South Vietnam fell to them, then either South Vietnam or Cambodia would suffer a bloodbath. 

I remember myself, at the time, running over in my mind several historical forerunners of this sort of warning. Many nations on the rampage, not to mention warring Indian tribes, have made a habit of invading some harmless or neutral neighbour, on the ground that if they didn't the poor neighbour would suffer a bloodbath from the invasion of the other side, the wicked enemy. And I'm sorry to say that I discounted the Nixon-Kissinger warning at the time as a familiar brand of bluster. 

Well, a surprisingly few people seem to have noticed that Cambodia has suffered, in the past three or four years, an act of genocide that makes Hitler look like an amateur. When the detested Pol Pot regime was overthrown in Cambodia, you might, as a naive Westerner expect the victors to order the capital city and the provincial capitals to be decorated with flags and bunting before the triumphal entry, just like the first scene of 'Julius Caesar'. Instead the order went out to burn the cities, slaughter the able-bodied and chase hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants into the countryside to live off whatever roots they could find. This was intended as a downright lesson to show who was boss and to deprive Pol Pot, in his rural retreat, from getting food or weapons. 

Well, what we have now is a civil war between the old and the new regimes, Heng Samrin, the puppet of Vietnam backed by the Soviet Union, and Pol Pot and his guerrilla forces backed by the Chinese. Now it is the borderlands of Thailand which are being used as a sanctuary for the Pol Pot refugees and as an escape route for thousands and thousands of starving refugees with their skeleton babies and adults dropping in their tracks. You'll remember that the ghastly television pictures of these living corpses and barely breathing vegetables stirred the conscience of good people, in many lands, to mobilise rescue teams and food supplies from several sources, most notably, Oxfam, the International Red Cross, the United Nations Children's Fund. 

So the food, lashings of it was assembled and despatched. Then its delivery to the people who desperately needed it got stuck. Why? The easy, technical answer is that one regime or one of the two equally detestable puppets wouldn't deal with this international agency while willing to deal with another. The whole supply problem got tangled beyond comprehension. But the truer answer is that the Chinese would not let food destined for the starving, anywhere, go to those parts of the country under the rule of the new Soviet-backed regime. And the Russians weren't willing to let food go to the refugees or the guerrillas of the Chinese-backed Pol Pot regime. 

This question was brought up recently in Moscow by a friend of mine, a powerful American journalist, before one or two top Soviet foreign ministry officials. They blandly told him it was not a human problem at all. It had nothing to do with human beings. It was, they solemnly pronounced, a 'geo-political' problem. In other words, people starving in Chinese-backed territory must move back into Soviet-backed territory if they would care to live. 

Well the plot now thickens, or curdles sickeningly, I should say. A week or more ago, the President of the United States received a document which outraged him about which he was able to do nothing, having the ratification of the SALT treaty in mind. A copy of this same document came into the hands of this friend of mine. What it showed, and you'll have to take my word for it that it's a document beyond suspicion, was that not only is the Soviet Union blocking huge supplies of food and medicines that could save uncountable numbers of the Cambodian people, but is getting hold of supplies sent by the foreign relief agencies, taxing them as imports, and either giving them to their Cambodian guerrillas that they back or selling them to the Vietnamese. 

Now there's no suggestion that the Russians have any of their own troops in Cambodia or for that matter their own supplies of food; they don't need them. The International Red Cross, Oxfam, the UN Children's Fund and countless conscience-stricken groups and individuals have handed to the Russians a golden opportunity to feed the sturdy guerrillas who are fighting the guerrillas of the Pol Pot troops, while the people, the trudging and dropping legions of the starving, do without. 

Meanwhile, on the question of arms for Cambodia for the puppet Heng Samrin, over 120 Soviet cargo ships and 70 tankers have, since the spring, arrived in Vietnamese ports. To put it crudely, if you happen to live or are trudging through Pol Pot country, since your homes back in Heng Samrin country were burned to the ground, then you deserve to die. If you're lucky enough to find yourself in the country of Heng Samrin, our boy, you can get, or buy, food plus the Russian-imposed tariff generously supplied by the brave agents of Oxfam, the Red Cross, the UN Children's Fund, or the kindly people round the corner in Illinois or Texas or Shropshire or Melbourne or wherever, who thought of the coming Christmas feast and saved a little from the cost of it to feed a shrivelled baby. 

The two charitable gentlemen who approached Ebenezer Scrooge for an offering told him that many who might get to the poorhouse would rather die than go there. And Scrooge suggested that they had better do it. 

Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians cannot get back to their poor, ruined shacks in the country of the new regime, but don't weep too copiously for them! At this festive season of the year remember the wise words of the Russian foreign ministry: 'This has nothing to do with human beings. It is a geo-political problem.' 

Merry Christmas. If possible.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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