Pol Pot regime falls

The other night I found myself standing at a reception in midtown Manhattan, spiking little meatballs on toothpicks, gobbling up egg rolls and constantly lifting glasses to all sorts of men and women who were sifting around toasting a black African here, a white African there, an earnest Czech filmmaker, a very tall Viennese man, a tiny Spanish lady, a young American spinster, a substantial Pakistani matron, people of both sexes, every shape and age and nationality, and every sort of political belief. Democrats, conservatives, socialists, liberals, communists, the representative of military dictatorships, Western parliaments, whites, blacks, yellows, aligned and unaligned. But all of them aligned, that evening, by politeness and a general air of goodwill to men and gallantry to women.

Now in our fractious and brutally divided world, what sort of party was this? Well, it was, you've probably guessed, a party at the United Nations. It’s been a long time, 30 years or more, since I attended these amiable soirées. In fact I've not been a regular since San Francisco, where the United Nations was born and where, for nine weeks or so, we basked every evening in delightful christening parties. 

The difference between then and now is, I'm afraid, very sad to observe. In 1945 all but the most hardened and cynical diplomats, veterans of such failed honeymoons as the Kellogg Peace Pact and the League of Nations, most of us could toast each other and wring a foreign hand in the genuine, though innocent, belief that the world had really turned over a new leaf, that 50 nations were really going to lie down together like the lion and the lamb. 

Today, or the other night, the gaiety of the occasion was clouded by the feeling that all this affability and good fellowship was a performance put on for one evening only and that the next morning the real world would return, as it would every morning, with the rudeness of a gigantic hangover. 

Now the occasion for this particular party was, and I think I mentioned it at the time, a brilliant piano concert by Alicia de Larrocha who, if she's not the greatest living pianist, is certainly the greatest living woman pianist. But even the music of Chopin and of that astounding monkish recluse, Antonio Soler, could not obliterate the irony, the hypocrisy if you like, of the occasion, for the party had met to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights, which at least two-thirds of the nations present flout as a regular expression of their domestic policy. 

When the party was over, I couldn't help thinking, with a new sort of sympathy, of Jimmy Carter, the born-again Georgia Baptist, who genuinely wishes that nations would stop torturing their domestic critics, would hold free elections, and who, when he came to the presidency, felt that he had to say so. And then he threw the fat in the fire by pointing the finger at the giant who allows no free elections and imprisons dissenters, at the Soviet Union. What he got for his brave impulse was nasty reminders from his own people that the United States is allied to, or dependent on, several nations that amount to tyrannies. The Russians, of course, had a field day naming some of these right-wing allies who brook no opposition. Mr Carter was warned by his own advisers in the State Department that if he went on like this he'd find that he would never get a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union. 

Well, he decided to quieten down about Russia's crimes against human rights mainly, I think, because, as I say, he was so often reminded about pretty inhuman regimes in Iran and the Philippines, Taiwan and in half a dozen so-called 'friendly' countries in South and Central America. He must be a very frustrated man these days. What he hoped would be his one big coup, an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, has bogged down in hassles over Article 4 and Article 6 of the Camp David agreement. Then his more unkind critics say he tried to take our minds off the Middle East with another, and breathtaking coup by declaring that, from 1 January on, the United States would open normal relations with communist China. 

Now, leaving aside for the moment the contradiction between denouncing one totalitarian giant while embracing the other, we can say that Mr Carter was not bucking public opinion. A majority, not a massive majority, but a majority of Americans approved of the official recognition of China and the outcries against ditching Nationalist China, or Taiwan, have been, for the time being anyway, drowned out by the cries of joy from big business which expects to do billions of dollars worth of trade with mainland China. Maybe Mr Carter hoped by announcing the big China deal while the old Congress was expiring that he would have smothered any sizeable body of criticism before the new Congress came in. This, as I hinted a couple of weeks ago, is a pretty optimistic hope. 

But now, something has happened for which Mr Carter is being vigorously blamed, not least, by some of the incoming congressmen. No sooner was he being scolded for bad intelligence about Iran (why didn't we know long ago how shaky was the Shah's hold on his country?) than the Vietnamese bounded into Phnom Penh and overnight Cambodia was lost. Mr Carter's embarrassment is double or even triple-edged. He never thought of the Cambodian regime that has just collapsed as a friend or an embattled democracy.

 On the contrary, he has publicly called it the most appallingly inhumane regime of our time and, from every indisputable source, there seems no doubt that the mass slaughter of Cambodians by Cambodians was hardly matched by Hitler, so that if Mr Carter were harping only on his concern for human rights, he might even have been expected to send up a cheer but it's very doubtful, to say the least, that the invading Vietnamese are going to be any better. As one Cambodian refugee put it the other day, 'The replacement of the Pol Pot regime by the Vietnamese troops is comparable to an epidemic of bubonic plague being replaced by cholera.' 

Perhaps any time before the last week in December Mr Carter could have deplored these abominable enemies equally and let it go at that. But in that week he embraced communist China which for long has embraced and supported the Pol Pot regime. The time may come when the United States feels obliged, embarrassingly obliged perhaps, to support awful regimes that the new ally, China, supports, but not just yet. 

However the Russians now step in to embarrass Mr Carter further, for the Russians are the supporters of the conquering Vietnamese regime and its victory has given the Russians a wonderful opportunity to express in the open the pique at the American Chinese get-together. Two days after the conquest of Phnom Penh, Mr Brezhnev did something he has rarely done, if ever – he called in Western magazine writers and trumpeted his congratulations to what the Soviets will surely go on calling 'the Cambodian insurgents'. They are the Vietnamese who, for the purposes of invasion, march under the flag of something called the Cambodian National United Front for Cambodian Salvation. This is exactly as if Hitler had invaded Britain and dubbed his invasion force the British National United Front for British Salvation. 

Mr Brezhnev didn't stop at saying that a fine, progressive regime had conquered a dreadful one, he turned the knife in Mr Carter's shoulder blades by saying that what had been overthrown was 'a political system on the Chinese model, a hateful regime and a tyranny imposed from the outside'. Well, it's doubtful – in fact it's not doubtful, it's almost certain – that Hanoi could not have imposed its regime from the outside without massive Russian arms and money, any more than the Cambodian Pol Pot regime could have held out at all without massive Chinese arms and money. 

The rest of Mr Brezhnev’s telegram of congratulation is a masterpiece of smooth, hypocritical prose, like: 'The remarkable victory of the Cambodian people opens up a new favourable prospect for strengthening peace in the Indochinese peninsula in conformity with the national aspirations of the peoples of that area to live without interference from the outside.' 

I think a fair, current translation of this in Washington would read: 'The remarkable victory of our Soviet-backed Vietnamese opens up favourable prospects for strengthening our hold on the Indochinese peninsula in conformity with our plan to subject the peoples of that area to regimes WE will impose without interference from the Chinese.' 

And then to salt the wound still further, who should arrive in New York but Prince Sihanouk, hot from Peking and Tokyo. He was once the Cambodian head of state and he was ousted in 1970 by, of all awkward things, a pro-American coup. Now, however, he's the spokesman of the dreaded, but overthrown, Pol Pot regime and he's here to beg help for it from the United Nations Security Council and, of course, from China and the United States. 

The United States ardently wishes there would be no debate at all about Cambodia. The Russians are enthusiastic for it, naturally, and the chance to lambast and deplore the wickedness of the Chinese. Mr Carter may well wish it would all go away and that the new friend, Peking, would not plead in the cause of human rights for the inhuman regime just overthrown. 

Prince Sihanouk, however, was met at Kennedy Airport by the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations bearing a bouquet of flowers.

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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