Published: November 20, 2012
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Four decades after American warplanes
carpet-bombed this impoverished country, an American president came to
visit for the first time. He came not to defend the past, nor to
apologize for it. In fact, he made no public mention of it whatsoever.
President Obama’s
visit to a country deeply scarred by its involvement with the United
States did nothing to purge the ghosts or even address them. Mr. Obama
made clear he came only because Cambodia happened to be the site for a
summit meeting of Asian leaders, but given the current government’s
human rights record, he was intent on avoiding much interaction with the
host.
“How are you?” Mr. Obama asked Prime Minister Hun Sen when he showed up, unsmiling, for a meeting made necessary by protocol. “Good to see you.”
Those, as it turned out, were the only words he uttered publicly to or
about Cambodia during his two days here. In private, aides said, Mr.
Obama pressed Mr. Hun Sen about repression. While they usually
characterize even the most hostile meeting in diplomatic terms, in this
case they were eager to call the meeting “tense.”
But the president’s public silence disappointed human rights
organizations that had called for a more explicit challenge to Mr. Hun
Sen’s record of crushing opposition. And it left to another day any
public examination of the United States’ role in the events of the 1970s
that culminated in the infamous “killing fields” that wiped out a
generation of Cambodians.
Theary Seng, president of the Association of Khmer Rouge Victims in
Cambodia, said, “President Obama should have met with the human rights
community and activists challenging the Hun Sen regime, and while then
and there, offer a public apology to the Cambodian people for the
illegal U.S. bombings, which took the lives of half a million Cambodians
and created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge genocide.”
Gary J. Bass, a scholar of war crimes at Princeton, said Mr. Obama
passed up a chance to publicly exorcise a painful history. “It’s a
missed opportunity for Obama,” he said. “Obama is right to evoke
America’s better angels, but that’s more effective when you give the
complete story.”
White House officials were sympathetic, but they said the focus of Mr.
Obama’s stop in Phnom Penh was on the summit meeting, organized by the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, not on a visit to
Cambodia or the relationship between the two countries.
“It’s not a lack of appreciation; it’s the circumstances of the visit,”
said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security
adviser. “President Obama’s always willing to confront the history we
have in the nations we visit and believes it’s important to acknowledge
the past so we can move beyond it. The fact is, this particular visit
was structured to focus on the summits that the Cambodians were
hosting.”
Some activists said that Mr. Obama’s visit would help Cambodia’s transition.
“The U.S. president’s visit to Cambodia is an important part of that
process,” said Youk Chhang, a survivor of the genocide and executive
director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia,
a private research group. “Cambodians look to the United States more
than any other country as a beacon for leadership on human rights and
democracy issues as well as what can be achieved by a free and fair
market system.”
Michael Abramowitz, who directs the genocide prevention center at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, recently visited Cambodia on a fact-finding mission on the Khmer Rouge trials.
He saw value in Mr. Obama’s visit. “Even though President Obama would
likely not have visited Phnom Penh were it not for the Asean meeting,
the presence of the first U.S. president on Cambodian soil has enormous
symbolic importance,” he said.
Left undiscussed during the visit was the grim history between the
United States and Cambodia. President Richard M. Nixon, trying to cut
off North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam, ordered a secret
bombing campaign that dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of
explosives on Cambodia from 1970 to 1973. The United States also backed a
coup that ousted Norodom Sihanouk as head of state.
Many Cambodians responded by joining a Communist resistance, which led
to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, a bloodthirsty guerrilla
group that went on to orchestrate a genocide that resulted in the deaths
of 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979, when the group was pushed
out of power by Vietnamese forces.
Even today, Cambodia is struggling with that history. A United
Nations-Cambodian war crimes trial is trying the senior surviving
leadership of the Khmer Rouge on charges of war crimes, genocide and
crimes against humanity.
The United States has supported and helped finance the trials, although
human rights groups complain that the Cambodian government has been
tampering with the court.
Mr. Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has ruled Cambodia for
decades with little tolerance for dissent. Opposition leaders have been
jailed and killed, and his allies have been seizing land on a large
scale, according to human rights groups.
That complicated the question of Mr. Obama’s trip. Past presidents have
confronted American actions; President Bill Clinton made a trip to
Vietnam in 2000 to reconcile years after the war, while George W. Bush,
during a trip to Eastern Europe, expressed regret for the Yalta accords,
which he viewed as allowing the Soviet Union to control the region for
decades after the end of World War II.
But Mr. Obama was reluctant to engage in a discussion of America’s
responsibility in Cambodia while the current government is so
repressive. Such a discussion could serve to elevate rather than
diminish Mr. Hun Sen, American officials said.
Mr. Obama refused to make joint statements with Mr. Hun Sen, as he
normally does with leaders hosting him, on the assumption that any
criticism of the government would be censored, but the pictures of the
two leaders side by side would be used to validate the Cambodian leader.
Instead, Mr. Obama used almost their entire private meeting to press Mr.
Hun Sen on human rights, aides said. He emphasized “the need for them
to move towards elections that are fair and free, the need for an
independent election commission associated with those elections, the
need to allow for the release of political prisoners and for opposition
parties to be able to operate,” Mr. Rhodes said.
Even if Mr. Obama did not address the past during this visit, Mr. Rhodes
noted that the United States government has been supporting the
genocide trials and efforts to dispose of unexploded mines and ordnance.
“We have done important work to help the Cambodian people move forward
with their tragic past,” he said. “We want to continue that support.”
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