Re: [Marxism] Nepal confrontation deepens: Popularly-supported left asks peaceful accord

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I strongly agree with Fred's introductory points above and the rest, but
just one minor aspect. I wouldn't quite agree that Cambodia now has a
"stable", let alone "independent" capitalist regime. It is more like a
playground for the World Bank and various neo-liberal experimenters. It
even came to the point that when Cambodia entered the WTO, it was allowed
certain concessions due to being a least developed country, and yet signed
the agreements without these concessions, so convinced the leaders were
that free markets naturally solve everything.

I think part of the problem was that the Vietnamese internationalists and
their Cambodian allies were unable to defeat the Pol Potists and their
allies outright, due to Vietnam's economic collapse (partly due to being
bled dry in Cambodia) and the massive imperialist, Thai and Chinese
support for the Pol Potists. Thus the result was a deal: the imperialists
would abandon the actual Pol Pot group, the more straightforward
right-wing factions that had been allied to Pol Pot would come to the
table with the Vietnamese-backed government, and the whole deal would be
guaranteed by a multi-year UN (essentially imperialist) occupation. This
occupation ensured it was not much of an "independent" capitalist regime
from the outset. The coalition governments that have existed since then
have mainly consisted of the remnants (totally ideologically gutted beyond
recognition) of the pro-Vietnamese Cambodian Peoples party, and the
right-wing, royalist Funcinpec. The former may occasionally show some
limps and shivers of vaguely more independent or social thought than the
latter, but that's about it.

I'd be interested to know Fred's opinion of the Cambodia government/UN war
crimes/genocide trials of the surviving Pol Potists getting underway.

Fred responds:
I have a somewhat different view of the way that the pro-Vietnamese wing of
the Cambodian liberation movement turned toward capitalism. The process was
far advanced before the 1991 agreement, and occurred pretty organically
while the Vietnamese troops were still in the country en masse.

This was already irreversible when the 1991 agreements were signed.

The Vietnamese main goals were to defeat Pol Pot, secure their border
regions, which had taken heavy losses from the Pol Pot's various invasions
and raids. He laid claim, if you remember, to most of south Vietnam
including Ho Chi Minh City as historically Khmer territory.

In the SWP, I and others worked closely with several Cambodian activists in
the solidarity movement with Vietnam, all of whom hoped that the fall of the
Pol Pot regime would lead to a course toward socialism. By 1985, they were
all convinced that things were on the wrong track there, and that the regime
was corrupt and bourgeois-oriented.

Partly they were too hopeful that the Vietnamese would play some variant of
the Soviet role in Eastern Europe, pushing through some kind of "structural
assimilation" revolution 

In part, they counted to much on the Vietnamese trying to direct the country
Eastern-Europe style. I think they also underestimated the blows that the
Pol Pot counterrevolution had dealt to revolutionary hopes, the legitimacy
of socialist goals, and so forth in Cambodia both in the leadership and the
masses.

The Vietnamese did not pursue an Eastern European approach, for which all
praise is due to Allah and their political wisdom. As a result they have a
very friendly government in power in Phnompenh and not an enemy people, and
they still retain close ties with the eastern part of the country in
particular.

The Vietnamese and their allies won the war. In no way, shape, or form did
the Vietnamese or the Hun Sen group give away the store to the imperialists,
even though this was presented in the media as a defeated Afghanistan-style
retreat. The 1991 accord registered the defeat of the Pol Pot forces. The
imperialists did not "dump" them. They were already finished, even though
they could still drain Vietnam with guerrilla pinpricks. They controlled
almost no territory any longer.

In fact, the imperialists have backed various efforts by the Sihanouk forces
and the "royalist" party Funcinpec to replace the government with one more
antagonistic to Vietnam and more directly submissive to the imperialists.
They have been defeated repeatedly. There is resistance to noticing this on
the left because of the wildly free market orientation of the ex-CP gang
that now runs the country. Funcinpec primarily hangs on and takes its piece
of the action, while denouncing the government for being sympathetic to the
Vietnamese government and the many Vietnamese and part-Vietnamese people in
the country. 

When moves against the government are attempted, there have been threats by
the political leaders of the eastern part of the country bordering Vietnam,
where the Heng Samrin-Hun Sen wing of the Cambodian CP originated, to
secede.

I contrasted the record and relative success of Vietnam in Cambodia to the
utter defeat of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Unfortunately I
tangled my paragraphs and the point did not come through clearly.
Afghanistan is a reminder that the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia could
have come out a whole lot worse than it did.

And frankly, since Kampuchea has had basically the same government now for
30 years and not primarily by brutal repression -- though that has not been
absent -- indicates to me that a certain stability was achieved. A real
popular anti-imperialist, anti-oligarchical and anticapitalist revolution
would have been nicer, of course, but so it goes.

The difference in the two outcomes lies partly in the political skills of
the two leaderships, with the Vietnamese being head and shoulders and more
above Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev, et al. And part of this was their
sensitive handling of the national question.

War crimes trials
The pressure for war crimes trials in Cambodia has mostly been from the
imperialists. It has never been primarily internal, not that there aren't a
lot of families who would love to see some fellow old folks get nailed for
what they did in the Pol Pot years.

The imperialists have always seen this as primarily a way to discredit the
Hun Sen clique, which they simply do not like and do not trust, partly
because, while he has adopted a full-scale version of capitalist politics,
he has never accepted the anti-Vietnamese position locally and in foreign
policy, which the imperialists favor in neighboring countries as a strategic
barrier against the Vietnamese revolution which (do I really have to say
this? I guess so.) is not dead.

It seems to me that the Hun Sen clique has managed to get control of this
process as of other challenges, although I suspect that at some point
something will come out that will have the imperialist media and Funcinpec
jumping up and down with a sense of imminent victory which will probably be,
as usual, illusory. But the trials themselves will have little or no
redeeming social value.

I want to say this clearly: I am absolutely  opposed to hunting down every
ten year old who committed crimes for Pol Pot. I am against a general
witch-hunt around this. I am not for forgetting the past, but the Truth
Commission road seems like the healthier way forward.

I am not even excited by the prospect of Bush and Cheney being tried by the
unbearable Spanish Judge of All Humanity Baltasar Garzon.

I hate the whole "war crimes" game. A pure imperialist gambit from the
start. I see little or nothing of value in the trials of Slobodan Milosevic,
or Sankoh in Sierra Leone, or Taylor in Liberia, or the President of Sudan.
Criminals? I almost take that for granted. But how does consciousness of
what causes these things, how to prevent them, and so forth gain from these
processes. In my opinion, absolutely nothing. 

Even in the torture debate here, trials are not the primary need of my soul.
The truth is. Reveal all the facts, all the photos, all the evidence, all
the testimony. And if there are going to be trials they should start at the
top and not go all the way to the bottom. I am AGAINST trying all the
"willing executioners."

Now I am going to say something a bit off the wall, especially since I pride
myself on being a bit of a Jewish nationalist. My heart goes out to John
Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian product of forced collectivization and famine in a
country where the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union got an initially
favorable response. He was framed up for being a major Jew-killer, Ivan the
Terrible, but it turned out that the evidence was faked and misinterpreted.

Now, at the age of 89, he is being tried -- in Germany, by the imperialists
who hired him IF the current charges are more true than the previous ones --
for having been a guard at one of the lesser death camps. This will be a
show trial pure and simple, with conviction automatic because the whole
purpose is to show the world that German imperialism is the best pal the
Jews have ever had. 

The trial of this small fry, a victim even if he was also a criminal in the
whole world nightmare of 1930-45, shows the scapegoating and totally
politically misleading and disorienting character of the imperialist
war-crimes trial industry.

I am not optimistic, but I hope that Demjanjuk beats the rap and gets to die
at home.
Fred Feldman









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