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The fact is that China supported Saroth Sar (as Pol Pot was first called) from his earliest days.

That support helped the Khmer Rouge win the long war against Lon Nol in 1975, and was maintained through the years of terror until, in 1979, the Vietnamese drove Pol Pot back into the jungle. Nor did the support end there. The Chinese connection remained critically important over the following decades, as the international community became increasingly involved in the fate of Cambodia and as the Khmer Rouge tried to win back at the negotiating table the power and prestige which they had not been able to retain through their regime of cruelty, violence and repression.
 
You can't be in Cambodia for more than a few hours without realizing how savagely, how indelibly, the Pol Pot years have marked the country and its inhabitants. Almost all the people I talked to had lost brothers or sisters or parents in the killing fields or in the Tuol Sleng torture centre. Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of this is the pagoda they have built at Choeung Ek, 15 kilometres from the centre of Phnom Penh. This structure has been erected in the very heart of the killing fields. It towers above the surrounding countryside, 17 storeys high. On every storey of the pagoda, the human skulls are packed tight - 9,895 victims dug up from 129 mass graves. A sombre notice records that 20,000 people were killed here by `electric shock, poison, steel bar, gun, axe, bamboo stick, hammer and hoe', among them `one Australian, one Frenchman and six American journalists'.

You have to have a strong stomach to visit Choeung Ek

and, perhaps, an even stronger one to visit Tuol Sleng, the former school turned interrogation centre where Pol Pot's lieutenant Duch exercised his murderous regime. The climbing frames in the children's playground became instruments of torture from which prisoners were suspended to have their heads dunked in water. The walls of the cells are still spattered with blood, and row upon row of photographs demonstrate the meticulous care with which the Angka tyranny documented its victims and recorded their 'confessions'.

In one of the rooms is an enlarged photograph of the scene on 17 April 1975, when Pol Pot's flag-waving, banner-carrying Khmer Rouge soldiers, standing on the backs of open trucks, were surrounded by cheering crowds as they entered Phnom Penh. By the end of the day the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh had been ordered and the mass killings had begun with well over a million Cambodians losing their lives in one of the worst genocides in history.

Pinned up on the wall of another room are the Tuol Sleng `Security Regulations'.

These are the ten commandments of the Khmer Rouge regime. I copied the prison rules down in my notebook:

1. You must answer according to my questions - don't turn them away.

2. Don't try to hide the facts by making pretext this or that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.

3. Don't be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

5. Don't tell me about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protest.

8. Don't make protests about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.

9. If you don't follow the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.

10. If you disobey any point of my regulations, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

As we left Tuol Sleng, my driver told me that both his parents had been tortured to death there.

Choeung Ek, Tuol Sleng, the stories ordinary people tell you of their own or their relatives' suffering - these things are quite enough to put President Jiang's visit to Cambodia in a different light. If you want to raise human-rights issues with China, you don't have to limit them to Tiananmen Square. What China has done by proxy counts too.

To be fair, China has never sought to disguise its support (then and now) for the Khmer Rouge. The support of the United States for the Khmer Rouge is far more nebulous. History's airbrush has been at work overtime. Human-rights campaigners in the USA have conveniently forgotten that people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, actively promoted US support of the China-backed Khmer Rouge as a counterweight to Soviet support of Vietnam. Even after 1979, when the Cambodian atrocities had come fully to light and Pol Pot had retired to the jungles along the Thai border, the Khmer Rouge still had friends at a very high level in the US administration, with the USA insisting that they should be in any future Cambodian coalition - as indeed they are today.

The reality is that US and Chinese interests, as regards the Khmer Rouge, have long converged far more than they diverged, a fact which President Clinton's historic visit to Vietnam this week will not be able to obscure.

Ten years ago this festival was still banned. Today it is a time for national rejoicing. If rivers can reverse direction, who knows what other miracles may happen? We may even see peace and prosperity return to this antique land.

Author  Johnson, Stanley Copyright Spectator Nov 25
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