Abstract
From March 1978 to the end of that year, two different trends in Western responses to events in Cambodia developed and moved into greater conflict with each other. As information regarding and concern surrounding the human rights situation grew, Western governments, particularly the United States and Britain, began to take further responsive measures, culminating in submissions made by each government and a number of others to the UN Commission on Human Rights. As the conflict between Kampuchea and Vietnam deepened, however, and the backing of each by China and the Soviet Union, respectively, strengthened, the United States moved towards closer links with China. This move tacitly implied support for China and its ally Kampuchea against the Soviet Union and Vietnam. This paradox — between opposing the Democratic Kampuchea regime on human rights grounds and realising that Western states had certain shared strategic interests with Kampuchea — became abundantly clear with the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia at the end of 1978.
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Notes
Pao-Min Chang, The Sino-Vietnamese Territorial Dispute (New York, 1986), p. 4; Longmire, Soviet, p. 122; Ross, Indo-China, p. 177.
King C. Chen, China’s War with Vietnam, 1979 (Stanford, CA, 1987), pp. 39–68; Chang, Sino-Vietnamese, p. 4; Chen, Strategic Triangle, p. 141.
Gelman, Brezhnev, pp. 105–73; Herring, America’s, p. 270; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC, 1985), pp. 617–18, 623–53.
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm; Postwar lndo-China and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Nottingham, 1979), p. 196.
John Barron and Paul, Anthony, “Cambodia: The Killing Goes On”, Reader’s Digest, vol. 113 (July 1978), pp. 167–74.
Jean Lacouture, Survive le Peuple Cambodgien! (Paris, 1978), p. 5.
See Karl D. Jackson, “Cambodia 1978: War, Pillage and Purge in Democratic Kampuchea”, Asian Survey, vol. XIX, no. 1 (January 1979), p. 82fn; Jackson, Cambodia, p. ix.
Roberta Lynch, “Blacking out the Mind: Cambodia and the American Left”, In These Times, vol. 2, no. 31, 21–27 June 1978, p. 16.
See R. J. Vincent, “Human Rights in Foreign Policy”, in Dilys Hill (ed.), Human Rights and Foreign Policy: Principles and Practise (London, 1989), pp. 54–66.
See J. R. Frears, France in the Giscard Presidency (London, 1981), p. 99. Similarly, the Swedish Ambassador to the Commission told a State Department official that Sweden “would not want to damage its potential good office’s role by making a complaint against Kampuchea at this time” (Sieverts to Secretary of State, 4 July 1978).
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© 1996 Jamie Frederic Metzl
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Metzl, J.F. (1996). April 1978–December 1978. In: Western Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975–80. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24717-2_5
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