Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sary, he found it pulled from the US edition of the magazine. Pringle had encountered
Sary during a nonaligned meeting in Lima. It was an unexpected scoop: for the first time
a leading member of the new Cambodian government was offering a peek behind the
shroud of mystery that had fallen over the country. But the American desk wasn't interes-
ted. Pringle picked up the phone and requested an explanation. “The editor said that they
felt Americans wanted to put the Vietnam and Cambodian wars behind them and turn to
more happy subjects,” he recalled. “The emphasis was on more upbeat stories.”
31
A similar Vietnam fatigue prevailed in the US government. When Phnom Penh fell in
April 1975, Charles Twining was a Foreign Service Officer stationed at the US embassy
in Bangkok, monitoring the trickle of information coming from inside Cambodia. Then
33 years of age, Twining had just spent eight months diligently learning the Khmer lan-
guage in preparation for a posting to Phnom Penh. His plans disrupted by the fall of the
city, he put his language skills to use along the Thai border, where as many as 6,000 Cam-
bodian refugees had gathered by the middle of the year. “It took me a while,” Twining
said. “It was only in August or so of 1975 that I started to piece together a few of the
refugee stories. It suddenly struck me that some of the awful abuses of Nazi Germany
were being relived in Cambodia.” He wrote up his reports and cabled them back to Wash-
ington, where, like Quinn's 1974 report, they met with a general lack of interest. Only a
handful of policy-makers maintained any interest in Cambodia. Otherwise, Twining said,
“the United States was pretty much tuned out of Indochina.”
32
On August 12, 1978, the chairman of the Swedish-Kampuchean Friendship Association
arrived in Phnom Penh on a flight from Beijing. Gunnar Bergström and his delegation
were warmly received. Accompanying him were three Swedish leftists, including the
well-known radical Jan Myrdal; also on the flight were a few Chinese advisors and a
“Carpathian mountain garland art troupe,” bringing fraternal greetings from the dim high-
noon of Ceauşescu's Romania. In early 1978, hoping to improve its international image,
DK began allowing small groups of sympathetic Westerners to visit Cambodia, along
with journalists from friendly socialist countries. Since 1975 Bergström's group had writ-
ten repeatedly to the DK embassy in Beijing requesting a visa to visit Cambodia. Then,
one day, there was a response. “In spring of '78 we got a letter,” he remembered. “They
said we were allowed to send four people.”
33
As a student in Stockholm, Bergström had proclaimed himself a Maoist. He was en-
raged by the American bombing of Cambodia and sympathized with the pro-Chinese
peasant revolutionaries fighting to free themselves from the yoke of US imperialism. To
Bergström, as to communist radicals across the Western world, DK seemed like a model
of political zeal and self-reliance, smeared by what David Kline, a writer for the Americ-
