Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?

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Sihanouk

Sukarno and prince Norodom Sihanouk of the kingdom of Cambodia were since many years friends and shared views on world affairs, including within the group of non-aligned Afro-Asian nations. When Sukarno was ousted by a cia coup, Sihanouk said in an interview, that he did not understand, how the Indonesian President could have been taken by surprise knowing for a long time, that the cia had targeted him. However, the prince was going to be faced with a cia surprise himself. March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow for a stop-over on his way home, he became another cia victim, when traitor General Lon Nol grabbed power in Pnom Penh.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were still on the warpath in Southeast Asia and had decided on the advice of the bright minds within the Secret Team, that it was best to quickly invade Laos and Cambodia as well, because it would prevent Ho Chi-minh from supplying the Vietcong in the south. Sihanouk was not prepared to accept us troops operating on Cambodian soil. Therefore, he had to go. Hence, the Lon Nol coup. April 30, 1970 the us invasion began. Washington policy-makers had long ceased to observe international law or worry about violating treaties Washington had promoted and duly signed, like the Charter of the un, which protected Cambodia from this type of Hitlerite invasion, at least on paper. Nixon and Kissinger followed strictly Third Reich methods in achieving their goals.

In his book, written with journalist Wilfrid Burchett, My War with the cia²⁹, prince Sihanouk said, ‘It is worse than what Hitler did (...) What is the difference between burning and gassing people in ovens and doing it to a whole nation in the open? That is just what the us of President Nixon is doing today (...) In Cambodia, it is happening before our eyes, as part of a deliberate us policy (...) to destroy present an future generations of Cambodians by also destroying our environment. Once nature dies, man also dies.’

The terrorists in Washington plainly waged genocide in Cambodia, as they were already doing for years in Vietnam and as they did five years before in Indonesia with the assistance of another cia traitor, Suharto. Sihanouk spoke of ‘the barbaric us aggression’ in his country. He recalled he had often pondered the dangers that had been looming from Washington. ‘The only thing I had not anticipated, was that the us would take part directly in trying to tear our country to pieces (...) We were being punished, humiliated, and being prepared for the chopping-bloc, because we had stood on our dignity. We refused to become us puppets, or join the anti-communist crusade. We spurned the billion dollars rewards for such a role. That was our crime in the eyes of successive us Administrations.’ Sukarno could have written the same lines, I know.

29 Sihanouk and Wilfrid Burchett, My War with the cia, Allen Lane, London, 1973.

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The prince explained in his book why he refused to submit to Washington's wishes to allow us troops to engage in combat with the north Vietnamese on Cambodian soil. ‘To cover up their battlefield defeats in South Vietnam, American commanders, especially Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams maintained the only thing preventing complete us victory was the existence of sanctuaries in Cambodia used by the Vietcong.’ Sihanouk refused. ‘It would have meant surrendering our neutrality. Secondly, I, together with a vast majority of Cambodian people, sympathised with Vietnamese resistance against us aggression.’ He made it clear, ‘It is true, I did not want Communism in Cambodia. Under the influence of Lon Nol - as I clearly understood when it was too late - he wanted me to concentrate my attention on an enemy of the left to conceal his own plotting on the extreme right.’ Of course, Sihanouk wanted to return immediately after the news of the coup from Moscow to Pnom Penh. ‘But Lon Nol was thorough and ruthless,’ he noted. The cia indeed works preferably with bloody murderers. The prince was informed, that if he had at the time of the coup been in his homeland, he would have been killed. Now, the plotters feared his speedy return. What if in the end the Army would side with him instead of Lon Nol? Therefore, a message was sent to Moscow, that whatever company would fly the legal head-of-state back to Cambodia, the plotters would confiscate the plane and arrest the crew. The prince called Lon Nol ‘an arch-traitor.’³⁰

Sihanouk experienced the same problems with Eisenhower and Dulles, as Sukarno had in the fifties. He talked in 1953 for one hour with John Foster Dulles in Washington and came away from the meeting alarmed. Dulles had shouted at the prince: ‘Defeat Communism in your area!’ Quite disarmingly, Sihanouk noted in his book, ‘I felt like telling him not to worry too much about our affairs.’³¹

Both leaders were convinced the Eisenhower Administration suffered from an ‘idée fixe’ about Communism. Suharto between 1965 and 1967, when he finally took de facto power, exerted extreme pressure on President Sukarno to condemn the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (pki) for the coup of 1965. Like Sihanouk, Sukarno too, knew that this second effort to oust him, was purely and exclusively another Washington initiated affair. President Sukarno, whom I visited at length during October 1966 and filmed for Dutch television - I bagged at the same time Suharto's first TV interview ever - was just as certain as prince Sihanouk, who the real guilty party was. While Suharto, edged on by American agents, who were in constant touch with his top aides, launched a nationwide witch hunt. Suharto's soldiers were decapitating communists with the cia supplied list in hand. They obviously began to like their job. Not the 5.000 people on the cia list were hacked to death - the Army of Suharto tried to save

30 Sihanouk and Wilfrid Burchett, My War with the cia, Allen Lane, London, 1973, p.p. 56.

31 Sihanouk and Wilfrid Burchett, My War with the cia, Allen Lane, London, 1973, p.p. 154.

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bullets - but hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered in the wake of the murder of six of their generals. If that bloodbath does not qualify the fascist Indonesian dictator for a one-way ticket to The Hague, what does? Perhaps Pol Pot did surpass Suharto as an Asian war criminal, but he passed away some time ago and is unable to stand trial anymore. Does this mean Suharto should go free, because the cia still protects Lyndon Johnson's boy, who, 30 years later was Clinton's boy?

During a series of conversations with President Sukarno during October 1966, both at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta and the Bogor Summer Palace in the mountains, it became clear to me, that the father of the nation, like his friend Sihanouk, was firmly convinced that Indonesia like Cambodia had suffered a mortifying blow through direct cia intervention by playing generals against each other. To him, what had happened during the night of September 30-October 1, 1965 was an inter-Army affair intentionally provoked by the cia. The President was convinced the pki was not guilty of what Suharto and his clique accused them of. Who really wished the Indonesian Communists decimated? The Wild Bill Donovan boys were running a crusade against communists everywhere. Washington was once more the guilty party as Super Rogue State in the world. Not Moscow and not Peking, as the Suharto evildoers and the cia were saying.

Sihanouk referred in his book to the Suharto coup and wrote, ‘With the help of psychological warfare specialists from Indonesia who had engineered a slander campaign against Sukarno, Lon Nol and Sirik Matak whipped up a campaign against the monarchy.’³² Like in Jakarta in 1965, in Pnom Penh in 1970 slogans appeared everywhere, accusing the monarchy of always having been traitors. Where did Lon Nol and Suharto - the real traitors - get their script from? From the criminals in Washington, who trumped up these barefaced lies in their screwy crusade against Marxism-Leninism. In Jakarta, indeed, the cia followed a similar scenario. In 1966, when I was there, Suharto and the Army were whipping up anti-Sukarno sentiments through so-called action-fronts, like kabi, Indonesian Worker's Action Front, kagi, Indonesian Teachers Action Front, kami, Indonesian Students Action Front, kappi, Indonesian High School Students and Youths Action Front, kasi, Indonesian Scholars Action Front, and kawi, Indonesian Women's Action Front.

I went to see the guys of the kami and filmed them I interviewed a leader Cosmas Batubara, a hot tempered and empty headed idiot, who had no clue to what extent he was being used by Army traitors. Indonesians were like wax in the hands of rogue elements at the top of the us Government. Cosmas was largely rewarded by Suharto for the violent demonstrations he helped organize against Sukarno and appointed cabinet minister to join the stool pigeons that were stealing themselves rich. Army trucks shuttled the anti Sukarno demonstrators to wherever they

32 Sihanouk and Wilfrid Burchett, My War with the cia, Allen Lane, London, 1973, p.p. 216.

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were planning trouble for the legal Government. Where the funds came from to finance the anti Sukarno baiting was any-body's guess. President Sukarno mentioned these activities to me and had received information that, for instance, camouflage jackets had come from us clothing dumps, and had been paid for by Australian intelligence, always ready to back up the us and British services when they were somewhere on the warpath. He spoke directly about the cia involvement in Jakarta to me, as Sihanouk did in his 1973 book. After 1967 Sukarno became a prisoner of Suharto and was never in a position to write additional memoirs. He, too, would have chosen the title, My War with the cia.

Sukarno, too, could have written a passage that Sihanouk entered in his book. He lived at the time in Peking and often talked with Mao Tsetung. During one such conversation, Mao observed: ‘Prince Sihanouk, I like to talk with you. You speak frankly and express your ideas courageously (...) You deserve to be a Communist.’ The prince replied: ‘Monsieur le President, really I can't.’ Mao laughed and said: ‘You are intelligent, you are hard working. You could start studying.’ Sihanouk replied: ‘I am too lazy to plough through the works of Marx, Lenin and others.’³³

Sukarno had not been too lazy to page through Communist philosophers. During eleven and a half years of detention in the days of Dutch colonialism, he had spent his time well and read hundreds of books. He knew exactly why he was opposed to dictatorship in any form. As he sneered in his autobiography, published in New-York the year of the second cia coup, that he, Sukarno, ‘lover of God was being labelled a fat communist.’³⁴ He was aware of the nonsense us media were writing about him, or of the insults heaped on him in Congress. He asked whether there was a difference between being forced to lie, as the controlled press in communist countries was doing or being totally free to lie, as western media were doing. ‘Both are equally destructive’, he added.³⁵

Incidentally, Sukarno recalled in his memoir his 1956 official visit to the White House. Eisenhower did not meet his plane, like jfk did in 1961. Eisenhower did not welcome Sukarno entering the White House. He even made his Indonesian guest wait one hour in an anteroom, when Sukarno finally asked the Chief of Protocol in a sharp tone what was going on. Only then, he was rushed into the Oval Office. Ike's boorish behavior was, of course, totally inexcusable. He had probably been advised to make a fool of himself by the two psychotic characters, who were his top-advisors at the time, John Foster Dulles (State Department) and Allen Dulles (cia). Unfortunately, the much hailed Western democratic system of managing state affairs, virtually guarantees installing persons to jobs they are indubitably unsuited for. Which reminds me of a long-time friendship with dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, the Park Avenue psychiatrist, consulted by Richard

33 Sihanouk and Wilfrid Burchett, My War with the cia, Allen Lane, London, 1973, p.p. 208.

34 Cindy Adams, Sukarno: An Autobiography, Bobbs Merrill Company, New-York, 1965, p.p. 278.

35 Cindy Adams, Sukarno: An Autobiography, Bobbs Merrill Company, New-York, 1965, p.p. 281.

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Nixon after he lost the California election. Hutschnecker, now 102 years old, has campaigned since the 70s for ‘Psychiatry at High Levels of Government’³⁶.

‘Perhaps the time has come for us,’ he wrote, ‘the people who love our country, who respect its laws, who cherish freedom and who are responsible and independent men and women (...) to apply psychodynamic principles and explore possibilities other than purely political to secure that our best and brightest leaders are also our mentally and morally healthiest and soundest.’ Hutschnecker flatly advocated, that future us leaders should have their heads examined - as is being done with applications for top jobs in the business world - prior to announcing their candidacy for the White House. A quarter of a century has passed since this sensible suggestion was first put on paper, but nothing has changed. Remember Texas and Florida in 2000.

The Cambodian killing-fields became a symbol to the world of what happens if us rogues of the likes of Nixon and Kissinger run amok. The mass slaughter of millions following the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of 1970 was not the result of aggression by Moscow or Peking, but bore the mark of the cia, the Pentagon, and the neurotic Secret Team, that had gone on a rampage once more, this time in Southeast Asia to save the world for freedom and democracy. Only a quarter of a century later an aged Sihanouk finally returned to his land of birth, to find it in smoking ruins courtesy of the American liberators who in 1970 installed the Quisling puppet Lon Nol.

Old Henry continues to publish books, like his most recent masterpiece Does America Need a Foreign Policy?. Nick Cohen reviewed the book in the London Observer and stressed, that the poor man keeps to rail against tyrants, totally oblivious to his own guilt. He received when in Paris a summons from a French judge, who wanted to question him in relation to French citizens that disappeared during the Pinochet regime in Chili. Kissinger refused to accept the papers and left France in a hurry. In Chili a judge wanted to question him about the murder of Charles Horman, an American journalist. Cohen added, ‘Like a terrorist who refuses to recognise the validity of the courts, Kissinger rejects in his book the validity of prosecution in the abstract without once mentioning the charge sheet or declaring his interest.’ And Cohen ends: ‘Kissinger complains that politicians who may have murdered thousands are treated like ordinary criminals who kill one or two. Not once does he acknowledge or attempt to refute the allegation that he is covered in enough blood to make a psychopath wince.’

36 Op-Ed page, The New York Times, July 4, 1973.