First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter
Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2016 9:15 pm
Somewhat interesting article from some cluEless moron who vocally supported the Khmer Rouge regime and was rewarded by being allowed to visit the devastated country back in 1978, not long before the collapse. VERY few outsiders got such access.
https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/forb ... ts-111383/Forbidden Thoughts
BY GEORGE WRIGHT | APRIL 17, 2016
In August 1978, as reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities began to flow out of Cambodia, Gunnar Bergstrom arrived in Phnom Penh on a mission.
He was hoping to discredit these reports as fabrications of the U.S. and other Western countries, and prove that the Khmer Rouge were an upright group of freedom fighters who had liberated their nation from capitalist oppressors.
“In the beginning, we wanted to believe that all of this was propaganda and that everything they said about the Khmer Rouge was a lie,” Mr. Bergstrom, now 65, said from his home in Stockholm last month.
Mr. Bergstrom had become one of a select few Khmer Rouge supporters from Western countries who were granted access to the closed-off mass worksite that was Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime.
With a political conscience shaped by the Second Indochina War in the 1960s, the young Marxist had played an active role in Sweden’s anti-war movement, which helped turn the tide of public opinion against the U.S. presence in Vietnam. As Richard Nixon’s government began its carpet bombing campaign inside Cambodia in 1969, Mr. Bergstrom’s attentions moved across the border.
Perceiving the Khmer Rouge’s overthrow of Lon Nol in April 1975 as a liberation from a corrupt regime backed by imperialist Western superpowers, Mr. Bergstrom helped establish the Swedish-Cambodian Friendship Association a year later.
In August 1978, following two years of negotiations—during which an increasing number of tales of mass murder and starvation began to trickle out of Cambodia—Mr. Bergstrom stepped onto Phnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport runway alongside three comrades, Maoist author Jan Myrdal, Marita Wikander, and Hedvig Ekerwald, with hopes of debunking the horror stories as CIA propaganda.
Driving through the capital’s desolate streets, which had been emptied by the regime as it evacuated its residents shortly after taking power in 1975, Mr. Bergstrom encountered a surreal scene.
“It was like a science fiction film, you know? People asked, ‘Were you not shocked and horrified?’ And we had to tell people that we expected it. We knew it was empty. We saw an empty city,” Mr. Bergstrom said.
“The things I remember thinking, and it was 40 years ago, is that we had, so far, defended the Khmer Rouge. I had never said that there were no killings and no murders because I realized there had been a war…I realized there had been some killings in the beginning.
“I thought maybe the refugee stories are about that. I hoped that the killings were over now. We defended the evacuation of the cities with the arguments that the Khmer Rouge had given us,” he said.
more
