Connecting People to Peace

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What does Broken Promises say about the United Nations?  Instead of celebrating the United Nations’ 60th anniversary, the Citizens United Foundation sought to develop and project a film to raise awareness about its foibles. The Citizens United Foundation used genocide survivors versus United Nations’ officials to uncover every stone about the organization. Some lurid events that the movie draws on are the Rwanda and Bosnia killings and the Pol Pot scandal in Cambodia.

Rwanda:

Not long after Rwanda achieved independence from the Uganda monarchy, war broke out in Rwanda between two sides: the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) and the official Hutu wing, which had taken power in 1962.

The bloodshed began in 1990, when the RPF (Tutsi-dominated) seized Rwanda’s working government. In 1993, compensations were called at the Arusha accords. The arrangement called for the two groups to share the government equally. Fighting continued, though, and the issue became a controversial issue for the U.N.

At the time, Kofi Annan (now Secretary-General) was head of U.N. peacekeeping, and Izbal Riza (see Oppposition 2) was his deputy. U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda warned them of the impending slaughter of the Hutu by the Tutsi, but they ordered the peacekeepers to stand by and let the massacre continue. Even though over 800,000 people died in Rwanda, the Untied Nations hesitated to call it a genocide and actively intervene. Instead, the U.N. established the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) to provide funds to Rwanda. No funds were ever provided. The foreign affair seemed thus wrapped in hopeless bereavement.

In the end, death ended the war, not peace. The RPF invaded Kigali, Rwanda in the summer of 1994, and Hutus refugees left their homelands to escape the Tutsi.

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Pol Pot Scandal:

After Indochina, the French colony of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand,[] fell to the Soviet Union in 1954, King Norodom Sihanouk established a communist government in North Vietnam. Saloth Star (later known as Pol Pot) was a Cambodian at this time that created his own regime while Sihanouk was in leadership. When western participation in Cambodian politics started inclining during the 1970s, pro-western Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk’s influence.

Out of resentment, Sihanouk joined Saloth Star’s recruits. Their coalition became the Khmer Rouge and gained power from the popularity of Sihanouk and the hostilities created by United States intervention in Cambodia at the time. Indeed, the United States intervention in Cambodia under President Nixon comes into harsh questioning when in regards to Saloth Star’s Khmer Rouge. Some say that if the United States had not intervened in the first place, the Khmer Rouge would not have received support. For instance, John Pilger, with The Nation, stated that “The invasion [that is, the United States’ attack in Cambodia in the 1970s] provided a small group of extreme ethnic nationalists with Maoist pretensions, the Khmer Rouge, with a catalyst for a revolution that had no popular base among the Cambodia people…U.S terror was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power,” in 1998.

 When the United States ended the war with Vietnam in 1973, Lon Nol’s government suffered. The Nixon administration, still immovable about letting Vietnam fall to communism, continued to bomb Cambodia and remove Khmer Rouge recruits. In 1974, though, Khmer Rouge resurrects and captures the city of Odongk, killing 20,000 citizens. At that time, Khmer Rouge also captured Phnom Penh, and Lon Nol fled to the United States. More conflict continued between Khmer Rouge and the United States when Star’s recruits, in 1975, seized the United States S.S Mayaguez, a merchant ship on a passage to leave the Vietnam shores. This affair was labeled the Mayaguez Crisis, and Saloth Star changed his name to Pol Pot.

 Continuing with his zenith, Pol Pot declared April 17, 1975 his “Year Zero.” He began wiping out western culture, intellectuals, and capitalism. Pol Pot’s goal was an agrarian society for Cambodia. John Pilger described the scene after visiting in 1979, “When the afternoon monsoon broke, the streets nearby ran with money as thousands of brand-new banknotes washed away in the gutter. Children, orphans, collected and dried them for fuel; I can still hear the crackle as the money burned.” Although genocide in Cambodia was obvious, Pol Pot became the official prime minister of the Democratic Kampuchea,  his new state under the Khmer Rouge, in 1976.

 Meanwhile, the Thai, Laotian, and Vietnamese borders sat in conflict, and other world powers come into play—China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, for example. Vietnam turned towards Soviet Union. Pol Pot’s regime, long supported by China, continued its relations with the nation. At this time, the United States too realized the benefits in supporting China in Indochina. The United States’ null accomplishments in Vietnam made them eager to play off from the dangerous relations between China and Soviet while undercutting Vietnam simultaneously.

 The United States got a chance to act on their theory when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978. During 1979 and 1980, the United States and China backed the Khmer Rouge’s takeover in Indochina. Ironically, the United States, one time at war with Cambodia, began using  its finances to support a vigilante like Pol Pot.

How the United Nations is Involved

Irony came in again when the United States, the United Nations, and China stop all of their trade and communication with Cambodia in the 1990s. It started after the UN peacekeeping force implemented elections in 1991, which Sihanouk won and resumed position as president of Cambodia. Then, in 1993, the United States, China, and the United Nations banned aid to the suffering nation. In fact, a United Nations embargo stopped trade from the World Health Organization from moving into Cambodia.

John Pilger says that the “pertinent question is: Will those foreign governments that backed Pol Pot while wringing their hands now help rebuild the country they helped devastate?” Other questions remain too. For example, do nations decide to intervene in an international crisis based on sincerity of imperialistic concern? The United Nations, with the help of the United States, seemed wiling to back the suffering Cambodians when their interests were to play on the rivalries of China and Soviet Union, but what happens after the benefits of the aiding countries run thin. Furthermore, questions about why America would support a criminal like Pol Pot wear on, making the entire issue a diplomatic dispute.    

Last Updated: March 19, 2006