Living pictures of Kampuchea

Press, 21 November 1979, Page 17

Living pictures of Kampuchea

John Pilger s report on Kampuchea, shown on Television One s "Dateline Monday” was one of those occa- ions when television justifies its existence as a means by which journalism can be carried on. No newspaper or radio report could show us the flies on the faces of the dying chidren: no debate in the correspondence columns of ' newspaper

By

A. K. GRANT

could be conducted on the Basis of a denial of the existence of the bones in the trench or the photographs of the murdered at Pol Pot’s extermination damp. • It is, of course, perfectly’ possible, while not denying the existence of tpese things, to act as though their existence doesn't matter: hence the Sipport given by ourselves and other Western Governments to Pol Pot in tjie United Nations. » But. at least television imports like Pilger’s make qs face the meaning of ’ihat our Government yes, or what we do by lotting the Kampuchean refugees conveniently die iti the mud. After all, nobody can blame you for not giving money for food fbr dead refugees, can they? • Pilger sought to lay the blame for the rise of the

Khmer Rouge at me teet of Nixon and Kissinger and their initially secret bombardment of Cambodia. This is a pity, because it will enable those who wish to evade the realities presented by the progiamme to do so by attacking this premise. The point, of course, is that it doesn’t matter a damn who caused the rise of the Khmer Rouge; what

matters is what they did and its consequences. In showing these consequencies the programme was brilliantly effective. The shot of the enormous, deserted Phnom Penh boulevard, with a child skipping along it; the shot of the child, moaning and dying on the ramshackle bed, and the same bed, empty, the next day; the indignation, despair and nobility on the faces of the doctors in the camps, whose efforts, in the absence of medicines and food, are a bit like pointing an electric fan at a hurricane: the terrifying interviews with the blankeyed. living-dead Khmer Rouge executioners: all these establish images of the enormity of what has happened in the face of indifference, or as the U.N. vote for Pol Pot shows, with our active support.

Pilger’s report was biased and one-sided from time to time; for example, he praised the Vietnamese for giving some of their own food supplies to Kampuchea and did not mentioned that the Viet-namese-installed regime initially created difficulties about allowing aid from the West into Kampuchea. Not that very much aid was being offered, anyway; in the West we reserve the really massive dollops of aid for victims of things we can understand. like earthquakes. If the Kampucheans had only had the good fortune to be devastated by a really gigantic earthquake, instead of falling prey to murderous political lunatics, by now they would have aid running out of what was left of their ears. But in any event, bias is irrelevant in the face of the facts conveyed by this programme. To argue otherwise would be equivalent to condemning the newsreels released just after the war showing the corpses at Belsen being bulldozed into mass graves, on the grounds that they did not fairly present the opposite point of view.