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The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia Holocaust
Examines the work of international relief organizations, such as UNICEF, CARE, the Red Cross, OXFAM, and the World Council of Churches, in Cambodia
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William Shawcross
41 books39 followersWilliam Shawcross is a widely renowned writer and broadcaster.
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July 5, 2021
This review refers to the 1984 Simon and Schuster edition.
This book is a pretty remarkable accomplishment. Shawcross provides us with a detailed, thorough, incisive history of the humanitarian aid operation in Cambodia in the few years immediately after the deposal of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnamese intervention. This is immensely valuable because many accounts of Cambodia’s recent history leave off with the downfall of Democratic Kampuchea, when in fact neither was that event the end of the Khmer Rouge, nor was the Heng Samrin regime a real knight in shining armor. Shawcross’ attention to the 1979-83 period is welcome; it has certainly rounded and expanded my comprehension of post-DK Cambodia.
His account of the preceding period of Cambodian history is pretty brisk, and he occasionally seems to expect a certain level of prior knowledge from his audience, so if you’re interested in reading this book I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the Cambodian Civil War and the Khmer Rouge reign first. (When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker is my recommendation for the best introduction to those events, and Ben Kiernan’s How Pol Pot Came to Power is a very thorough, exacting, sweeping account of the history of Communism in Cambodia and of the internal politics that drove the Khmer Rouge.) But though it’s a pretty concise account, his recap is probably sufficient for understanding the events of the rest of the book.
The Quality of Mercy is also especially valuable because its focus is on the provision of aid, an important undertaking too often glossed over in accounts of tragedy, catastrophe, or atrocity. He provides a really important glimpse into the practical challenges of transportation, stocking, shipping, and distribution, and shows how unscrupulous political actors can undermine these procedures. Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Soviet, US, UK, and UN interests—along with a handful of Cambodian groups—all shaped and subverted the aid program. Shawcross consistently emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of both the situation in Cambodia and the aid program: a discrepancy between what transpired on the Thai border and what happened deeper in the country itself is particularly interesting, and led to some incoherence in how international actors approached the crisis.
One of the main focuses of the later half of the book is the way that international aid spreads beyond its humanitarian mandate and inevitably ends up having political implications in the aid-receiving country. Aid in Phnom Penh ended up stabilizing and legitimating the Heng Samrin regime, while aid at the Thai border ended up feeding and economically benefitting (that is to say: indirectly arming) the Khmer Rouge. Though the ICRC and some UN agencies were bound to only providing help which would not have such political impacts, they were unavoidable. It’s interesting that, in the face of these restrictions, large international agencies somewhat devolved their mission to smaller, private, voluntary groups, who were not bound by the same requirements. The answer to the main moral dilemma here (feeding everyone means feeding soldiers, and feeding soldiers means furthering the conflict) remains opaque to me (I am more than okay with feeding combatants on principle, since they are people too; but that such aid would further the very violence that produced the need for aid is a trickier situation that I feel bad about both ways.) The international agencies for their part decided that it was worth it, and so opted to have voluntary agencies provide that aid, so that the aid could be provided without crossing regulatory requirements. I want to think this was the correct call, because I can’t stomach the idea of choosing not to provide that aid; but since that aid literally fed the continuing violence, I don’t know if it was.
An ironic implication of the book’s title, which Shawcross does not articulate in the text itself but which is certainly apropos: the titular phrase stems from a speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia entreats Shylock to act mercifully towards Antonio. But in the end Shylock doesn’t spare Antonio because he has been persuaded that mercy is beautiful and good: he does so because of a coercive, duplicitous, disingenuous legal manipulation that renders his cruel intent inoperable. Similarly in the events Shawcross chronicles, lyrical moral appeals are weaker than political maneuvering and the implicit threat of violence.
The book often reads drily and slowly, but it’s forgivable because, even when dry or slow, Shawcross still manages to render quite clear all sorts of complicated material, ranging from logistical challenges to currency devaluation to parliamentary procedure. And there are passages that really pop: moments of absolute absurdity abound—the role of an American lawyer as Pol Pot and Ieng Sary’s defense in the Heng Samrin regime’s show trial, the offer of an American charity to send a plane full of lactating mothers to suckle Cambodian orphans, the lavish feasts offered to Western journalists and aid workers—which are at first baffling and amusing, and then afterwards soberingly grim. Other anecdotes are frustrating or infuriating (the galling waste of money, the horrifically callous disregard for human life and wellbeing), and Shawcross renders many of his characters with great color and flair, especially the European aid directors, diplomats, and the warlords who ruled refugee camps on the Thai border.
Shawcross deftly avoids having his history come across as tendentious, but his final chapters do make some judgments and assessments, and it’s hard to come away from reading this book without a changed perception of international aid. None of the principal players make it out of this book unscathed. The UN, especially its wasteful and prideful FAO, comes across particularly badly (the incoherent dance between the General Assembly and the various UN agencies involved is dizzying, and the inefficacy of those agencies is disconcerting). All the agencies involved exhibit credulousness, rashness, inconsiderateness, and unwillingness to admit or even look at their mistakes. Many of the individual diplomats and aid workers, however, can come across as well-intentioned, diligent, frank, and even sometimes quite canny: one of the principal strengths of The Quality of Mercy is that it tracks, in precise practical detail, the ways that earnest individual good intention can end up leading into ineffectual and counterproductive results. Jimmy Carter, still my least least favorite US President, no longer has the same sterling moral reputation that he used to in my mind, but he comes off leagues better than his vile, inhumane successor. Learning that Ben Kiernan and Noam Chomsky, people I tend to admire, both disbelieved early reports of Khmer Rouge atrocity was a reminder not to trust in any one scholar’s instincts or moral compass too implicitly, and a reminder not to be too eager to write lurid rumors off as Western propaganda, both of which I think I needed.
I imagine at least some parts of this book are outdated by now, and so maybe the organizations that Shawcross depicts here have since improved; I’ll restrain myself from writing any of those groups off on the basis of decades-past mismanagement. The UN is, after all, now twice as old as it was at the time of Shawcross’ writing. But the value of this book doesn’t lie in its critique of international aid organizations, but instead in how it parses and clarifies the challenges and contradictions of providing aid. I think this book should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to work or volunteer in aid, development, or relief; understanding the misfires of the past would improve the efficacy of future programs.
But in addition to being a tight, focused history on an under-examined topic, The Quality of Mercy also incorporates a second, somewhat more ambitious thread: it’s also a critical reading of the way the Holocaust has influenced how people talk, think, and behave around more recent crises. This resembles what in the field of classics they would call reception studies. He shows that Holocaust-invoking rhetoric was a tool both for fundraisers seeking to capture the attention of the Western public, and for the Heng Samrin regime, whose invocation of (often imprecise) Nazi analogies helped them paint the Pol Pot era as uniquely evil, which in turn allowed them to retain Khmer Rouge cadre for their own purposes.
The desire among a traumatized and guilty West to avoid a “new Holocaust” motivated impressive financial donation, but it did so only briefly, and in such a way that more mundane evils and tragedies were overlooked, and in such a way that the generous outpouring of aid ends up unfortunately doing little. (A particularly strong insight of Shawcross’ is that, among the people of conscience who involve themselves in international relief, it seems immoral to compare and quantify suffering; this discomfort leads to a lack of triage and analysis, self-criticism, and impulse control; as such it unfortunately reifies the situation in which the most attention-grabbing crisis gets the most aid.) Something that I found particularly interesting was that Shawcross expresses discomfort with the term Holocaust, which originally meant a complete sacrifice, considering it an imprecise translation for the word Shoah used by Jewish communities. I hadn’t ever thought before about when and how the term “Holocaust” gained prevalence, so seeing Shawcross talk about that was valuable and eye-opening.
Part and parcel with this “reception study” are the memoiristic elements that Shawcross incorporates into the book. It opens with a third-hand recollection: how Shawcross as a child had listened to a vinyl record on which was recorded his father’s voice reading an eyewitness account of Holocaust atrocity. Elsewhere Shawcross describes his own experiences of meeting key figures in this history and of seeing the Cambodia of the period first hand. These elements enrich the book’s scope and depth.
I take issue only with a few things about the actual content of the book. First of all, in a book so interested in the shadow that Nazism and the Holocaust cast over present-day international relations and aid, Shawcross certainly describes Kurt Waldheim’s role in these events quite well without ever discussing certain fulsome aspects of Waldheim’s prior biography. My instinct is not to assume that Shawcross was at the time of this writing unaware of Waldheim’s military service for the Nazis: the omission feels to me, therefore, like an act either of craven politeness or of a kind of absolution that Shawcross is unqualified to grant. I’m hesitant to impute such an act to an author whom, on the basis of this one book, I have come to respect and admire, so I will allow that I could just be all hung up on nothing here. But in my reading of The Quality of Mercy, the lack of mention of this particular tidbit—one that would have been relevant to Shawcross’ overall project—seemed to me to compromise Shawcross’ ethos, one of careful attention to historical legacies and of scrupulous critique of international institutions. (Perhaps I’m wrong and this part of Waldheim’s life was not widely known in ’84? Yet even then I would be surprised that Shawcross’ impressive research did not spend time on the background of one of the most powerful individuals in this story.)
More minor (and perhaps I reveal my own biases here?) is that I think, based on the evidence presented in this very book, the Soviet aid program seems to deserve rather more credit than they get. (But of course I yield before Shawcross’ expertise and knowledge here.) And lastly I worry somewhat that a reader of this book’s final few chapters might come away resolved to view all entreaties for humanitarian aid with penny-pinching skepticism and cynical expectation of ulterior political motives. That would be a counterproductive lesson for a reader to take away.
At one time I believed with some fervor that I was destined for humanitarian work; such a life looks less and less likely for me these days. Though that may be the case, I still feel like the moral, logistical, and legal conundrums Shawcross elucidates would be edifying for anyone to chew on. Lessons aside, even, such a careful, insightful history is certainly worth reading and thinking about.
This book is a pretty remarkable accomplishment. Shawcross provides us with a detailed, thorough, incisive history of the humanitarian aid operation in Cambodia in the few years immediately after the deposal of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnamese intervention. This is immensely valuable because many accounts of Cambodia’s recent history leave off with the downfall of Democratic Kampuchea, when in fact neither was that event the end of the Khmer Rouge, nor was the Heng Samrin regime a real knight in shining armor. Shawcross’ attention to the 1979-83 period is welcome; it has certainly rounded and expanded my comprehension of post-DK Cambodia.
His account of the preceding period of Cambodian history is pretty brisk, and he occasionally seems to expect a certain level of prior knowledge from his audience, so if you’re interested in reading this book I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the Cambodian Civil War and the Khmer Rouge reign first. (When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker is my recommendation for the best introduction to those events, and Ben Kiernan’s How Pol Pot Came to Power is a very thorough, exacting, sweeping account of the history of Communism in Cambodia and of the internal politics that drove the Khmer Rouge.) But though it’s a pretty concise account, his recap is probably sufficient for understanding the events of the rest of the book.
The Quality of Mercy is also especially valuable because its focus is on the provision of aid, an important undertaking too often glossed over in accounts of tragedy, catastrophe, or atrocity. He provides a really important glimpse into the practical challenges of transportation, stocking, shipping, and distribution, and shows how unscrupulous political actors can undermine these procedures. Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Soviet, US, UK, and UN interests—along with a handful of Cambodian groups—all shaped and subverted the aid program. Shawcross consistently emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of both the situation in Cambodia and the aid program: a discrepancy between what transpired on the Thai border and what happened deeper in the country itself is particularly interesting, and led to some incoherence in how international actors approached the crisis.
One of the main focuses of the later half of the book is the way that international aid spreads beyond its humanitarian mandate and inevitably ends up having political implications in the aid-receiving country. Aid in Phnom Penh ended up stabilizing and legitimating the Heng Samrin regime, while aid at the Thai border ended up feeding and economically benefitting (that is to say: indirectly arming) the Khmer Rouge. Though the ICRC and some UN agencies were bound to only providing help which would not have such political impacts, they were unavoidable. It’s interesting that, in the face of these restrictions, large international agencies somewhat devolved their mission to smaller, private, voluntary groups, who were not bound by the same requirements. The answer to the main moral dilemma here (feeding everyone means feeding soldiers, and feeding soldiers means furthering the conflict) remains opaque to me (I am more than okay with feeding combatants on principle, since they are people too; but that such aid would further the very violence that produced the need for aid is a trickier situation that I feel bad about both ways.) The international agencies for their part decided that it was worth it, and so opted to have voluntary agencies provide that aid, so that the aid could be provided without crossing regulatory requirements. I want to think this was the correct call, because I can’t stomach the idea of choosing not to provide that aid; but since that aid literally fed the continuing violence, I don’t know if it was.
An ironic implication of the book’s title, which Shawcross does not articulate in the text itself but which is certainly apropos: the titular phrase stems from a speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia entreats Shylock to act mercifully towards Antonio. But in the end Shylock doesn’t spare Antonio because he has been persuaded that mercy is beautiful and good: he does so because of a coercive, duplicitous, disingenuous legal manipulation that renders his cruel intent inoperable. Similarly in the events Shawcross chronicles, lyrical moral appeals are weaker than political maneuvering and the implicit threat of violence.
The book often reads drily and slowly, but it’s forgivable because, even when dry or slow, Shawcross still manages to render quite clear all sorts of complicated material, ranging from logistical challenges to currency devaluation to parliamentary procedure. And there are passages that really pop: moments of absolute absurdity abound—the role of an American lawyer as Pol Pot and Ieng Sary’s defense in the Heng Samrin regime’s show trial, the offer of an American charity to send a plane full of lactating mothers to suckle Cambodian orphans, the lavish feasts offered to Western journalists and aid workers—which are at first baffling and amusing, and then afterwards soberingly grim. Other anecdotes are frustrating or infuriating (the galling waste of money, the horrifically callous disregard for human life and wellbeing), and Shawcross renders many of his characters with great color and flair, especially the European aid directors, diplomats, and the warlords who ruled refugee camps on the Thai border.
Shawcross deftly avoids having his history come across as tendentious, but his final chapters do make some judgments and assessments, and it’s hard to come away from reading this book without a changed perception of international aid. None of the principal players make it out of this book unscathed. The UN, especially its wasteful and prideful FAO, comes across particularly badly (the incoherent dance between the General Assembly and the various UN agencies involved is dizzying, and the inefficacy of those agencies is disconcerting). All the agencies involved exhibit credulousness, rashness, inconsiderateness, and unwillingness to admit or even look at their mistakes. Many of the individual diplomats and aid workers, however, can come across as well-intentioned, diligent, frank, and even sometimes quite canny: one of the principal strengths of The Quality of Mercy is that it tracks, in precise practical detail, the ways that earnest individual good intention can end up leading into ineffectual and counterproductive results. Jimmy Carter, still my least least favorite US President, no longer has the same sterling moral reputation that he used to in my mind, but he comes off leagues better than his vile, inhumane successor. Learning that Ben Kiernan and Noam Chomsky, people I tend to admire, both disbelieved early reports of Khmer Rouge atrocity was a reminder not to trust in any one scholar’s instincts or moral compass too implicitly, and a reminder not to be too eager to write lurid rumors off as Western propaganda, both of which I think I needed.
I imagine at least some parts of this book are outdated by now, and so maybe the organizations that Shawcross depicts here have since improved; I’ll restrain myself from writing any of those groups off on the basis of decades-past mismanagement. The UN is, after all, now twice as old as it was at the time of Shawcross’ writing. But the value of this book doesn’t lie in its critique of international aid organizations, but instead in how it parses and clarifies the challenges and contradictions of providing aid. I think this book should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to work or volunteer in aid, development, or relief; understanding the misfires of the past would improve the efficacy of future programs.
But in addition to being a tight, focused history on an under-examined topic, The Quality of Mercy also incorporates a second, somewhat more ambitious thread: it’s also a critical reading of the way the Holocaust has influenced how people talk, think, and behave around more recent crises. This resembles what in the field of classics they would call reception studies. He shows that Holocaust-invoking rhetoric was a tool both for fundraisers seeking to capture the attention of the Western public, and for the Heng Samrin regime, whose invocation of (often imprecise) Nazi analogies helped them paint the Pol Pot era as uniquely evil, which in turn allowed them to retain Khmer Rouge cadre for their own purposes.
The desire among a traumatized and guilty West to avoid a “new Holocaust” motivated impressive financial donation, but it did so only briefly, and in such a way that more mundane evils and tragedies were overlooked, and in such a way that the generous outpouring of aid ends up unfortunately doing little. (A particularly strong insight of Shawcross’ is that, among the people of conscience who involve themselves in international relief, it seems immoral to compare and quantify suffering; this discomfort leads to a lack of triage and analysis, self-criticism, and impulse control; as such it unfortunately reifies the situation in which the most attention-grabbing crisis gets the most aid.) Something that I found particularly interesting was that Shawcross expresses discomfort with the term Holocaust, which originally meant a complete sacrifice, considering it an imprecise translation for the word Shoah used by Jewish communities. I hadn’t ever thought before about when and how the term “Holocaust” gained prevalence, so seeing Shawcross talk about that was valuable and eye-opening.
Part and parcel with this “reception study” are the memoiristic elements that Shawcross incorporates into the book. It opens with a third-hand recollection: how Shawcross as a child had listened to a vinyl record on which was recorded his father’s voice reading an eyewitness account of Holocaust atrocity. Elsewhere Shawcross describes his own experiences of meeting key figures in this history and of seeing the Cambodia of the period first hand. These elements enrich the book’s scope and depth.
I take issue only with a few things about the actual content of the book. First of all, in a book so interested in the shadow that Nazism and the Holocaust cast over present-day international relations and aid, Shawcross certainly describes Kurt Waldheim’s role in these events quite well without ever discussing certain fulsome aspects of Waldheim’s prior biography. My instinct is not to assume that Shawcross was at the time of this writing unaware of Waldheim’s military service for the Nazis: the omission feels to me, therefore, like an act either of craven politeness or of a kind of absolution that Shawcross is unqualified to grant. I’m hesitant to impute such an act to an author whom, on the basis of this one book, I have come to respect and admire, so I will allow that I could just be all hung up on nothing here. But in my reading of The Quality of Mercy, the lack of mention of this particular tidbit—one that would have been relevant to Shawcross’ overall project—seemed to me to compromise Shawcross’ ethos, one of careful attention to historical legacies and of scrupulous critique of international institutions. (Perhaps I’m wrong and this part of Waldheim’s life was not widely known in ’84? Yet even then I would be surprised that Shawcross’ impressive research did not spend time on the background of one of the most powerful individuals in this story.)
More minor (and perhaps I reveal my own biases here?) is that I think, based on the evidence presented in this very book, the Soviet aid program seems to deserve rather more credit than they get. (But of course I yield before Shawcross’ expertise and knowledge here.) And lastly I worry somewhat that a reader of this book’s final few chapters might come away resolved to view all entreaties for humanitarian aid with penny-pinching skepticism and cynical expectation of ulterior political motives. That would be a counterproductive lesson for a reader to take away.
At one time I believed with some fervor that I was destined for humanitarian work; such a life looks less and less likely for me these days. Though that may be the case, I still feel like the moral, logistical, and legal conundrums Shawcross elucidates would be edifying for anyone to chew on. Lessons aside, even, such a careful, insightful history is certainly worth reading and thinking about.
June 9, 2011
Covers in exhaustive detail the international aid mission to prevent famine (1979 to 1983) following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This only gets three stars instead of four because it's too detailed for the casual reader (me), so I can't really recommend it to everyone.
Interesting that Deng Xiaoping coaches the Khmer Rouge leadership in how to appeal to the Western organisations by using an urbane, Western-educated spokesperson, just as the Chinese did with Zhou Enlai.
I have wondered why the Khmer Rouge carried out genocide in the first place... To this there is no real answer, but at one point late on in the book he says "Wartime brutality, Marxist fanaticism, obsessive and threatened nationalism - these seemed to be three of the principal elements that had contributed to their totalitarianism... I was disturbed not by the banality of evil but by the intellectual pretensions behind it."
Oxfam comes out pretty badly, but it seems to be the point that they transformed from a British NGO to an international aid organisation, ditching the self-serving behaviour (just a guess).
The first time I read about Cambodia was in a John Pilger book. Shawcross gives him one paragraph, saying he was late in reporting the Cambodia crisis and portraying him as opportunistic. But that overall he contributed to greatly raising awareness of the situation in the UK, which helped get aid.
Interesting that Deng Xiaoping coaches the Khmer Rouge leadership in how to appeal to the Western organisations by using an urbane, Western-educated spokesperson, just as the Chinese did with Zhou Enlai.
I have wondered why the Khmer Rouge carried out genocide in the first place... To this there is no real answer, but at one point late on in the book he says "Wartime brutality, Marxist fanaticism, obsessive and threatened nationalism - these seemed to be three of the principal elements that had contributed to their totalitarianism... I was disturbed not by the banality of evil but by the intellectual pretensions behind it."
Oxfam comes out pretty badly, but it seems to be the point that they transformed from a British NGO to an international aid organisation, ditching the self-serving behaviour (just a guess).
The first time I read about Cambodia was in a John Pilger book. Shawcross gives him one paragraph, saying he was late in reporting the Cambodia crisis and portraying him as opportunistic. But that overall he contributed to greatly raising awareness of the situation in the UK, which helped get aid.
July 15, 2013
The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
With this wonderfully worded Shakespeare poem begins The Quality of Mercy by William Shawcross, an journalist, scholar and intrepid researcher I have come to deeply respect over the course of reading two of his book on Cambodia (the first was Sideshow). I expected TQoM to be about the state of Cambodia during the years the Khmer Rouge was in power, 1975 through roughly 1979 but it is not. In this follow up to Sideshow, which deals chiefly with the impact of American war policy on Cambodia, Mr. Shawcross focuses on the politics of relief. Thick with footnotes, the book dives deep into the international community's response to the Cambodian food crisis in 1979. Mr. Shawcross adequately exposes the consequences of so many different political entities and relief organizations working towards supposedly common goals hampered by their own prejudices, principles and political considerations. The book reminded me a bit of Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo. Because of the depth of its research, the book does sometimes read as an Appendix to itself, and would have suffered much more at the hands of a lesser writer. Nevertheless, this is an important historical document. A reading will inspire some introspection and a lot of uncomfortable contemplation. Recommended.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
With this wonderfully worded Shakespeare poem begins The Quality of Mercy by William Shawcross, an journalist, scholar and intrepid researcher I have come to deeply respect over the course of reading two of his book on Cambodia (the first was Sideshow). I expected TQoM to be about the state of Cambodia during the years the Khmer Rouge was in power, 1975 through roughly 1979 but it is not. In this follow up to Sideshow, which deals chiefly with the impact of American war policy on Cambodia, Mr. Shawcross focuses on the politics of relief. Thick with footnotes, the book dives deep into the international community's response to the Cambodian food crisis in 1979. Mr. Shawcross adequately exposes the consequences of so many different political entities and relief organizations working towards supposedly common goals hampered by their own prejudices, principles and political considerations. The book reminded me a bit of Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo. Because of the depth of its research, the book does sometimes read as an Appendix to itself, and would have suffered much more at the hands of a lesser writer. Nevertheless, this is an important historical document. A reading will inspire some introspection and a lot of uncomfortable contemplation. Recommended.
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