A Mighty Purpose Read Online Free PDF Page A

Norodom Sihanouk in March 1970. The coup—followed shortly thereafter by a US ground invasion of Cambodia in April that was ordered by President Nixon to flush out the North Vietnamese—drew neutral Cambodia further into the Vietnam War. Sihanouk responded by lending his legitimacy to the ragtag Khmer Rouge rebels, who were then allied with the North Vietnamese. All of these developments strengthened Pol Pot’s forces and helped them to defeat Lon Nol in 1975. The worst, of course, was yet to come.
    China was Pol Pot’s biggest and most loyal sponsor, while the Soviets threw their weight behind Vietnam. Following the genocide and overthrow of the murderous regime in 1979, the Vietnamese apparatus in Cambodia emerged as a patently corrupt puppet state that included several Khmer Rouge defectors. Its primary agenda was its own political survival, not the well-being of millions of suffering Cambodians. Even so, it was obviously better than what it had replaced. Thailand also aided Pol Pot and treated the refugees with violent disdain; in one appalling incident, Thai soldiers forced 42,000 Cambodians over a steep mountainside at gun point, and as many as several thousand perished in the heavily land-mined terrain below. Vietnam, in turn, was angry that Thailand was allowing the Khmer Rouge to operate from its territory and purposefully hindered the delivery of relief.
    As a result of these schisms, the humanitarian response split into two different aid operations: one inside Cambodia (allied with Vietnam and the Soviets) and one on the border (allied with Thailand, China, and the West). UNICEF and the ICRC worked on both sides, in a gloomy, disorienting fog of suspicion and mistrust. It was in the midst of this bloody diplomatic briar patch that Jim Grant found himself.
    Southeast Asia was not new to him. From 1967 to 1969, Grant had served as the USAID assistant administrator for Vietnam, helping to run “the other war”—nation building. This included the American “pacification” program, a campaign to win Vietnamese hearts and minds. In January 1969, Grant wrote a sanguine memo entitled “Vietnam—Progress Despite the War,” proclaiming that the notoriously corrupt South Vietnamese government “is more effective and has more popular support than any government since the 1950s.” The memo also stated that “the buildup of American troops saved the day,” but added that it had also caused inflationary pressures and economic disruptions. He would later rarely speak publicly of his time in Vietnam, but would tell his close friend and UNICEF colleague Dr. Jon Rohde that sending men into harm’s way had haunted him. Now, in Cambodia, the fallout from America’s involvement in Vietnam cropped up as a boulder-sized obstacle in his path.
    Grant’s predecessor, Henry Labouisse, had already worked assiduously (along with the ICRC) to appease all sides in order to start delivering aid. The negotiating skills of UNICEF’s intrepid envoy Jacques Beaumont had proved particularlycritical in securing the grudging cooperation of the Vietnam-backed government.
    But in early 1980, conditions remained acutely precarious, as the threat of famine grimly stalked those on both sides of the border. The Khmer Rouge used the camps to consolidate their power, and Vietnamese forces attacked their positions. The concussive sound of shelling was constant. Other armed groups sprouted among the refugees and started to steal aid and sell it for monetary gain.
    Keeping the border operation from dissolving into outright mayhem was the job of a stocky, young, indefatigable Swedish man named Ulf Kristoffersson, who had been dispatched to the area by UNICEF in 1979 (he had worked for UNICEF in Phnom Penh in the early 1970s, before the Khmer Rouge had taken over). The challenge he had faced was stupefying. “People just came across the border and died,” he says. “You didn’t even know where to start.”
    The resourceful Swede became