A Mighty Purpose Read Online Free PDF Page B

a point to praise everyone. He thanked Thailand for hosting the refugees, commended the Russians for their support of efforts inside Cambodia, and extolled a decision by the Vietnam-backed government to allow peasants to keep rice they had grown.
    As of mid-February, it looked as though they had won a reprieve from further devastation. “Disaster has been averted,” Grant told the UNICEF executive board on February 14. He also noted that the Cambodia effort had drained UNICEF’s resources and had taken up “well over a third of my own time.” This concern would nibble, and then gnaw, at him over the next year, especially as new emergencies proliferated in Africa.
    New famine fears in Cambodia unfurled in March, after harvest failures, and the case for even more money had to be made. In
The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience
—a detailed and critical look at the relief effort—William Shawcross contends that the threat of famine had earlier (in 1979) been “overestimated” by the Vietnamese government and others. Grant may have himself overstated the severity of the situation when he warned in March, according to the
New York Times
, that Cambodia was facing “the equivalent of a Holocaust.” A master of messaging, Grant would not hesitate to use hyperbole (though, as Shawcross points out, the Holocaust analogy was used by many “with as much imprecision as passion”). Exaggeration or not, Cambodians were stillbadly malnourished—as Ulf Kristoffersson saw firsthand, day in and day out. And Grant had to spark attention, especially as the world’s gaze drifted to other news: the Iran hostage crisis, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador, and, not least, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
    Cold War bias ultimately skewed the relief effort disproportionately toward the border operation. Shawcross notes the “obvious preference” of Western donors to fund relief inside Thailand and cites funding estimates indicating that as much as eight times more was spent on each refugee on the border compared to what was spent on Cambodians inside Cambodia (though he cautions that these figures “are at best imprecise, at worst tendentious”). Kristoffersson and others were able to minimize the stark Cold War aid disparity by supporting an unofficial relief system known as the “land bridge” that funneled aid from Thailand into Cambodia and that may have made a crucial difference. Cambodians would cross the Thai border, get food and rice seed from UNICEF and the World Food Program, and bring the supplies back into Cambodia via oxcart. “Jim was convinced that [the land bridge] saved Cambodia,” says Kristoffersson.
    Grant had always believed that the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) should be running the border camps. After Thailand announced an “open door” policy in January 1979, welcoming Cambodian refugees across its border, the UN refugee agency was allowed to set up officially sanctioned refugee “holding centers” inside Thailand proper. But after a scant three months, Thailand reversed course and abruptly shut its border and announced that the holding centerswere now closed to new arrivals. The refugees kept coming, with nowhere to go. The UNHCR washed its hands of the growing crisis at the border. UNICEF and the Red Cross were left holding the bag—and that included the morally vexing question of what to do about the Khmer Rouge.
    Kristoffersson was rattled after his first encounter with Pol Pot’s henchmen. “It’s very difficult to explain the turbulence that you went on emotionally when you drove back from meeting with these bastards,” he says. “They’re standing there, smiling at you, and you knew what [crimes] they had committed. It was horrible.”
    The nauseating prospect of “feeding the butchers” tormented many at UNICEF.
    The United States and China had a vested interest in keeping the killers well fed: they wanted to