Letters
Inauspicious Pilger
Sir: In his review of William Shawcross's book The Quality of Mercy (Books, 29 September), Richard West quotes the author as saying I visited Cambodia in 1979 'under the auspices of Vietnam Televi- sion'. I did not visit Cambodia under the auspices of Vietnam Television or under any other auspices; I went there in the way Shawcross did: via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Phnom Penh. The only contact I had with Vietnam Television was to arrange transport for my film crew's equip- ment on a purely commercial basis; other foreign TV crews do exactly the same.
In Cambodia we went everywhere we wanted to and spoke to everybody we wanted to. The same freedom applied the following year when we were accompanied by a senior Oxfam official who later wrote in his report:
It was made clear by Pilger that they wished to film where they liked on the aid program-. mes and the general situation, and they would not work to a pre-planned schedule . . . and they would decide daily what to film and where. This arrangement was partly. . to avoid 'set pieces' by the authorities.
West quotes Shawcross as saying that 'a rather interesting quality' of my articles was that I compared Khmer Rouge atroci- ties with those of Nazism and not of communism. This fits snugly with Shaw- cross's apparent theory that Vietnamese propaganda invented the analogy of Pol Pot with Hitler and that pliant foreigners fell foul of it.
The rather more 'interesting quality' of this example of Shawcross selectivity is that in the Daily Mirror article he quotes I, in fact, compared the Khmer Rouge with 'Hitler's demonry' and 'Stalin's terror'. The irony here is also 'rather interesting', isn't it? Omission of truth was a Stalinist Speciality.
John Pilger
57 Hambalt Road, London SW4
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