Two Phases of Cambodian "Genocide"
The Times, along with everybody else in the mainstream media, also fails to mention that before Pol Pot came to power in 1975, the United States had devastated Cambodia for the first half of what a Finnish government’s study referred to as a "decade" of genocide (not just the four years of Pol Pot’s rule, 1975-78). The "secret bombing" of Cambodia by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry whose leaders had allied themselves with the foreign terrorists.
The U.S.-imposed holocaust was a "sideshow" to the Vietnam War, the United States bombing Cambodia heavily by 1969, helping organize the overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970, and in collaboration with its puppet Saigon government making period incursions into Cambodia in the 1960s and later. "U.S. B-52s pounded Cambodia for 160 consecutive days
, dropping more than 240,000 short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo, villages (particularly along the Mekong River) and on such troop positions as the guerrillas might maintain," a tonnage that "represents 50 percent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during World War II". This "constant indiscriminate bombing" was of course carried out against a peasant society with no airforce or ground defenses. The
Finnish government study estimates that 600,000 people died in this first phase, with 2 million refugees produced. Michael Vickerey estimated 500,000 killed in phase one.
At the end of the first half of the decade of genocide, with the Khmer Rouge victorious and occupying Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia was a shattered, embittered society, on the verge of mass starvation with crops unsowed and vast numbers of refugees in and around Phnom Penh suddenly cut off from the U.S. aid that had kept them alive. High U.S. officials were estimating a million deaths from starvation before the Khmer Rouge takeover. The Khmer Rouge forced a mass exodus from Phnom Penh, whose population they were in no position to feed, an action interpreted in the West as simply a completely unjustified exercise in vengeance.
There is no question but that the Khmer Rouge were brutal and killed large numbers. Michael Vickerey estimated 150-300,000 executed and an excess of deaths in the four years of Pol Pot rule of 750,000. David Chandler estimates up to 100,000 executions (Newsweek, June 30, 1997). The Finnish study estimated the total deaths in the Pol Pot years at a million, encompassing both executions and deaths from disease, starvation and overwork. Other serious studies of Cambodia yield comparable numbers.
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hermansept97.htm
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