This week Cambodia marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the murderous Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam celebrates the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975.

They are being commemorated very differently; after all, there’s nothing to celebrate in Cambodia. Its capital Phnom Penh was emptied, and its people had to then endure the “killing fields” and the darkest years of its modern existence under Khmer Rouge rule.

Over the border in Vietnam, however, there will be modest celebrations for their victory against US (and Australian) forces at the end of this month.

• READ MORE: Other West Papua liberation reports

Yet, this week’s news of Indonesia considering a Russian request to base aircraft at the Biak airbase in West Papua throws in stark relief a troubling question I have long asked — did Australia back the wrong war 63 years ago? These different areas — and histories — of Southeast Asia may seem disconnected, but allow me to draw some links.

Through the 1950s until the early 1960s, it was official Australian policy under the Menzies government to support The Netherlands as it prepared West Papua for independence, knowing its people were ethnically and religiously different from the rest of Indonesia.

They are a Christian Melanesian people who look east to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific, not west to Muslim Asia. Australia at the time was administering and beginning to prepare PNG for self-rule.

The Second World War had shown the importance of West Papua (then part of Dutch New Guinea) to Australian security, as it had been a base for Japanese air raids over northern Australia.

Japanese beeline to Sorong
Early in the war, Japanese forces made a beeline to Sorong on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of West Papua for its abundance of high-quality oil. Former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam served in a RAAF unit briefly stationed in Merauke in West Papua.

By 1962, the US wanted Indonesia to annex West Papua as a way of splitting Chinese and Russian influence in the region, as well as getting at the biggest gold deposit on earth at the Grasberg mine, something which US company Freeport continues to mine, controversially, today.

Following the so-called Bunker Agreement signed in New York in 1962, The Netherlands reluctantly agreed to relinquish West Papua to Indonesia under US pressure. Australia, too, folded in line with US interests.

That would also be the year when Australia sent its first group of 30 military advisers to Vietnam. Instead of backing West Papuan nationhood, Australia joined the US in suppressing Vietnam’s.

As a result of US arm-twisting, Australia ceded its own strategic interests in allowing Indonesia to expand eastwards into Pacific territories by swallowing West Papua. Instead, Australians trooped off to fight the unwinnable wars of Indochina.

To me, it remains one of the great what-ifs of Australian strategic history — if Australia had held the line with the Dutch against US moves, then West Papua today would be free, the East Timor invasion of 1975 was unlikely to have ever happened and Australia might not have been dragged into the Vietnam War.

Instead, as Cambodia and Vietnam mark their anniversaries this month, Australia continues to be reminded of the potential threat Indonesian-controlled West Papua has posed to Australia and the Pacific since it gave way to US interests in 1962.

Russian space agency plans
Nor is this the first time Russia has deployed assets to West Papua. Last year, Russian media reported plans under way for the Russian space agency Roscosmos to help Indonesia build a space base on Biak island.

In 2017, RAAF Tindal was scrambled just before Christmas to monitor Russian Tu95 nuclear “Bear” bombers doing their first-ever sorties in the South Pacific, flying between Australia and Papua New Guinea. I wrote not long afterwards how Australia was becoming “caught in a pincer” between Indonesian and Russian interests on Indonesia’s side and Chinese moves coming through the Pacific on the other.

All because we have abandoned the West Papuans to endure their own “slow-motion genocide” under Indonesian rule. Church groups and NGOs estimate up to 500,000 Papuans have perished under 60 years of Indonesian military rule, while Jakarta refuses to allow international media and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit.

Alex Sobel, an MP in the UK Parliament, last week called on Indonesia to allow the UN High Commissioner to visit but it is exceedingly rare to hear any Australian MPs ask questions about our neighbour West Papua in the Australian Parliament.

Canberra continues to enhance security relations with Indonesia in a naive belief that the nation is our ally against an assertive China. This ignores Jakarta’s deepening relations with both Russia and China, and avoids any mention of ongoing atrocities in West Papua or the fact that jihadi groups are operating close to Australia’s border.

Indonesia’s militarisation of West Papua, jihadi infiltration and now the potential for Russia to use airbases or space bases on Biak should all be “red lines” for Australia, yet successive governments remain desperate not to criticise Indonesia.

Ignoring actual ‘hot war’
Australia’s national security establishment remains focused on grand global strategy and acquiring over-priced gear, while ignoring the only actual “hot war” in our region.

Our geography has not changed; the most important line of defence for Australia remains the islands of Melanesia to our north and the co-operation and friendship of its peoples.

Strong independence movements in West Papua, Bougainville and New Caledonia all materially affect Australian security but Canberra can always be relied on to defer to Indonesian, American and French interests in these places, rather than what is ultimately in Australian — and Pacific Islander — interests.

Australia needs to develop a defence policy centred on a “Melanesia First” strategy from Timor to Fiji, radiating outwards. Yet Australia keeps deferring to external interests, to our cost, as history continues to remind us.

Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist and policy analyst who has reported across Asia and the Pacific for the past 36 years. His website is benbohane.com  This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The Maoist regime controlled all aspects of life in Cambodia, including who you married. She was paired up with Lep Plong, 19. Villager leaders marked the occasion with a rare extravagance – they slaughtered a pig.

(Nuon Mayouro via RFA Khmer)

Fifty years ago this week, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, turning the country into a vast agrarian labor camp, with tragic results. A quarter of the population died in just three-and-a-half years.

Anyone deemed an enemy of the government was executed.

And when it came to relationships, the state was also in charge. The government separated families and segregated the population according to age and gender.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to wed in joyless ceremonies where the only vows were allegiance to the organization or Angkar, as the Khmer Rouge was known.

Weddings were mass production numbers, with multiple couples, all who had to pledge to produce children for Angkar.

At least in Nuon Mayourom’s case, she knew the groom, Lep Plong, who had been chosen for her. But the timing was definitely not of her choosing.

“Yes, I liked him, and he liked me. I thought he looked like a good person. But I argued with the organization because I wasn’t ready to get married. The organization said, ‘Comrade, you have to marry!’”

Nuon Mayoroum recounted to RFA the details of her wedding. In a time of mass starvation and communal living, there were benefits.

“They slaughtered a pig for us. After the marriage, we moved into a separated hut from others,” she said.

But after three days they were separated once more. Months later they successfully argued to be reunited.

Strangers picking strangers

Dr. Theresa de Langis. director for the Southeast Asian studies at the American University in Phnom Penh, has conducted extensive interviews with Khmer Rouge survivors about forced marriages.

She says while there had been arranged marriages in Cambodia previously, there were a number of very distinct differences under the Maoist regime.

“First, it was strangers picking strangers, generally unknown to each other. Second, the parents were ostracized by the Khmer Rouge. The women I interviewed told me that one of the things they worried about the most at the time was that my parents must have been angry because I had accepted the marriage proposal without their knowledge or consultation. And third, there is evidence that you cannot refuse these marriage proposals,” she said.

(RFA Khmer)

When Khieu Samphan, who was head of state under the Khmer Rouge, was sentenced by a special U.N. backed tribunal in Cambodia in December 2022, among the crimes he was convicted for was imposing forced marriages on people. Also charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, he received two life sentences, and remains in prison, aged 93.

De Langis said those who were forced into marriages had often registered their dissatisfaction at the time but were compelled to obey.

“About 70% of the people we interviewed told us that they had refused at least once, but in the end, 97% were forced into marriage because if you continued to refuse to marry, you would be taken to the organization for re-education,” de Langis said.

In Cambodia, ‘re-education’ was associated with punishment, detainment and death.

‘Until today, we were one’

It’s not known how many people were forced to marry, but researchers estimate it could be between 250,000 and 500,000.

“This happened all over the country, so it was a national policy at the time, and many, many people were victims of this crime,” de Langis said.

(Nuon Mayouro via RFA Khmer)

While Nuon Mayourom married against her will at the time, she and her husband Lep Plong survived life under the Khmer Rouge and made a life together.

They eventually moved to the United States as refugees, bringing their two children – a son, Lola Plong, born in Cambodia, and a daughter, Chenda Plong, born in Thailand.

Lep Plong died in 2010.

“To be honest, he loved me from the beginning. He saw me and loved me. When anyone wanted to propose, he would say, ‘Don’t ask, she already has a fiancé’”.

Did she love him?

“Yes, until today, we were one, one,” Nuon Mayoroum said.

Edited by Mat Pennington

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Sok Ry Sum and Ginny Stein for RFA.

In 1975, as the Khmer Rouge fanned out across the country, decimating their rivals and forcing people in their millions out of cities into the countryside, Sarann Nuon was busy being born.

The maternity ward at Battambang’s Friendship Hospital was suddenly plunged into darkness. The Khmer Rouge had entered the northwestern city, announcing their arrival by taking out the power. Sarann came into this world by torchlight.

“I was born the very day. April 17th, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge invaded,” she said. “My family would say I’m a true Pol Pot baby.”

“Outside, the Khmer Rouge were shooting the lights out. Somehow, I was born as the electricity was going in and out and chaos was happening all around the country.”

Not long after they arrived in the city, the Khmer Rouge entered the hospital and ordered everyone out into the countryside “to be with Angkar,” as the nameless, faceless regime would quickly come to be known.

Overnight, loyalty to Angkar replaced all other forms – to parents, to family, to village or community, and even to religion.

People deemed disloyal to Angkar were to be “smashed,” a Khmer Rouge term for weeding out and murdering those deemed disloyal. Over the next four years, millions would die.

‘Always hungry’

For Sarann, her mother and her family, the two days’ grace they had before being forced out of the hospital and into the countryside gave her mother a moment to recover and a fighting chance at survival for both of them.

“We were lucky, we had a family, who knew someone with a tractor, and they put me and my mother on that, and then all the other villagers just walked and walked,” Sarann said. “And being conceived before the war, I was born a very fat baby.”

Her nickname is “Map,” which translates to “fat.”

“My grandmother, aunts and uncles still call me ‘Map’ to this day,” she said. “My brother who was born at the end of the war wasn’t so fortunate. He was so malnourished, so skinny.”

(Courtesy of Sarann Nuon)

Sarann has few memories of that time. The strongest memories are second-hand from what she gleaned from others.

“I just heard that I played in the dirt, and nobody was watching me, and I was just a dirty, fat baby. That’s my history. Always hungry,’ she said.

Her first real memory of Cambodia, which she claims as her own, is when her family decided to flee.

“My great-grandmother was dressing me, and I asked her where we were going. And the sarong she dressed me in had a gold necklace in the seam of the sarong. And I remember that so clearly,” she said.

“And I remember asking her if she was coming with us, and she said no.”

‘If he was alive, we had no idea’

Sarann’s grandfather, who was heavily involved in local politics, had escaped Cambodia shortly after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975.

It took him two months to walk his way out of the country, staying out of sight and avoiding the Khmer Rouge, but he made it first to Thailand and then to the United States and avoided what was to come.

Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, city residents, leaders of the old government and thousands of low-level soldiers, police officers and civil servants were murdered by the Khmer Rouge.

Bodies were dumped in mass graves in rural areas across the country, earning them the name of the “Killing Fields.”

(Chor Sokunthea/Reuters)

Within days, the country became a closed-off nation for people inside and outside.

“If he was alive, we had no idea, and he had no idea whether we were alive. Not until the war ended when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and the refugee camps started to open,” Sarann said.

From America, where he had been granted asylum, Sarann’s grandfather never gave up hope through the dark years that his family would survive and be reunited.

After the regime was felled in 1979, her grandfather sent photos and a letter with a friend from Virginia who returned to Asia to work in one of the camps. Her grandfather hoped that his family would eventually get the message that he was still alive, and that he could sponsor them to join him in the United States.

Fled by bicycle and by foot

And so in 1980, 5-year-old Sarann, suddenly found herself being dressed in a sarong by her great-grandmother. A sarong in which a gold chain, the sum of the family’s wealth, was sewn into its hem.

“And then, just running, running, running and running. My uncle would carry me on his back, and my mother had my baby brother, who was a year and a half old,” she said.

They had travelled by bicycle and by foot from village to village until they got close to the border.

“With the gold, we exchanged it to hire a guide who knows how to get to the Thai border safely, to cross without the Khmer Rouge finding you and the Thai soldiers trying to shoot you, to kill you, and then the landmines.”

(DC-CAM)

Their final push to freedom was made at night, a short journey that took more than five hours. She remembers being separated from her mother and brother at one point, as he started to cry and the group split up in case the noise of a baby crying gave them all away.

Together with her mother, brother, aunt, uncle and their two children, they eventually made it to safety inside the Khao-I-Dang border refugee camp. And from there, with her grandfather as a direct sponsor, they were among the first granted political asylum in the United States.

“We all know that our history kind of defines us,” Sarann said.

“I consider myself a child of war. The generation that is around me, my peers,” she said. “We had so much potential to make the country better, too, and it was all shattered.”

Edited by Matt Reed

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Ginny Stein for RFA.

“It was so hot, burning,” he recalled. “And the walk – I was crying so much because we were so confused.”

Between 1975 and 1979, between 1.5 million and 2 million Cambodians died by execution, forced labor and famine, including his parents.

“I struggled so hard,” Sok Ry said. “I almost died so many times, but I refused to die.”

Read Sok Ry’s and the other RFA staffers' stories of survival here.

The Photo of the Week showcases a compelling image from the past seven days.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Paul Nelson for RFA.

Under the leadership of a man known as Brother Number One, or Pol Pot, a systematic campaign of persecution, killing and starvation began within hours of his troops claiming Phnom Penh on the morning of April 17, 1975.

Under Pol Pot’s rule, the goal was absolute.

Citizens had no rights. The nation’s past would be erased to create a new future. Parents were separated from their children, and everyone was forced to pledge allegiance to Angka, as the organization headed by Pol Pot was known.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Ginny Stein.

Those who “deny, trivialize, reject or dispute the authenticity of crimes” committed during the regime’s rule face between one and five years in prison and fines from 10 million riel (US$2,480) to 50 million riel (US$12,420) under the law, which the king signed on March 1.

The Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million people from starvation, overwork or mass executions between 1975 and 1979.

The law was requested last year by Hun Sen, the former prime minister who handed power to his son in 2023. It replaces a 2013 law that more narrowly focused on denial of Khmer Rouge crimes.

It was unclear why Hun Sen initiated the measure. But he made the request to the Council of Ministers in May 2024 — the same month that he called for an inquiry into disparaging social media comments about him that were posted on TikTok and Facebook in Vietnamese.

(Samrang Pring/Reuters)

Some of the comments read: “Vietnam sacrificed its blood for peace in Cambodia,” and “Don’t forget tens of thousands of Vietnamese volunteers who were killed in Cambodia.”

Hun Sen was a Khmer Rouge commander who fled to Vietnam in 1977 amid internal purges. He later rose to power in a government installed by Vietnam after its forces invaded in late 1978 and quickly ousted the Khmer Rouge regime.

Vietnamese forces remained in Cambodia for the next decade battling Khmer Rouge guerrillas based in sanctuaries on the Thai border.

Ideas and statements

Human rights activists have criticized the law as divisive and have warned that it could be used to stifle criticism of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, which has historical ties to Vietnam.

For Hun Sen and the CPP, the Vietnam-led ouster of the Khmer Rouge was Cambodia’s moment of salvation, according to opinion writer David Hutt.

“For today’s beleaguered and exiled political opposition in Cambodia, the invasion by Hanoi was yet another curse, meaning the country is still waiting for true liberation, by which most people mean the downfall of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of Hun Sen and his family,” he wrote for Radio Free Asia last month.

But it’s not the government’s proper role to mandate a version of history, said law and democratic governance expert Vorn Chan Lout. Being punished for ideas and statements that differ from those in power is something that also occurred under the Khmer Rouge, he added.

“This doesn’t reflect a country that has advanced ideas and views,” he told RFA.

The law was approved by the Council of Ministers in January. The National Assembly and the Senate, where Hun Sen now serves as president, gave its unanimous approval in February.

Last month, the Ministry of Justice criticized Hutt’s opinion article, noting that at least 17 European countries have similar laws that criminalize Holocaust denial or the denial of other crimes against humanity.

Some of those laws allow for penalties of up to 10 years in prison, the ministry said in a Feb. 18 statement.

“Cambodia’s legislation is not an exception, but rather a necessary step to preserve historical truth and protect social harmony,” it said.

“The denial or glorification of these crimes is not an exercise of free speech,” the ministry said. “Such actions constitute a profound insult to the memory of those who perished and inflict renewed pain upon surviving victims and their families.”

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Khmer.

The bill, requested – and presumably drafted – by Hun Sen, the former prime minister who handed power to his son in 2023, will replace a 2013 law that narrowly focused on denial.

The bill’s seven articles haven’t been publicly released, so it remains unclear how some of the terms are to be defined. “Trivialize” and “dispute” are broad, and there are works by academics that might be seen as “disputing” standard accounts of the Khmer Rouge era.

Is the “authentic history” of the bill’s title going to be based on the judgments of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia? If so, there will be major gaps in the narrative.

Cambodia’s courts are now so supine that one presumes the “authentic history” will be whatever the state prosecutor says it is, should a case come to trial.

(AFP)

There are two concerns about this.

First, the Cambodian government is not being honest about why it’s pushing through this law.

There is some scholarly debate about the total number of deaths that occurred between 1975 and 1979, and estimates range from one to three million.

There also remain discussions about how much intention there was behind the barbarism or how much the deaths were unintended consequences of economic policy and mismanagement.

No nostalgia

Yet, in Cambodian society, it’s nearly impossible to find a person these days who is worse off than they were in 1979, so there’s almost no nostalgia for the Khmer Rouge days, and the crude propaganda inflicted on people some fifty years ago has faded.

There are no neo-Khmer Rouge parties. “Socialism”, let alone “communism,” is no longer in the political vocabulary. Even though China is now Phnom Penh’s closest friend, there is no affection for Maoism and Mao among Cambodians.

Moreover, as far as I can tell, the 2013 law that covers denialism specifically hasn’t needed to be used too often.

Instead, the incoming law is quite obviously “political”, not least because since 1979, Cambodia’s politics has essentially been split into two over the meaning of events that year.

For the ruling party – whose old guard, including Hun Sen, were once mid-ranking Khmer Rouge cadre but defected and joined the Vietnam-led “liberation” – 1979 was Cambodia’s moment of salvation.

(Agence Khmere de Presse/AFP)

For today’s beleaguered and exiled political opposition in Cambodia, the invasion by Hanoi was yet another curse, meaning the country is still waiting for true liberation, by which most people mean the downfall of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of Hun Sen and his family.

The CPP is quite explicit: any opposition equates to supporting the Khmer Rouge. “You hate Pol Pot but you oppose the ones who toppled him. What does this mean? It means you are an ally of the Pol Pot regime,” Hun Sen said a few years ago, with a logic that will inform the incoming law.

Crackdown era

The ruling CPP has finished its destructive march through the institutions that began in 2017 and is now marching through the people’s minds.

A decade ago, Cambodia was a different sort of place. There was one-party rule, repression, and assassinations, yet the regime didn’t really care what most people thought as long as their outward actions were correct.

Today, it’s possible to imagine the Hun family lying awake at night, quivering with rage that someone might be thinking about deviations from the party line.

Now, the CPP really does care about banishing skepticism and enforcing obedience. What one thinks of the past is naturally an important part of this.

Another troublesome factor is that, with Jan. 27 having been the 80th anniversary of Holocaust Remembrance Day, there is a flurry of interest globally in trying to comprehend how ordinary people could commit such horrors as the Holocaust or the Khmer Rouge’s genocide.

The publication of Laurence Rees’ excellent new book, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History, this month reminds us that if “never again” means anything, it means understanding the mentality of those who supported or joined in mass executions.

Yet we don’t learn this from the victims or ordinary people unassociated with the regime, even though these more accessible voices occupy the bulk of the literature.

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Listen only to the outsider, and one comes away with the impression that almost everyone living under a despotic regime is either a passive resister or an outright rebel. There are a few devotees who find redemption after realizing their own sins – as in the main character in Schindler’s List.

Yet no dictatorship can possibly survive without some input from a majority of the population. Thus, it’s more important to learn not “why they killed,” but “why we killed” – or “why we didn’t do anything.”

Remembrance is vital

The world could do with hearing much more about other atrocities, like Cambodia’s.

For many in the West, there is a tendency to think of the Holocaust as a singular evil, which can lead one down the path of culture, not human nature, as an explanation.

One lesson of the 1930s was that the people most able to stop the spread of Fascism were the same people least capable of understanding its impulses.

The left-wing intelligentsia was content to keep to the position until quite late that Fascism was just a more reactionary form of capitalist exploitation, while conservative elites had a self-interest in thinking it was a tamable version of Marxism.

Their materialism, their belief that life could be reduced to the money in your pocket and what you can buy with it, didn’t allow them to see the emotional draw of Fascism.

These intense feelings brought the torch parade, the speeches, the marching paramilitaries, the uniforms and symbols, the book burnings, and the transgressiveness of petty revenge and bullying.

Perhaps the best definition of Fascism came from Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who said: “there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms.”

Likewise, the same people now who were supposed to stop the rise of new despotisms have been as equally ignorant about the power of signs and exorcisms.

Europe kidded itself that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin was as much a rationalist as Germany’s Angela Merkel.

The notion that all the Chinese Communist Party cared about was economic growth blinded world leaders to its changing aspirations: Han supremacy, jingoism, revenging past humiliations, national rebirth and territorial conquests.

In Cambodia, it is possible to find books by or about Khmer Rouge perpetrators, yet the curious reader must exert a good deal of effort.

Those who do that find that a temperament for the transgressive and the cynical motivated the Khmer Rouge’s cadres.

It won’t be long before the world marks a Holocaust Memorial Day without any survivors present at the commemorations.

Cambodia’s horror is more recent history, yet anyone who was a teenager at the time is now in their sixties. We haven’t too long left with that generation.

Even aside from the clear political reasons for introducing the new law, it might give historians pause before writing about the more gray aspects of the Khmer Rouge era – or exploring the motives of the perpetrators.

Once it becomes illegal to “condone” the Khmer Rouge’s crimes, whatever that means, revealing what one did as a cadre could skirt the border of criminality.

My fear is that the law will confine history to the study of what the Khmer Rouge did, not why it did it. This would be much to the detriment of future generations worldwide.

David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by A commentary by David Hutt.

Recognized Contemporary Genocides

In Rwanda, the larger Hutu population (85%) felt dominated by the smaller (15%) and wealthier Tutsi ethnicity. Independence led to Hutu control, followed by massacres of Tutsis, and forced displacement of 400,000 by the ruling government that portrayed Tutsis as threats to Rwanda.

The April 6, 1994 downing of a plane carrying Rwanda’s President Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira prompted extremist Hutus to blame Tutsi rebels from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) for the attack and deaths of the two Hutu presidents. Rwanda’s Hutu militia organized attacks against all Tutsis. Assisted by forces in neighboring Uganda and Tanzania, the RPF successfully engaged the Hutu militia, captured the country, and gained control of the government. The victory did not stop a three-month Hutu rampage that randomly murdered an estimated 500,000 – 900,000 Tutsis.

In Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation, Rohingya people are an ethnic and religious minority of Muslim and Indo-Aryan origin. Despite tracing their presence in Myanmar to before the 18th century, the government considers them “Bengali, with no cultural, religious, or social ties to Myanmar,” and denies them citizenship and services. A conflict between the Rakhine people and the Myanmar authorities spilled over into the ongoing conflicts between Rohingya and their Rakhine neighbors and the Myanmar military. In 2017, the violence caused an excess of 10,000 Rohingya killed and more than 300 villages destroyed. About 700,000 of an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya people fled to nearby countries, mostly to Bangladesh.

Cambodia found itself drawn into the Vietnam War when U.S. forces expanded their military operations into Cambodia to combat Vietnamese communist forces seeking sanctuary. Prince Sihanouk severed relations and the U.S. initiated a U.S.-backed coup that dethroned Sihanouk and brought General Lon Nol to power as President of the Khmer Republic. An exiled Sihanouk joined forces with the North Vietnamese and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge communists, defeated the Lon Nol army, and captured Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975. Guided by leadership from Pol Pot, the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) instituted a series of purges that evacuated cities, killed previous Lon Nol officials, brutally persecuted Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities, and attempted to eliminate dissidents to the regime. In 1979, Pol Pot’s previous ally, victorious North Vietnam, now a unified Vietnam, invaded Cambodia, overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime, and created the People’s Republic of Kampuchea.

The Cambodian genocide was not conventional; more of a super killing field, reminiscent of Robespierre’s terror campaign during the French Revolution.

The World War II genocide started with severe persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany during the pre-war years and emerged in Poland during the early war years. A complete genocide, known as the Holocaust, reached maximum intensity with the slaughter of Jews after their forced transfer from all of Europe to labor camps. The most severe statistic has only 3.5 million of the 9.5 million Jews who lived in Europe before the war listed as survivors. An agreement between the Zionists in Palestine and the Nazi regime enabled some 53,000 Jews to emigrate from Germany to Palestine. About 170,000 displaced persons migrated to Israel after the war. Jews are now accused of genocide of the Palestinian people.

Armenians have suffered genocidal violence throughout their history. According to Britannica:

Anti-Armenian feelings erupted into mass violence several times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When, in 1894, the Armenians in the Sasun region refused to pay an oppressive tax, Ottoman troops and Kurdish tribesmen killed thousands of Armenians in the region. Another series of mass killings began in the fall of 1895, when Ottoman authorities’ suppression of an Armenian demonstration in Istanbul became a massacre. In all, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in massacres between 1894 and 1896, which later came to be known as the Hamidian massacres. Some 20,000 more Armenians were killed in urban riots and pogroms in Adana and Hadjin in 1909.

These atrocities were a prelude to the 1915 genocide that some estimate caused 1-1.5 million Armenian deaths by Turkish Ottoman authorities who claimed that questionable loyalty of the Armenian population necessitated their transfer away from the neighboring Russian enemy. Turkish officials asserted that the massacres occurred from enraged populations and not from a design by the Turkish Ottoman government.

Uniqueness of the Palestinian Genocide

Most of the previously recognized genocides occurred spontaneously, involved local people, were relatively short, and ended abruptly. In their essential feature, the government accused a minority of not having social and cultural ties with the majority and being intruders in the land. No foreign governments or foreign people assisted in the genocide and assisted the oppressed people. The genocide of the Palestinian people does not share these characteristics.

Zionists were not part of the local population; they intruded into the area and were a small minority at the time they started the Palestinian genocide. An established Israeli government slowly increased the genocide process, has continued it for a lengthy time, and is now providing a planned path to conclusion. Whereas, other genocides occurred quickly — Rwanda Tutsi, Armenian, Rohingya — or were not readily apparent — World War II Holocaust — the Palestinian genocide is occurring for a long period and in full view of the world. Several foreign governments, mainly the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, and Jewish and Evangelical people and institutions actively aid the genocide. On the other hand, several Middle Eastern governments and people throughout the world recognize the desperate plight of the Palestinians and valiantly fight to protect them from destruction. The unique characteristics, no visible end to the catastrophe, involvement of external actors in perpetrating the genocide, and increasingly violent reactions indicate that this genocide will provoke unavoidable clashes. More destruction will be visited upon other innocents.

Beyond the Genocide

The South African delegation gave a convincing presentation to the International Court of Justice at The Hague’s case of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.

More than 23,000 people in Gaza have been killed during Israel’s military campaign, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. That toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Nearly 85% of Gaza’s people have been driven their homes, a quarter of the enclave’s residents face starvation, and much of northern Gaza has been reduced to rubble.

The response from U.S. and Israeli authorities certified the genocide.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the accusation of genocide “meritless.” National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby said, “That’s not a word that ought to be thrown around lightly, and we certainly don’t believe that it applies here.”

John Kirby is correct. “Genocide is not a word that ought to be thrown around lightly.” Normal, serious, and compassionate people don’t lightly reject the accusation, don’t immediately call it meritless, and listen carefully to the pleadings. Simple adjectives and adverbs are not a reply and point-by-point refutation to exacting statements is the only acceptable answer. By judging before listening, American officials indicated they could not reply and the charge of genocide is accurate. Surprisingly, the Israeli government’s reply was more damaging to its defense. Its defense lawyer uttered, “Genocide is one of the most heinous acts any entity or individual can commit, and such allegations should only be made with the greatest of care. Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorist acts — acts that Hamas has vowed to repeat again and again until Israel is completely destroyed.” Israel insisted that its war in Gaza was a legitimate defense of its people and Hamas militants were guilty of genocide who want to wipe out all Jews.

This war is an offensive war and not a defensive war. Israel is not defending itself, it is offending all of Gaza and its population. Can any knowledgeable and competent individual believe that Hamas, with its peashooters and 15,000 fighters, can repeat and repeat its October 7 action, destroy nuclear-armed Israel, commit genocide on the Israeli people, and wipe out all Jews? Only a twisted mind can offer those reasons as an excuse for the daily murder of the Gazans and the destruction of their housing, institutions, hospitals, and will to live.

Realizing the oppression cannot force the Palestinians to submit or leave and has no foreseeable end, the Israeli government took advantage of the October 7 single event (it will become a remembrance date throughout the Western world) to convince the world that the Palestinians are mass murderers and therefore mass murder of millions of them is acceptable. How will this eventually play out? Noting the enormity of the last 75 years of destruction throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Western nations battle against international terrorism, and Israel’s intensification of its assaults in Gaza and the West Bank, anticipated future destruction throughout the world, which includes strikes against Israel’s principal opponents, will be vast.

Start with Gaza

Israeli leaders have twittered and tittered with vague propositions that Gazans have a choice of either leaving the area or remaining surrounded and confined. President Biden recommends the Palestinian Authority (PA) govern Gaza; the PA that cannot support itself, is not popular with the Palestinian people, cannot stop the daily aggression against its citizens in the West Bank, and subsidized 1/3 of the budget of Hamas ruled Gaza, is the PA that is going to tend to two million Palestinians in a barren Gaza.

Another suggestion is for the United Nations (UN), which has supplied succulence to the Gazans for 75 years, to govern (by a Trusteeship Council???) and increase succulence by several magnitudes. This is the UN that passed a myriad of resolutions for administrating the chaos and has not been able to implement any of them. The UN Trusteeship Council consists of the five permanent members of the Security Council — China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States — few of whom trust one another. UN peacekeepers have rarely been able to keep the peace in any areas of their presence.

In a previous article, The Fate of the Palestinians, the writer described a depressing scenario for Gaza’s future.

In this gigantic plantation, where a huge population cramps into an area that cannot contain it, labor will be plentiful and jobs will be scarce. Gazans will work for low wages and receive a marginal life. With every aspect of their lives controlled by an outside force, they will be unable to control their destiny; population increase will be regulated and population decrease will be ruthlessly managed…until extinction.

I have not seen another serious scenario that capably contradicts this drastic scenario. One feature of those contending the Palestinian genocide is that they are mostly retroactive and not proactive; few actions prevent events and many actions only recite events. What are the possible scenarios? What is expected to happen? Preparing for certainty is preferred to waiting for Godot.

West Bank

Israel has addressed the Palestinians in the West Bank territory in a different manner than addressed in Gaza. Arranging the West Bank Palestinians for their demise requires another approach. The Gazans live in one contiguous area; West Bank Palestinians live in separate enclaves. No settlements or settlers in Gaza; many of both are in the West Bank. No soldiers, checkpoints, or roadblocks in Gaza; daily occurrence in the West Bank. No recognized authority that Israel will deal with in Gaza; PA in the West Bank.

Expanding settlements, periodic stealing of Palestinian lands, and daily encroachment on Palestinian lives indicate that Israel is not amenable to having Palestinians between the river and the sea. Recent events show Israel is attempting to quell all resistance, no matter how minor. From October 7, 2023, to January 11, 2024, more than 2,650 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested. According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, “some 300 West Bank Palestinians have been killed. Based on military estimates, the vast majority of those killed since October 7 were shot during clashes amid arrest raids.” Two problems exist that prevent Israel from completing its plans.

(1)    Palestinians have not budged and their population has not reduced.

(2)    Military opposition grows stronger each day. Iran advances in all warfare technology — drones, long-range missiles, and nuclear weapons.

Israel has a dilemma — should Palestinians be removed before addressing the military problem or is it wise to silence enemies before they develop capability to defend themselves? Israel’s strategists realize their foes may be able to challenge the expulsion and once the foes are eliminated the expulsion becomes easier. Look at history and find Iran and Hezbollah as the last-standing antagonists who can prevent the Zionists from accomplishing their objectives. Other antagonists have been sidetracked.

The Sudan, a perceived Israel antagonist, which had potential of becoming a major nation, has been carved into two hapless nations, much due to U.S. actions. The U.S. invasion, urged by Israel’s fifth column, the Neocons, overthrew Saddam Hussein and prevented Iraq from becoming a major power in the Middle East and a threat to Israel. Libya, another Israel antagonist, has been destroyed and driven to anarchy by NATO’s incomprehensible and falsely driven military actions. Egypt and Jordan have been pacified.

Israel expected Syria’s Assad would be defeated and a new government would eschew relations with Iran and Hezbollah. Overthrow of the Assad regime and replacement by a new government would have deprived Hezbollah of a compatible border and access to its Iran ally. In Iraq or Syria, a Kurdish success in establishing an independent state would have given Israel a friend on the borders with Iraq and Iran. Because none of these expectations have been realized, a new approach to debilitating Iran and Hezbollah and assuring they do not have weapons to cause great danger to Israel is being processed.

Iran is the last man standing. Hezbollah and the Houthis are irritants that will become ineffective once Iran has been destroyed. Provoking Iran into serious military action has not occurred and the Islamic Republic is not falling for the bait, which means the provocations will become stronger and stronger until Iran has no choice. The Islamic Republic also has internal enemies and restless ethnicities who seek independence. Arranging the dominos and churning the pot are everyday tasks for Israel’s Mossad; assuredly, they have been hard at work on the problem. Once the massive strikes from sea and air hit Tehran and other cities, other internal land strikes will scorch the countryside. Iran will become an inferno of external war, religious war, civil war, and tribal rebellions.

With Iran subdued, Israel will turn its intention to the recalcitrant Palestinians, whom the government will accuse of siding with Iran and cannot be trusted. Expulsion of three million indigenous people, who had tilled the soil for generations, and replacing them with foreign newcomers, who had walked city streets for generations, is difficult. Israel cannot evict the Palestinians. The separation of the Palestinian population in several and widely separated cities in the West Bank does not allow forcible eviction. Israel will find another means and the most logical is covertly administrating population decline.

The CIA publishes interesting statistics (they do some helpful things) and the population and economic statistics reveal the precarious life of the Palestinians on their home grounds.

WEST BANK POPULATION STATISTICS

The present statistics don’t favor Israel’s approach to getting rid of those pesky Palestinians. High birth rates and low death rates offset ultra-high maternal and infant mortality rates and a high migration rate. The Palestinian population continues to increase at 2.3%/yr. So, how can Israel engineer a severe population decline? This was previously discussed in an article, “Ever Again.” Changing the statistics to be more favorable to decreasing Palestinian presence in the West Bank is another way.

Make life more brutal, which Israel will do, and the migration rate, already high for young males, will greatly increase. This will lower the number of marriages and births. Families will also leave. The Palestinian economy is not well developed, with no major industries, mainly services (77.6%, 2017 est.), agriculture, and small industry. Unemployment is at 25 percent. Imports absorb one-half of the GDP. In 2022, Palestinian imports of goods and services were $8.20 billion and exports were $1.58 billion and much of the trade was with Israel. Imports from Israel were $4.64 billion and exports were $1.40 billion.

Israel has a stranglehold on Palestinian lives and economy — appropriating land reduces agriculture and animal husbandry output and increases demand for food imports; lowering Palestinian labor in the Israel economy augments Palestinian unemployment; crime and violence follow unemployment and urge people to leave, harassment and physical attacks create anxiety, leading to escalating illness, deaths, and miscarriages.

Continually encroached on and reduced to diminishing living space, agriculture, water, and resources, life for Palestinians will become unbearable. Will the Palestinians continue to live at lower and lower subsistence levels? Migration will escalate.

If the population decreases by 5 percent annually, in 14 years, the population is halved, and, in 50 years, the population decreases to 10 percent of its initial amount. By these methods, the West Bank Palestinian population can be reduced from 3 million to 300,000. The remaining Palestinians will be faceless and wandering people among the many millions of Israelis.

Physical destruction is noticeable. Psychological, cultural, political, social, cultural, and economic havoc (oil embargos) go unnoticed.

Hesitatingly murmured is that descendants of those who suffered the World War II genocide are committing the present genocide. The Israeli Jewish population has a strong voice in a democratic nation and has not expressed indignation; they, and a great number of Jews throughout the world are supporting the genocide. Are those who suffered and died during the Holocaust being used to shadow another genocide? Have the decades of abundant references to the Holocaust been an emotional preparation to have others accept the ongoing genocide? Have the lessons of World War II, which should have been used to prevent further community destruction, been subverted to enhance destruction? Have contemporary Jews betrayed their ancestors who lie buried in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Sobibor, and others?

Reactions to the gathering genocide have already occurred. The extent to which they grow and affect the Jewish people remains undetermined. Will they be short-lived and mildly punishing or will they grow in intensity, be gravely punishing, and last from here to eternity?

A relatively small clique determines America’s future, who succeeds and who fails, who receives and who is denied, who gets pardoned, and who gets punished. American democracy in action.

In the Middle East, it has become “who lives and who dies.”

From Plymouth Rock to Western Wall granite, the American dream shapes the fate of people and skews world history.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Henry Kissinger, who died on Nov. 29, 2023 at the age of 100, stood as a colossus of U.S. foreign policy. His influence on American politics lasted long beyond his eight-year stint guiding the Nixon and Ford administrations as national security adviser and secretary of state, with successive presidents, presidential candidates and top diplomats seeking his advice and approval ever since.

But his mark extends beyond the United States. Kissinger’s policies in the 1970s had immediate impact on countries, governments and people across South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Sometimes the fallout – and it was that – lasted decades; in some places it continues to be felt today. Nowhere is that more true than Cambodia.

I’m a scholar of the political economy of Cambodia who, as a child, escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge regime with four siblings, thanks in large part to the cunning and determination of my mother. In both a professional and personal sense, I am aware of the near 50-year impact Kissinger’s policies during the Vietnam War have had on the country of my birth.

The rise of the murderous regime that forced my family to leave was, in part, encouraged by Kissinger’s policies. The cluster bombs dropped on Cambodia under Kissinger’s watch continue to destroy the lives of any man, woman or child who happens across them. Indeed, when the current U.S. administration announced its intention in 2023 to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine, the prime minister of Cambodia was quick to call out the lingering damage the munition causes.

‘Island of peace’

Counterfactuals are not the best tool of the historian; no one can say how Cambodia would have developed were it not for the Vietnam War and U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

But prior to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the country was touted as an “Island of Peace” by then-leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, with a developing economy and relative stability.

After Cambodia gained independence from its French colonial masters in 1953, Sihanouk presided over what was seen as a golden age for Cambodia. Even Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern-day Singapore, visited Cambodia to learn lessons on nation-building.

The country’s independence from France did not require any hard fight. Neighboring Vietnam, meanwhile, gained independence only after the bitter anti-colonial First Indochina War, which concluded with a rout of French troops at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.

However, Cambodia’s location drew it into the subsequent war between the newly independent communist North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam.

Cambodia wasn’t officially a party in the Vietnam War, with Sihanouk declaring the country neutral. But Washington looked for ways to disrupt communist North Vietnamese operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail – which cut across Cambodia’s east, with Sihanouk’s blessing, and allowed the resupply of North Vietnamese troops on Cambodian soil.

Kissinger’s ‘menu’

Kissinger was the chief architect of the plan to disrupt that supply line, and what he came up with was “Operation Menu.” The secret carpet-bombing campaign – with breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, dessert and supper representing different targets and missions within Cambodia – was confirmed at a meeting in the Oval Office on March 17, 1969. The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads: “ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s ‘Operation Breakfast’ finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].”

The following day, Haldeman wrote: “K’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.”

And so began four years of Kissinger’s legally dubious campaign in Cambodia.

To Kissinger, Cambodia was a “sideshow,” to use the title of William Shawcross’ damning book exposing the story of America’s secret war with Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.

During that period, the U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia saw an estimated 2,756,941 tons  of ordnance dropped on 113,716 targets in the country.

Secret and illegal war?

Kissinger and others in the White House tried to keep the campaign from the public for as long as they could, for good reason. It came as public opinion in the U.S. was turning against American involvement. The bombing campaign is also considered illegal under international law by many experts.

But to Kissinger, the ends – containing communism – seemingly justified the means, no matter the cost. And the cost to Cambodians was huge.

It resulted in the direct deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. With the U.S. government keeping the bombings secret at the time, comprehensive data and documentation are limited. But estimates on the number of deaths range from as few as 24,000 to as many as a million. Most estimates put the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Kissinger’s campaign also destabilized Cambodia, leaving it vulnerable for the horrors to come. The capital, Phnom Penh, ballooned in population because of the displacement of more than a million rural citizens fleeing U.S. bombs.

Meanwhile, the bombing of Cambodian citizens contributed to an erosion of trust in Camodia’s leadership and put at question Sihanouk’s policy of allowing the North Vietnamese access through the country’s east. On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a coup d’etat and replaced by the U.S.-friendly Lon Nol. Direct U.S. involvement in the coup has never been proven, but certainly opponents to Lon Nol saw the hand of the CIA in events.

The ousted Sihanouk called on the country’s rural masses to support his coalition government in exile, which included the Khmer Rouge. Until then, the Khmer Rouge had been a ragtag army with only revolutionary fantasies. But with Sihanouk’s backing, they grew. As journalist Philip Gourevitch noted: “His name became the Khmer Rouge’s greatest recruitment tool.”

But Kissinger’s bombs also served as a recruitment tool. The Khmer Rouge were able to capitalize on the anger and resentment of Cambodians in the areas being shelled. Rebel leaders portrayed themselves as a force to protect Cambodia from foreign aggression and restore order and justice, in contrast to the ruling government’s massive corruption and pro-American leanings.

Kissinger’s bombing campaign was certainly not the only reason for the Khmer Rouge’s rise, but it contributed to the overall destabilization of Cambodia and a political vacuum that the Khmer Rouge was able to exploit and eventually seize power – which it did in 1975, overthrowing the government.

Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge inflicted unimaginable atrocities upon the Cambodian people. Its genocidal campaign against political opponents, Cambodian minorities and those deemed counterrevolutionaries saw between 1.6 and 3 million people killed through executions, forced labor and starvation – a quarter of the country’s then population.

The scars from that period are still felt in Cambodia today. Recent research even points to the economic impact Kissinger’s bombs continue to have on farmers, who avoid richer, darker soil over fears that it hides unexploded ordnance.

Anti-Americanism is no longer prevalent at the everyday level in Cambodia; indeed, the opposite is increasingly becoming true as China’s financial and political embrace becomes suffocating. But anti-Americanism is frequently used in rhetoric by leading politicians in the country.

I don’t agree with some other scholars that Kissinger’s bombing campaign can be definitively proven to have resulted in Khmer Rouge rule. But in my view, it no doubt contributed. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s autocratic leader who ruled for 38 years before passing the prime minister baton to his son in August 2023, has cited the U.S. bombing of his birthplace as the reason he joined the Khmer Rouge. Many others joined for similar reasons.

As such, the devastating impact of Kissinger’s policies in Cambodia cannot be overstated – they contributed to the unraveling of the country’s social fabric and the suffering of its people, leaving behind a legacy of trauma.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Kissinger’s Bombing Campaign Likely Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Cambodians and Set the Path for the Ravages of the Khmer Rouge appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sophal Ear.

Henry Kissinger, who died on Nov. 29, 2023 at the age of 100, stood as a colossus of U.S. foreign policy. His influence on American politics lasted long beyond his eight-year stint guiding the Nixon and Ford administrations as national security adviser and secretary of state, with successive presidents, presidential candidates and top diplomats seeking his advice and approval ever since.

But his mark extends beyond the United States. Kissinger’s policies in the 1970s had immediate impact on countries, governments and people across South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Sometimes the fallout – and it was that – lasted decades; in some places it continues to be felt today. Nowhere is that more true than Cambodia.

I’m a scholar of the political economy of Cambodia who, as a child, escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge regime with four siblings, thanks in large part to the cunning and determination of my mother. In both a professional and personal sense, I am aware of the near 50-year impact Kissinger’s policies during the Vietnam War have had on the country of my birth.

The rise of the murderous regime that forced my family to leave was, in part, encouraged by Kissinger’s policies. The cluster bombs dropped on Cambodia under Kissinger’s watch continue to destroy the lives of any man, woman or child who happens across them. Indeed, when the current U.S. administration announced its intention in 2023 to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine, the prime minister of Cambodia was quick to call out the lingering damage the munition causes.

‘Island of peace’

Counterfactuals are not the best tool of the historian; no one can say how Cambodia would have developed were it not for the Vietnam War and U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

But prior to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the country was touted as an “Island of Peace” by then-leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, with a developing economy and relative stability.

After Cambodia gained independence from its French colonial masters in 1953, Sihanouk presided over what was seen as a golden age for Cambodia. Even Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern-day Singapore, visited Cambodia to learn lessons on nation-building.

The country’s independence from France did not require any hard fight. Neighboring Vietnam, meanwhile, gained independence only after the bitter anti-colonial First Indochina War, which concluded with a rout of French troops at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.

However, Cambodia’s location drew it into the subsequent war between the newly independent communist North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam.

Cambodia wasn’t officially a party in the Vietnam War, with Sihanouk declaring the country neutral. But Washington looked for ways to disrupt communist North Vietnamese operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail – which cut across Cambodia’s east, with Sihanouk’s blessing, and allowed the resupply of North Vietnamese troops on Cambodian soil.

Kissinger’s ‘menu’

Kissinger was the chief architect of the plan to disrupt that supply line, and what he came up with was “Operation Menu.” The secret carpet-bombing campaign – with breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, dessert and supper representing different targets and missions within Cambodia – was confirmed at a meeting in the Oval Office on March 17, 1969. The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads: “ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s ‘Operation Breakfast’ finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].”

The following day, Haldeman wrote: “K’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.”

And so began four years of Kissinger’s legally dubious campaign in Cambodia.

To Kissinger, Cambodia was a “sideshow,” to use the title of William Shawcross’ damning book exposing the story of America’s secret war with Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.

During that period, the U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia saw an estimated 2,756,941 tons  of ordnance dropped on 113,716 targets in the country.

Secret and illegal war?

Kissinger and others in the White House tried to keep the campaign from the public for as long as they could, for good reason. It came as public opinion in the U.S. was turning against American involvement. The bombing campaign is also considered illegal under international law by many experts.

But to Kissinger, the ends – containing communism – seemingly justified the means, no matter the cost. And the cost to Cambodians was huge.

It resulted in the direct deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. With the U.S. government keeping the bombings secret at the time, comprehensive data and documentation are limited. But estimates on the number of deaths range from as few as 24,000 to as many as a million. Most estimates put the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Kissinger’s campaign also destabilized Cambodia, leaving it vulnerable for the horrors to come. The capital, Phnom Penh, ballooned in population because of the displacement of more than a million rural citizens fleeing U.S. bombs.

Meanwhile, the bombing of Cambodian citizens contributed to an erosion of trust in Camodia’s leadership and put at question Sihanouk’s policy of allowing the North Vietnamese access through the country’s east. On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a coup d’etat and replaced by the U.S.-friendly Lon Nol. Direct U.S. involvement in the coup has never been proven, but certainly opponents to Lon Nol saw the hand of the CIA in events.

The ousted Sihanouk called on the country’s rural masses to support his coalition government in exile, which included the Khmer Rouge. Until then, the Khmer Rouge had been a ragtag army with only revolutionary fantasies. But with Sihanouk’s backing, they grew. As journalist Philip Gourevitch noted: “His name became the Khmer Rouge’s greatest recruitment tool.”

But Kissinger’s bombs also served as a recruitment tool. The Khmer Rouge were able to capitalize on the anger and resentment of Cambodians in the areas being shelled. Rebel leaders portrayed themselves as a force to protect Cambodia from foreign aggression and restore order and justice, in contrast to the ruling government’s massive corruption and pro-American leanings.

Kissinger’s bombing campaign was certainly not the only reason for the Khmer Rouge’s rise, but it contributed to the overall destabilization of Cambodia and a political vacuum that the Khmer Rouge was able to exploit and eventually seize power – which it did in 1975, overthrowing the government.

Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge inflicted unimaginable atrocities upon the Cambodian people. Its genocidal campaign against political opponents, Cambodian minorities and those deemed counterrevolutionaries saw between 1.6 and 3 million people killed through executions, forced labor and starvation – a quarter of the country’s then population.

The scars from that period are still felt in Cambodia today. Recent research even points to the economic impact Kissinger’s bombs continue to have on farmers, who avoid richer, darker soil over fears that it hides unexploded ordnance.

Anti-Americanism is no longer prevalent at the everyday level in Cambodia; indeed, the opposite is increasingly becoming true as China’s financial and political embrace becomes suffocating. But anti-Americanism is frequently used in rhetoric by leading politicians in the country.

I don’t agree with some other scholars that Kissinger’s bombing campaign can be definitively proven to have resulted in Khmer Rouge rule. But in my view, it no doubt contributed. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s autocratic leader who ruled for 38 years before passing the prime minister baton to his son in August 2023, has cited the U.S. bombing of his birthplace as the reason he joined the Khmer Rouge. Many others joined for similar reasons.

As such, the devastating impact of Kissinger’s policies in Cambodia cannot be overstated – they contributed to the unraveling of the country’s social fabric and the suffering of its people, leaving behind a legacy of trauma.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Kissinger’s Bombing Campaign Likely Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Cambodians and Set the Path for the Ravages of the Khmer Rouge appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sophal Ear.

Henry Kissinger, who died on Nov. 29, 2023 at the age of 100, stood as a colossus of U.S. foreign policy. His influence on American politics lasted long beyond his eight-year stint guiding the Nixon and Ford administrations as national security adviser and secretary of state, with successive presidents, presidential candidates and top diplomats seeking his advice and approval ever since.

But his mark extends beyond the United States. Kissinger’s policies in the 1970s had immediate impact on countries, governments and people across South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Sometimes the fallout – and it was that – lasted decades; in some places it continues to be felt today. Nowhere is that more true than Cambodia.

I’m a scholar of the political economy of Cambodia who, as a child, escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge regime with four siblings, thanks in large part to the cunning and determination of my mother. In both a professional and personal sense, I am aware of the near 50-year impact Kissinger’s policies during the Vietnam War have had on the country of my birth.

The rise of the murderous regime that forced my family to leave was, in part, encouraged by Kissinger’s policies. The cluster bombs dropped on Cambodia under Kissinger’s watch continue to destroy the lives of any man, woman or child who happens across them. Indeed, when the current U.S. administration announced its intention in 2023 to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine, the prime minister of Cambodia was quick to call out the lingering damage the munition causes.

‘Island of peace’

Counterfactuals are not the best tool of the historian; no one can say how Cambodia would have developed were it not for the Vietnam War and U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

But prior to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the country was touted as an “Island of Peace” by then-leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, with a developing economy and relative stability.

After Cambodia gained independence from its French colonial masters in 1953, Sihanouk presided over what was seen as a golden age for Cambodia. Even Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern-day Singapore, visited Cambodia to learn lessons on nation-building.

The country’s independence from France did not require any hard fight. Neighboring Vietnam, meanwhile, gained independence only after the bitter anti-colonial First Indochina War, which concluded with a rout of French troops at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.

However, Cambodia’s location drew it into the subsequent war between the newly independent communist North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam.

Cambodia wasn’t officially a party in the Vietnam War, with Sihanouk declaring the country neutral. But Washington looked for ways to disrupt communist North Vietnamese operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail – which cut across Cambodia’s east, with Sihanouk’s blessing, and allowed the resupply of North Vietnamese troops on Cambodian soil.

Kissinger’s ‘menu’

Kissinger was the chief architect of the plan to disrupt that supply line, and what he came up with was “Operation Menu.” The secret carpet-bombing campaign – with breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, dessert and supper representing different targets and missions within Cambodia – was confirmed at a meeting in the Oval Office on March 17, 1969. The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads: “ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s ‘Operation Breakfast’ finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].”

The following day, Haldeman wrote: “K’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.”

And so began four years of Kissinger’s legally dubious campaign in Cambodia.

To Kissinger, Cambodia was a “sideshow,” to use the title of William Shawcross’ damning book exposing the story of America’s secret war with Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.

During that period, the U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia saw an estimated 2,756,941 tons  of ordnance dropped on 113,716 targets in the country.

Secret and illegal war?

Kissinger and others in the White House tried to keep the campaign from the public for as long as they could, for good reason. It came as public opinion in the U.S. was turning against American involvement. The bombing campaign is also considered illegal under international law by many experts.

But to Kissinger, the ends – containing communism – seemingly justified the means, no matter the cost. And the cost to Cambodians was huge.

It resulted in the direct deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. With the U.S. government keeping the bombings secret at the time, comprehensive data and documentation are limited. But estimates on the number of deaths range from as few as 24,000 to as many as a million. Most estimates put the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Kissinger’s campaign also destabilized Cambodia, leaving it vulnerable for the horrors to come. The capital, Phnom Penh, ballooned in population because of the displacement of more than a million rural citizens fleeing U.S. bombs.

Meanwhile, the bombing of Cambodian citizens contributed to an erosion of trust in Camodia’s leadership and put at question Sihanouk’s policy of allowing the North Vietnamese access through the country’s east. On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a coup d’etat and replaced by the U.S.-friendly Lon Nol. Direct U.S. involvement in the coup has never been proven, but certainly opponents to Lon Nol saw the hand of the CIA in events.

The ousted Sihanouk called on the country’s rural masses to support his coalition government in exile, which included the Khmer Rouge. Until then, the Khmer Rouge had been a ragtag army with only revolutionary fantasies. But with Sihanouk’s backing, they grew. As journalist Philip Gourevitch noted: “His name became the Khmer Rouge’s greatest recruitment tool.”

But Kissinger’s bombs also served as a recruitment tool. The Khmer Rouge were able to capitalize on the anger and resentment of Cambodians in the areas being shelled. Rebel leaders portrayed themselves as a force to protect Cambodia from foreign aggression and restore order and justice, in contrast to the ruling government’s massive corruption and pro-American leanings.

Kissinger’s bombing campaign was certainly not the only reason for the Khmer Rouge’s rise, but it contributed to the overall destabilization of Cambodia and a political vacuum that the Khmer Rouge was able to exploit and eventually seize power – which it did in 1975, overthrowing the government.

Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge inflicted unimaginable atrocities upon the Cambodian people. Its genocidal campaign against political opponents, Cambodian minorities and those deemed counterrevolutionaries saw between 1.6 and 3 million people killed through executions, forced labor and starvation – a quarter of the country’s then population.

The scars from that period are still felt in Cambodia today. Recent research even points to the economic impact Kissinger’s bombs continue to have on farmers, who avoid richer, darker soil over fears that it hides unexploded ordnance.

Anti-Americanism is no longer prevalent at the everyday level in Cambodia; indeed, the opposite is increasingly becoming true as China’s financial and political embrace becomes suffocating. But anti-Americanism is frequently used in rhetoric by leading politicians in the country.

I don’t agree with some other scholars that Kissinger’s bombing campaign can be definitively proven to have resulted in Khmer Rouge rule. But in my view, it no doubt contributed. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s autocratic leader who ruled for 38 years before passing the prime minister baton to his son in August 2023, has cited the U.S. bombing of his birthplace as the reason he joined the Khmer Rouge. Many others joined for similar reasons.

As such, the devastating impact of Kissinger’s policies in Cambodia cannot be overstated – they contributed to the unraveling of the country’s social fabric and the suffering of its people, leaving behind a legacy of trauma.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Kissinger’s Bombing Campaign Likely Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Cambodians and Set the Path for the Ravages of the Khmer Rouge appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sophal Ear.

Former president Jimmy Carter is back in the news. His ongoing illness has surely caused him and his loved ones much distress and grief. For that, I wish them peace as the 39th president nears the end of his life.

However, this is also an important opportunity to recognize that corporate media whitewashing is yet again in full effect — painting Carter as a peace-loving saint who deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

As with all U.S. politicians — regardless of party — it remains as dangerous as ever to ignore historical reality.

During the Carter Administration, the U.S. had a president who claimed that human rights were “the soul of our foreign policy” despite making an agreement with the brutal dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, to not accept the asylum claims of Haitian refugees.

His duplicity, however, was not limited to our hemisphere; Carter also started earning his Nobel Peace Prize in Southeast Asia.

In Cambodia, Carter and his national security aide, Zbigniew Brzezinski, made “an untiring effort to find peaceful solutions” by initiating a joint U.S.-Thai operation in 1979 known as Task Force 80, which for ten years, propped up the notorious and lethal Khmer Rouge.

Interestingly, just two years earlier, Carter displayed his deep respect for human rights when he explained how the U.S. owed no debt to Vietnam. He justified this belief because the “destruction was mutual.”

(Hmm…do any of you recall being bombarded with napalm and/or Agent Orange here in the Home of the Brave?)

Moving further southward in Carter’s efforts to advance democracy and human rights, we have East Timor. This former Portuguese colony was the target of a relentless and murderous assault by Indonesia since December 7, 1975. That assault was made possible through the sale of U.S. arms to its loyal client state, the silent complicity of the American press, and then-Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s skill at keeping the United Nations uninvolved.

Upon relieving Gerald Ford — but strategically retaining the skills of fellow Nobel peacenik Henry Kissinger — Carter authorized increased military aid to Indonesia in 1977 as the death toll approached 100,000. In short order, over one-third of the East Timorese population (more than 200,000 humans) lost their lives due to war-related starvation, disease, massacres, or atrocities.

Closer to home, the Rockefeller/Trilateral Commission ally also bared his “gentle soul” in Central America. As historian William Blum detailed, in 1978, the former peanut farmer attempted to create a “moderate” alternative to the Sandinistas through covert CIA support for “the press and labor unions in Nicaragua.”

After the Sandinistas took power, Blum explained, “Carter authorized the CIA to provide financial and other support to opponents.”

Also in that region, one of Carter’s final acts as president was to order $10 million in military aid and advisors to El Salvador.

A final glimpse of “international cooperation based on international law” during the Carter Administration brings us to Afghanistan, the site of a Soviet invasion in December 1979. It was here that Carter and Brzezinski aligned themselves with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to exploit Islam as a method to arouse the Afghani populace to action.

With the CIA coordinating the effort, some $40 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to recruit “freedom fighters” like (wait for it) Osama bin Laden.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Was Jimmy Carter, as Chomsky once said, “the least violent of American presidents”? Perhaps. But have our standards dropped to the point where we meticulously rank the criminals who inhabit the White House?

Will we ever eschew electoral deceptions and instead recognize and accept and name the big-picture problems?

If you think Jimmy Carter was ever the answer, you’re asking the wrong questions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Led by the notorious Pol Pot, the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge killed some 1.7 million Cambodians through starvation, overwork, or execution in a bid to create an agrarian utopia. They were finally removed from power by Vietnam, which invaded Cambodia in 1979.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, formally called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), was set up to hold former Khmer Rouge leaders to account for the deaths.

Khieu Samphan, 91, lost his appeal of his 2018 conviction and life sentence for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his leadership role in Khmer Rouge.

Khieu Samphan, who is serving a life sentence for a 2014 conviction for crimes against humanity, had argued he was the titular head of state without decision-making powers in the Khmer Rouge regime during its bloody revolution and reign of terror.

His appeal against his 2018 genocide conviction asserted that the lower court had made more than 1,800 errors, but the ECCC Supreme Court rejected virtually all his arguments.

“I am unhappy with the Supreme Court's misunderstanding about the facts of the case that led to the conviction. The misunderstanding including his role in the Khmer Rouge,” said Khieu Samphan’s lawyer, Kong Sam Onn.

A 'clean person'

Khieu Samphan, his lawyer said, was “a clean person among other Khmer Rouge leaders” and “didn’t have the power to make any decisions during meetings.” 

“The court wanted to convict him before he dies. The court wanted to speed up the case to make sure the verdict is released before Khieu Samphan dies,” said Kong Sam Onn.

While many welcomed the verdict, some former Khmer Rouge soldiers defended Khieu Samphan and said members of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) who were former Khmer Rouge leaders should be brought to trial as well.

Former Khmer Rouge soldier Thong Thun in the western Cambodian province of Pailin said agreed with Khieu Samphan’s defense that he didn’t have power during his time as a ruler.

“The court shouldn’t put him in jail for the rest of his life. It is embarrassing,” he told RFA Khmer.

“Those other killers are still walking free and only a few were convicted,” he said, referring to members of the CPP who were former Khmer Rouge.

Hun Sen, who was a middle-ranking commander with the Khmer Rouge before defecting, has ruled Cambodia with an iron fist since 1985.

Another former soldier, who asked not to be named, dismissed the trial as a show to punish some former Khmer Rouge leaders while letting others get away with crimes.

“The court shouldn’t put (Khieu Samphan) in jail for the rest of life, he is getting old,” he said.

Lasting record

Some observers have questioned the merit of a legal process that took $337 million and 16 years to but convicted only three men, two of whom are dead.

Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge's No. 2 leader and chief ideologist, was convicted along with Khieu Samphan and was serving a life sentence when he died in 2019 at age 93.

The tribunal's third convicted Khmer Rouge figure was of Kaing Guek Eav. Also known as Duch, commandant of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, he died in 2020 at age 77 while serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity, murder and torture. The top Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, died in the jungle in 1998 at age 72.

Patrick Murphy, the U.S. ambassador in Phnom Penh, issued a statement saying the tribunal “leaves an important legacy detailing some of the worst crimes against humanity in modern history and making contributions to truth, reconciliation, and justice in the Kingdom of Cambodia.”

Former ECCC investigator Craig Etcheson told the Associated Press the court “successfully attacked the long-standing impunity of the Khmer Rouge, and showed that though it might take a long time, the law can catch up with those who commit crimes against humanity."

"The tribunal also created an extraordinary record of those crimes, comprising documentation that will be studied by scholars for decades to come, that will educate Cambodia's youth about the history of their country, and that will deeply frustrate any attempt to deny the crimes of the Khmer Rouge," said Etcheson, who was chief of investigations for the prosecution at the ECCC from 2006 to 2012.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written by Paul Eckert.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Multiple investigations in the Phnom Penh Post found evidence that the United States Army sprayed chemicals like dioxin, also known as Agent Orange, on southern Cambodian villages in the early seventies. People directly exposed to Agent Orange suffered from cancers, heart disease, and respiratory problems, while their descendants are born with crippling deformities and cognitive impairments.

Reports in The Atlantic added that researchers at Columbia University and the Institute for Cancer Prevention say that the U.S. military sprayed around 40,900 gallons of Agent Orange in Cambodia. However, the U.S. government has not offered any financial assistance to affected Cambodians who struggle to afford astronomical healthcare bills.

Moreover, at the height of the Vietnam War Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, in desperate attempts to stem the rise of communism in a newly decolonized Indochina, authorised B-52 planes to bombard Cambodia. The War Legacies Working Group (WLWG) says that American bombing raids dropped 2.7 million tons of ordnance between 1965 and 1973, including 26 million cluster bombs. Studies estimate that 25% of this ordnance has not detonated yet.

These unprovoked attacks against a neutral state nearly exterminated “anything that moves” in Cambodia, to quote National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Historians Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen argue that incessant and often indiscriminate bombings incinerated at least 50,000-150,000 civilians to death and ruined the economy. To this day, valuable farmland, rivers, and lakes are contaminated with unexploded munitions. Scholar Erin Lin discovered that rice farmers still avoid regions with rich and fertile soil for fear of triggering hidden bombs.

U.S. carpet bombings drove thousands of homeless, grieving, and vengeful Cambodians into the arms of the fanatical communist sect, the Khmer Rouge: “Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the KR.” Following their triumphant march into Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge instituted a totalitarian and borderline medieval autocracy that inflicted unimaginable horrors on the population. A Vietnamese invasion finally brought an end to this nightmare and ousted the KR in 1979.

The Vietnamese-controlled People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) in the eighties was also responsible for laying countless landmines along the Thai border to prevent the Chinese and American-backed Khmer Rouge from retaking Cambodia. General Lê Đức Anh, Commander of the People’s Army of Vietnam in Kampuchea, devised the “K5” defence plan to seal the Thai border. The PRK forced impoverished, famished, and sickly young men to fell trees in malaria-infested jungles and to lay thousands of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. Historians and medical workers like Margaret Slocomb, Fiona Terry, and Esmeralda Luciolli say that disease, malnutrition, accidents, and terrifying Khmer Rouge ambushes killed 50,000 of the nearly one million peasants press-ganged into constructing Cambodia’s deadly “Bamboo Wall.” Amputees have flooded Phnom Penh’s prosthesis clinics ever since.

A retired government employee told Cambodia News English that he regretted the PRK sacrificing many people to create a barren no-man’s land littered with mines. However, he also said it was a price worth paying to stop the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal leader, Pol Pot, from regaining power. Survivors and witnesses beg to differ. An anonymous man fled to refugee camps in Thailand rather than suffer the fate of his brother, who was conscripted into a forced labor brigade. He never saw him again. A former Health Department official vividly remembered the primitive field hospitals devoid of surgeons and doctors. Unqualified orderlies had no choice but to perform emergency surgery on wounded labourers.

Tom Fawthrop says the United Nation’s shameful refusal to recognise the PRK as Cambodia’s legitimate government meant that medical supplies and humanitarian aid rarely reached exhausted and famine-stricken Cambodians. Aid mostly ended up in the hands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas lurking in Thailand instead—the remnants of a homicidal regime that tortured, starved, and executed approximately two million of their own people. Cynical Cold War politics ensured that the U.S., China, and the West in general covertly supported the disposed Khmer Rouge and its insurgency against Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia. Clearly, punishing Soviet-backed Vietnam took precedence over helping Cambodians to protect and rebuild their shattered nation.

The Khmer Rouge also used landmines to sow terror and mayhem. Pol Pot called mines “perfect soldiers” because they never require food, rest, or orders to defeat enemies. KR units infiltrated PRK labor camps at night and sprinkled landmines everywhere, which caused untold panic. Lydia Monin argues that in the early nineties, when the Khmer Rouge invaded around 10% of Cambodia’s territory, Cambodian authorities and departing Vietnamese troops surrounded besieged villages, towns, and cities with landmines to halt the KR’s advance. Deminers like Guy Willoughby of the HALO Trust even admitted that Pol Pot would have reconquered the whole country had Phnom Penh not taken such drastic measures.

The British government’s damning role in teaching the Khmer Rouge how to use landmines is noteworthy as well. Journalists John Pilger and Simon O’Dwyer-Russell revealed that “British and Americans in uniform” trained Khmer Rouge fighters in secret Malaysian military camps. Members of the elite British Special Air Service (SAS) claimed they taught Khmer Rouge troops mine laying and provided off-route mines which detonated by sound. These devices release thousands of miniature pellets that lodge themselves in bodies and are extremely difficult to find or remove. Pilger even spoke with a KR veteran who chillingly confessed “We liked the British. They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims”.

Worst of all, the top-brass in the Cambodian army today is obstructing deminers and their laudable efforts to rid Cambodia of its minefields. Political scientist Matthew Breay Bolton worries that, despite the Khmer Rouge’s defeat and disintegration in the late nineties, there are powerful people in Phnom Penh and Bangkok who refuse to demilitarise the K5 border zone. A lingering Cold War mentality has convinced elderly generals that mines are an integral part of Cambodia’s antiquated security doctrine. As a result, deminers are not given complete access to border minefields.

A stubborn devotion to an outdated and useless defence doctrine is endangering lives. Grinding poverty is pushing Cambodians to venture deeper into arable lands laden with mines and other dangers. This has given birth to what anthropologist Lisa Arensen calls a “hierarchy of risk”: wealthy landowners hire poor labourers or tenants to farm plantations that may be filled with unexploded ordnance. In certain villages, landowners are known to lie about the safety risks to lure unwitting workers onto hazardous terrain.

Furthermore, CMAC (Cambodian Mine Action Centre) maps of “cleared areas” do not necessarily correspond to mine-free areas on the ground. CMAC deminers occasionally make mistakes and cut corners—much to the frustration of Cambodians already wary of a distant, corrupt, and authoritarian government. Some villagers find local deminers more trustworthy and efficient because they possess intimate knowledge of the terrain and stand to lose so much personally and professionally if they under-perform.

What can be done to undo this terrible legacy of conflict? Above all else, as the WLWG recommends, American citizens must urge congressmen and women to pass legislation that fully acknowledges the true extent of the U.S. military’s illegal actions in Cambodia. It also grants yearly multi-billion-dollar aid packages to abandoned communities plagued by unexploded ordnance, and provides access to funding for scientists to conduct thorough testing of suspected dioxin hotspots.

Meanwhile, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) must build more amputee rehabilitation facilities, especially in remote areas and northwestern provinces like Battambang, Banteay Meanchey, and Pailin, which contain a significant number of landmines. Existing clinics need extra funding and resources as well. ARMAC (ASEAN Regional Mine Action Centre) reports argue that the Covid pandemic dealt a severe blow to clinics such as the Jesuit-run Mindol Metta Karuna Reflection Centre. Volunteers from Japan, South Korea, and Australia are unable to fly overseas due to strict travel restrictions and donations are currently few and far in between.

Life as an amputee in Cambodia is very challenging. Friends, colleagues, and even family members, particularly in the countryside, often interpret disability through the lens of Buddhist theology. Losing a limb is perceived as a sign of great misfortune or punishment for evil deeds amputees committed in past lives. Abuse and neglect are not uncommon. This is why rehabilitation centres are so important and must be maintained. They teach amputees how to adapt and thrive with work skills courses, instill a strong sense of community, and serve as bases for activists campaigning for a world without landmines.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jean-Philippe Stone.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.