No More Learning

" Charles Mohr reported on July 16 that U. S. bombing "is directed against infiltration routes from North Viet- nam that pass through Laos en route to the South. " There is a July 28 reference to "200 American bombing sorties a day over northeastern Laos," directed against North Vietnamese forces, and Hedrick Smith adds from Washington on August 2 that the United States "has been bombing North Vietnamese concentrations" in Laos. T. D. Allman repOI1ed bombing sorties "in tactical support" of government forces fighting the North Vietnamese and "harassing attacks against Commu- nist positions all over northeast Laos" on ~llgust25, the latter providing
Ii<
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 257
the first glimpse of something beyond the approved version. Further reports of U. S. air power in tactical support and "to cut North Viet- namese supply routes" appear on September 7, followed by Allman's report of successes of a government offensive with forces "stiffened by Thai soldiers," supported by "the most intense American bombing ever seen in Laos" (Sept. I8). Then followed reports from Washington and Vientiane (Sept. I9, 20, 23, 24, 30) confirming that the U. S. Air Force was providing tactical support for government combat missions in addi- tion to bombing North Vietnamese infiltration routes, including a Sep- tember 23 Agence-France-Presse dispatch reporting "bombing of Pathet Lao areas by United States aircraft," thus implying that the bombing went well beyond infiltration routes and combat operations, common knowledge in Paris and Vientiane but yet to be reported here.
In short, the terror bombing of northern Laos, although known, remained off the agenda, and reporting in general was slight and highly misleading, to say the least. Elterman observes that the war in Laos and Cambodia was virtually "invisible" in the media through 1969, apart from the leftist National Guardian, which gave substantial coverage to what was in fact happening. 9
On October I, I969, the New York Times finally ran an account by T. D. Allman, whose valuable reporting throughout the war appeared primarily overseas, concluding that "the rebel economy and social fab- ric" were "the main United States targets now," and that the American bombardment had driven the population to caves and tunnels during the daylight hours, making it difficult for the Pathet Lao "to fight a 'people's war' with fewer and fewer people. " Control of territory was now of lesser importance, he wrote, "with United States bombers able to destroy, almost at will, any given town, bridge, road or concentration of enemy soldiers or civilians. "lo
This confirmation of what had long been known in restricted peace- movement circles, and consciously suppressed in the mainstream press, passed without particular notice. The CIA clandestine army had swept through the Plain of Jars in the preceding months, evacuating all re- maining civilians to areas near Vientiane, where they and their harrow- ing stories were largely ignored by the well-represented media, although available elsewhere. II
Walter Haney, a Lao-speaking American who compiled a detailed collection of refugee interviews that was described as "serious and carefully prepared" by U. S. Ambassador to Laos William Sullivan, quotes remarks by a UN official in Laos as "the most concise account of the bombing":
258
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. {Each} of the informants, without any exception, had his village completely destroyed. In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction of the (material} basis of the civilian society. 12
A staff study by a Kennedy subcommittee concluded that a main pur- pose of the U. S. bombardment was "to destroy the physical and social infrastructure" in areas held by the Pathet Lao, a conclusion well supported by the factual record. H
There were also eyewitness reports of the destruction of northern
Laos by Western reporters, but published overseas. T. D. Allman flew
over the Plain of Jars in late 1971, reporting that "it is empty and ravaged" by the napalm and B-sz saturation bombing being "used in
an attempt to extinguish all human life in the target area"; "All vegeta-
tion has been destroyed and the craters, literally, are countless" and
often impossible to distinguish among the "endless patches of churned
earth, repeatedly bombed. " At the same time, the WashingUJn Post published the statement of Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans, who reported from northern Laos that "I have seen no evidence of indis- criminate bombing"; it is the North Vietnamese who are "rough," and
the people are not "against the United States-just the opposite. " The Lao-speaking Australian reporter John Everingham traveled in 1970 t "through dying village after dying village" of the Hmong tribesmen
who had been "naive enough to trust the CIA" and were now being
offered "a one-way 'copter ride to death' " in the CIA clandestine army,
in the remains of a country where bombing had "turned more than half
the total area of Laos to a land of charred ruins where people fear the
sky" so that "nothing be left standing or alive for the communists to inherit. " No U. S. journal, apart from the tiny pacifist press, was inter-
ested enough to run his story, although later the media were to bewail
the plight of the miserable remnants of the Hmong, put on display as "victims of Communism. " In 1970, the Bangkok World (Oct. 7) pub-
lished an AP report on U. S. bombing that was "wiping out" towns, and
by ]972 such repons sometimes appeared in the U. S. pressY' Later~
Nayan Chanda visited the Plain of Jars, reporting overseas that from t the air it "resembles a luna. landscape, pockmarked as it is with bomb
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 259
craters that are a stark testimony to the years of war that denuded the area of people and buildings" during "six years of 'secret' bombing" by U. S. aircraft, while "at ground level, the signs of death and destruction are even more ubiquitous," including the provincial capital, "com- pletely razed," as had been reported earlier by refugees who were ignored. Following the practice of American volunteers during the war, American relief workers with long experience in Laos attempted to bring information about postwar Laos to the media-with little effect- and inform us privately that their accounts were seriously distorted by New York Times reporters "by the device of omission and taking the negative side of balanced statements we made" and similar means. 15
The U. S. government officially denied all of this, continuing the deception even after the facts were exposed and known in some detail to those concerned enough to learn them. Many regarded the U. S. war in Laos as "a success" (Senators Jacob Javits and Stuart Symington), or even "A spectacular success" (a former CIA officer in Laos, Thomas McCoy). 16
In scale and care, the extensive analysis of refugee reports by a few young American volunteers in Laos compares very favorably to the subsequent studies of refugees from Cambodia that received massive publicity in the West after the Khmer Rouge takeover, and the story was both gruesome and highly pertinent to ongoing U. S. operations. But there was little interest, and published materials, which appeared primarily outside of the mainstream, were virtually ignored and quickly forgotten; the agency of terror was inappropriate for the needs of the doctrinal system. Media failure to report the facts when they were readily available, in 1968, and to investigate further when they were undeniable, by late 1969, contributed to the successful deception of the public, and to the continuing destruction.
When the war ended, ABC News commentator Harry Reasoner expressed his hope that Laos and its "gentle folk" could return to peaceful ways after "the clowning of the CIA and the vicious invasion of the North Vietnamese. "17 The "clowning of the CIA" included the destruction of "the rebel economy and social fabric" in northern Laos, with unknown numbers killed in areas that may never recover, and the decimation of the Hmong who were enlisted in the CIA cause and then abandoned when no longer useful. Nothing remotely comparable may be attributed to "the vicious invasion of the North Vietnamese"- which did, however, include such atrocities as killing twelve U. S. Air Force men in Match 1968 at a U. S. radar base near the North Viet- namese border used to direct the bombing of Nonh Vietnam and operations in North Vietnam by U. S. -led mercenaries. 18
260 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
The New York Times reviewed the war in Laos at the war's end, concluding that 350,000 people had been killed, over a tenth of the population, with another tenth uprooted in this "fratricidal strife that was increased to tragic proportions by warring outsiders. " The "fratri- cidal strife" might well have been terminated by the 1958 coalition government had it not been for "outsiders," with the United States playing a decisive role throughout, a role completely ignored in this purported historical analysis apart from a few misleading comments. At this late date, the Times continued to pretend that the U. S. bombing was directed against North Vietnamese supply trails-nothing else is mentioned. The crucial events of the actual history also disappear, or are grossly misrepresented. Subsequent reporting also regularly obliterated the U. S. role in creating the devastation and postwar "prob- lems" attributed to the Communists alone, a shameful evasion in the light of the undisputed historical facts. 19
Once again, the media record, less than glorious, is well explained throughout by the propaganda model.
1
1
1 1
6. 2. CAMBODIA
6. 2. 1. "The decade of the genocide"
Few countries have suffered more bitterly than did Cambodia during I the 1970s. The "decade of the genocide," as the period is termed by the I Finnish Inquiry Commission that attempted to assess what had taken
place,20 consisted of three phases-now extending the time scale to the present, which bears a heavy imprint of these terrible years:
Phase I: From 1969 through April 1975, U. S. bombing at a histori- cally unprecedented level and a civil war sustained by the United States left the country in utter ruins. Though Congress legislated an end to the bombing in August 1973, U. S. government participa- tion in the ongoing slaughter continued until the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975. 21
Phase II: From April 1975 through 1978 Cambodia was subjected ~ to the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge (Democratic Kampu- j chea, DK), overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion of C a m b o d i a j in December1 9 7 8 . . . . 1
1
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS A"D CAMBODIA 261
Phase III: Vietnam installed the Heng Samrin regime in power in Cambodia, but the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) coalition, based primarily on the Khmer Rouge, maintained international recogni- tion apart from the Soviet bloc. Reconstructed with the aid of China and the United States on the Thai-Cambodia border and in Thai bases, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the only effective DK military force, continue to carry out activities in Cambodia of a sort called "terrorist" when a friendly government is the target.
We turn now to the travail of Cambcdia during these grim years, and the way it has been depicted, first with some preliminary observations and then in further detail, phase by phase.
6. 2. 2. Problems of scale and responsibility
The three phases of the "decade of the genocide" have fared quite differently in the media and general culture, and in a way that conforms well to the expectations of a propaganda model. Phase I, for which the United States bore primary responsibility, was little investigated at the time, or since, and has never been described with anything like the condemnatory terms applied to phase II. The vast number of Cambodi- ans killed, injured, and traumatized in this period were, in our concep- tualization of chapter 2, "unworthy" victims.
Phase II, the Pol Pot era, is the "holocaust" that was widely com- pared to the worst atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, virtually from the outset, with massive publicity and outrage at the suffering of these "worthy" victims.
Phase III renewed the status of the people of Cambodia as worthy victims, suffering under Vietnamese rule. The Vietnamese being official enemies of the United States, they quickly became the villains of the piece, responsible for unspeakable conditions within Cambodia and guilty of unprovoked aggression. Meanwhile, the United States backed its ally China as it conducted a punitive invasion of Vietnam in Febru- ary 1979 and reconstructed the defeated Pol Pot forces.
In the early stages of phase III, it was alleged "that the Vietnamese are now conducting a subtle 'genocide' in Cambodia," a charge tacitly endorsed in a CIA demographic study, which estimated a population drop of 700,000 during "the first year of the Heng Samrin rule. "22 This new "holocaust" was constructed on the basis of serious misinterpreta-
262 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
tion of available evidence, as was demonstrated by Michael Vickery in a response to William Shawcross's warnings of "the end of Cam~ bodia,"23 but not before it had left its mark on popular perceptions, and many distortions and, indeed, contradictions persist. In his Quality of Mercy, Shawcross agrees that, as Vickery had concluded, there was no large-scale famine of the character initially reported,24 but he later wrote that the Heng Samrin regime "was responsible for creating many of the conditions that caused the famine" in Cambodia. These conflict- ing accounts were noted by Australian Cambodia scholar Ben Kiernan, who suggested a partial explanation: "There was a threat of famine, as the Heng Samrin government proclaimed in mid-I919. But it was offset by the small but crucial December-January harvest, which Shawcross hardly mentions, and by the massive international aid program, which he regularly denigrates. "25
The eagerness to uncover Vietnamese villainy in "ending Cam- bodia," the easy reliance on sources known to be unreliable,26 and the subsequent evasions after the accusations dissolve are readily explained by U. S, (indeed, general Western-bloc) hostility to Vietnam, which led the United States to align itself quietly with Pol Pot and to transform its alleged concern over Cambodians to the victims of the Vietnamese occupation.
Phase III also had a domestic U,S. aspect that is highly relevant to our concerns. In an intriguing exercise, characteristic of system-sup- portive propaganda campaigns, it was charged that the horrors of phase II were passed over in "silence" at the time. This alleged fact, devel- oped in William Shawcross's influential book Quality ojMercy, elicited much commentary on "Holocaust and Modem Conscience," the: subti- tle of Shawcross's book, and on the failure of civilized people to react appropriately to ongoing atrocities. In "Phase III at home" (p. 288), we will turn to the merits of this charge with regard to phase II. As for phase I of "the decade of the genocide," the charge of silence is dis- tinctly applicable, but it was never raised, then or now, nor is phase I designated a period of "holocaust" or "genocide" in mainstream litera- ture, Phase 1 elicited no calls for international intervention or trials for crimes against humanity, and it has since been largely expunged from the record. In retrospect, the harshest critics within the mainstream attribute "the destruction of Cambodian society" during phase I to "years of warfare" and "careless policies of the White House," nothing more,27 The issue of U. S, bombing of Cambodia did arise during the Watergate hearings, but the primary concern there was the failure to notify Congress.
Michael Vickery suggests an "interesting comparison which an in-
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS A~D CAMBODIA 263
vestigative journalist might make" if truly concerned about the prob- lems of the region-namely, between Cambodia, during phase III, and Thailand, "where there has been no war, foreign invasion, carpet bombing, nor revolution, and where foreign investment is massive and the sympathy of the most advanced western powers is enjoyed," but where conditions in the peasant society were so terrible that "since 1980 substantial foreign 'refugee' aid near the border has been given to 'Affected Thai Villagers,' whose health and living standard, much to the shock of foreign aid personnel, were found to be little better than the condition ofCambodian refugees. "28 No such comparison was under- taken, nor was there even a flicker of concern over simultaneous re- ports, buried in appropriate obscurity, about the tens of thousands of children, many under ten years old, working as "virtual slaves" in Thai factories resembling concentration camps,29 nor over the normal condi- tions of peasant life in the region, now exposed to the visitors flocking to the border camps to witness the consequences of Communist terror and express their compassion for its victims.
The actual scale of the slaughter and destruction during the two authentic phases of large-scale killings during the "decade of the geno- cide" (phases I and II) would be difficult to estimate at best, and the problems have been compounded by a virtual orgy of falsification serv- ing political ends that are all too obvious. 3o The Finnish Inquiry Com- mission estimates that about 600,000 people in a population of over seven million died during phase I, while two million people became refugees. 31 For the second phase, they give 75,000 to 150,000 as a "realistic estimate" for outright executions, and a figure of roughly one million dead from killings, hunger, disease, and overwork. Vickery's analysis is the most careful attempt to sort out the confused facts to date. He accepts as plausible a "war loss" of over 500,000 for the first phase, calculated from the CIA estimates but lower than their conclu- sions (see note 31), and about 750,000 "deaths in excess of normal and due to the special conditions of OK," with perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 executed and a total population decline for this period of about
4 00,000. 32
These estimates, the most careful currently available in print to our
knowledge, suggest that the toll under phase II of "the genocide" is somewhat greater than that under phase I, although not radically dif- ferent in scale. But before accepting these figures at face value we must bear in mind that part of the death toll under phase II must be at- tributed to the conditions left by the U. S. war. As the war ended, deaths from starvation in Phnom Penh alone were running at about 100,000 a year, and the U. S. airlift that kept the population alive was immedi-
:64 MANUFACTURIl"G CONSENT
ately terminated. Sources close to the U. S. government predicted a million deaths in Cambodia if U. S. aid were to cease. A Western doctor working in Phnom Penh in 1974-75 reported that
This generation is going to be a lost generation of children. Mal- nutrition is going to affect their numbers and their mental capaci- ties. So, as well as knocking off a generation of young men, the war is knocking off a generation of children.
The V. S. embassy estimated that available rice in Phnom Penh would suffice for at most a few weeks. The final V. S. AID report observed that the country faced famine in 1975, with 75 percent of its draft animals destroyed by the war, and that rice planting for the next harvest, eight months hence, would have to be done "by the hard labor of seriously malnourished people. " The report predicted "widespread starvation" and "Slave labor and starvation rations for half the nation's people" for the coming year, and "general deprivation and suffering . . . over the next two or three years before Cambodia can get back to rice self- sufficiency. "33
There is also the matter of the effect of the U. S. bombing on the Khmer Rouge and the peasant society that provided their social base, a factor noted by all serious analysts. Cambodia specialist Milton Os- borne concludes that Communist terror was "surely a reaction to the terrible bombing of Communist-held regions" by the U,S. Air Force. Another Cambodia scholar, David Chandler, comments that the bomb- ing turned "thousands of young Cambodians into participants in an anti-American crusade," as it "destroyed a good deal of the fabric of prewar Cambodian society and provided the CPK (Khmer Rouge] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution," a "class warfare between the 'base people: who had been bombed, and the 'new people' who had taken refuge from the bombing and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States. " <<French intransigence had turned nationalists into Commu- nists," Philip Windsor observes, while "American ruthlessness now turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics. "34 One may debate the weight that should be assigned to this factor in determining Khmer Rouge policies, embittering the peasant society of "base people," and impelling them to force those they perceived as collaborators in their destruction to endure the lives of poor peasants or worse. But that it was a factor can hardly be doubted.
Assessing these various elements, it seems fair to describe the re-
-t
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 265
sponsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities during "the decade of the genocide" as being roughly in the same range.
Little is known about phase I of "the genocide. " There was little interest in ascertaining the facts, at the time or since. The Finnish Inquiry Commission Report devotes three cursory pages to the topic, because the information available is so meager. The second phase has been far mOre intensively studied, and by now substantial evidence is available about what took place. David Chandler and Ben Kiernan observe that as a result of the intense interest in phase II, "we know a great deal more about the texture of daily life in Democratic Kampu- chea, supposedly a 'hermit' regime, than we do about the ostensibly open regimes of the Khmer Republic (1970-1975) or the Sihanouk era (1954-1970) which preceded it. "35 Despite this already large imbalance in knowledge, the Cambodia Documentation Center in New York City concentrates on phase II of the genocide. The dramatic difference in the information available for the two phases, and the focus of the ongoing research effort, are readily explicable in terms of a propaganda model.
Outside of marginal Maoist circles, there was virtually no doubt from early on that the Khmer Rouge regime under the emerging leader Pol Pot was responsible for gruesome atrocities. But there were differing assessments of the scale and character of these crimes.
State Department Cambodia specialists were skeptical of the allega- tions that had received wide publicity by 1977-rightly, so subsequent inquiry revealed. The Far Eastern Economic Review based its January 1979 conclusion that the population had actually risen during the Pol Pot period on CIA sources, and its very knowledgeable correspondent Nayan Chanda, discussing the background for the Vietnamese inva- sion, reported that "some observers are convinced that had the Cambo- dian regime got a year's reprieve, its internal and international image would have been improved enough to make any Vietnamese drive difficult if not impossible. "36
Differing assessments persisted even after the abundant evidence provided by the flow of refugees to Thailand in 1979 and visits to Cambodia, which also provided the first significant information about the years 1977-78. At one extreme, Pol Pot continued to be described as having forged new patterns of genocide comparable to the worst excesses of Hitler and Stalin. At the other extreme, we have the postwar evaluation by U. S. government specialist Douglas Pike, now head of the University of California Indochina Archives, the "independent- minded" scholar lauded by Freedom House and the exemplar of the
266 MAKUFACTURING CONSENT
new, nonideological scholarship much admired by the New York Times.
Pike described Pol Pot in November 1979 as the "charismatic" leader
of a "bloody but successful peasant revolution with a substantial resi-
due of popular support," under which "on a statistical basis, most of them [peasants] . . . did not experience much in the way of brutality. "37
The 1980 CIA demographic study assigns the Pol Pot--era executions
to the period ending in January 1977, and for 1977-78 merely says that "living conditions most likely did not vary during these two years from
the conditions during 1976. " although as was known when the CIA study was undertaken, these later years were the worst, by far. in the context of internal purges and the escalating conflict with Vietnam at
a time when the United States was beginning its "tilt" toward China
and Pol Pot. The CIA concludes that among the "old people," the j "rural population" who were "the foundation for the new Khmer Rouge revolutionary society. " there was a slight increase in population through the DK period. A still more muted assessment is provided by
the close U. S. ally Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as "party strongman"
in China in December 1978 and soon implemented his p1a. n to "punish Vietnam," and who remained the main supporter of Pol Pot.
He bitterly opposed attempts to remove the Khmer Rouge from their leading role ~ in the DK coalition in 1984. stating in a rage that "I do not understand
why some people want to remove Pol Pot. It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the Viet- namese aggressors. "38 Deng has been backed in this stance by the Reagan administration (see "Phase III in Indochina," p. 285). 38
In addition to such real examples of less harsh interpretations of the Pol Pot period, there are also mythical ones to which we return.
6. 2. 3. The "not-so-gentle" land: some relevant history
Part of the illusory story constructed about Cambodia during the 1970S
and since is that this "gentle land" with its "smiling people" had known
little suffering before the country was drawn into the Indochina war and
then subjected to Pol Pot "autogenocide. " The reality is different. Behind the famous "Khmer smile," as Prince Sihanouk's French ad-
viser Charles Meyer observed. lies ample bitterness and violence. 39 Vickery observes that earlier chronicles "are filled with references t o j public executions, ambushes, torture, village-burnings and forced emi- . 1 gration," with the destruction of villages and landscapes, torture, and
1
I
, j
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AsD CAMBODIA 267
killing a matter of course, and few institutional restraints on terror. The peasantry of inner Cambodia, largely unknown to Western scholarship or to the urban population, appear to have lived under conditions of extreme violence and hatred for the oppressors from outside the village.
During the French war of reconquest in the late I940s, up to "per- haps one million rural inhabitants . . . were forcibly 'regrouped. ' " The huge flow of refugees to Phnom Penh during phase r of the "decade of the genocide" was not the first massive dislocation in recent history, Vickery continues, adding that it is, furthermore, "a strange kind of history" that regards the displacement of people fleeing from U. S. bombs and savage fighting "as somehow less abhorrent or more 'nor- mal' than the reverse movement of 1975," the forcible evacuation when the peasant army of the Khmer Rouge conquered the city. Leaders of the anti-French resistance after World War II describe horrifying atrocities conducted with obvious pleasure as a "normal" part of "Khmer mores. " In the same years, government forces led by Lon N01, who was to head the U. S. -backed client government in the early I970s, carried out wholesale massacres in villages as the French withdrew, induding such "individual tests of strength" as "grasping infants by the
legs and pulling them apart," actions that "had probably not been forgonen by the men of that area who survived to become the Khmer Rouge troops" whose later atrocities in this "gentle land" aroused such outrage in the West. "Thus for the rural 8o-go percent of the Cambo- dian people," Vickery concludes, "arb. itrary justice, sudden violent death, political oppression, exploitative use of religion and anti-reli- gious reaction, both violent and quiescent, were common facts of life long before the war and revolution of the 1970s. " These conditions elicited no interest in the West. "The creations of Pol Pot-ism were all there in embryo," Vickery continues, to be "directed first of all at the urban population" after a war which was in large measure "a war between town and countryside in which the town's battle was increas- ingly for the sole purpose of preserving its privileges while the rural areas suffered. '-'40
It is superfluous to observe that the United States deployed its ample means of violence in defense of urban privilege. But, in fact, these tasks were only of secondary importance. For the United States, the destruc- tion of rural Cambodia was ancillary to the goal of maintaining in power the client regime in South Vietnam.
Contrary to the arrangements in Laos and Vietnam, the Geneva Accords afforded no recognition lo lhe anti-French resistance in Cam- bodia, a source of much binerness. The country was ruled by Prince Sihanouk until March 1970, when he was overthrown in a coup sup-
268 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
ported by the United States. 41 Throughout this period, Sihanouk at- tempted a difficult balancing act both internally and externally. Within Cambodia, he repressed the left and peasant uprisings and attempted to hold off the right, although power largely remained in the hands of right-wing urban elites throughout. Externally, he tried to preserve a measure of neutrality against the background of the expanding Indo- china war, which, he expected, would end in a Communist victory. 42
Sihanouk's neutralist efforts were unappreciated by the United States and its allies. Diem's troops attacked border regions from 1957, and there were also Thai provocations. A coup attempt in 1959, proba- bly backed by the CIA, as generally assumed in Cambodia, was foiled; this should be seen in the context of general U. S. subversion in the region in the post-Geneva period, induding a CIA-backed coup and invasion aimed at overthrowing Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958, subver- sion of the elected government of Laos in the same year, and the efforts to destroy the anti-French resistance within South Vietnam and to consolidate the Diem dictatorship while undermining the political ar- rangements at Geneva. By 1963, CIA-backed Khmer Serei forces fre- quently attacked Cambodia from South Vietnamese and Thai bases at a time when the United States was intensifying its clandestine opera- tions in Laos and maneuvering, with increasing violence, to block a political settlement in South Vietnam. By 1966, the Khmer Serei "de- clared war on Cambodia and claimed responsibility for incursions across the border. "43
Attacks by U. S. and Saigon anny forces against border posts and villages in Cambodia intensified from the early 1960s, causing hundreds of casualties a year. Later, Vietnamese peasants and guerrillas fled for refuge to border areas in Cambodia, particularly after the murderous U. S. military operations in South Vietnam in early 1967, giving rise to cynical charges from Washington, echoed in the media, about Commu- nist encroachment into neutral Cambodia. By the time of the 1970 coup that overthrew Sihanouk, Vietnamese were scattered along border areas to a maximum depth of about twenty-five kilometers, according to most sources. The first evidence of Vietnamese encampments in Cambodia was discovered in late 1967, close to the unmarked border. While there was much outrage in the United States about "North Vietnamese ag- gression," the internal view in Washington was considerably more nuanced. From the Pentagon Papers we learn that as late as May 1967- well after the U. S. operations that caused cross-border flight-high Pentagon officials believed that Cambodia was "becoming more and more imponant as a supply base-now offood and medicines, perhaps ammunition later. " A year earlier, an American study team investigated
TilE INDOCHISA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 269
specific charges by the U. S. government on the scene and found them without substance although they did come across the site of a recent U. S. helicopter-gunship attack on a Cambodian village (one of many, according to the local population), first denied by the U. S. government, then conceded, since American eyewitnesses (including CBS-TV) were present-the usual pattern.
The Cambodian government reported many such incidents. Thus Cambodia complained to the United Nations that on February 24, 1967, "a large number of armed forces elements consisting of Americans, South Vietnamese and South Koreans entered Cambodian territory and fired heavily on the Khmer village of Chrak Kranh . . . [which1was then invaded and burnt by the United States-South Vietnamese troops" who occupied the village until March 3. By April 1969, rubber plantations were subjected to defoliation by air attack. In January 1970, an official Cambodian government White Paper reported thousands of such incidents with many deaths, giving pictures, dates, and other details, and also noting that not a single Viet Cong body had ever been found after U. S. -Saigon bombardments or ground attacks.
Virtually none of this was ever reported in the United States-even the official White Paper-although the information was readily availa- ble in official documents and reputable foreign sources, and in easily ignored peace-movement literature. 44 The agency of violence was once again the wrong one.
The occasional media reaction to these incursions was instructive. On March 25, 1964, New York Times correspondent Max Frankel, now executive editor, reported a Saigon army (ARVN) attack on the Cam- bodian village of Chantrea with armored cars and bombers, leaving many villagers killed and wounded. The ARVN forces were accom- panied by U. S. advisers, including a U. S. army pilot "dragged from the wreckage" of an observer plane "shot down in the action. " Diplomats on the scene confirmed that "at least one troop-carrying helicopter had landed at Chantrea with three Americans on board. " Frankel was out- raged-at Cambodia, which had the gall to demand reparations, leaving Washington "alarmed and saddened, but confused. " The headline reads: "Stomping on U. S. Toes: Cambodia Typical of Many Small Nations Putting Strain on a Policy of Patience. " Cambodia has "bor- rowed a leaf from Fidel Castro's book," Frankel stormed, by requesting compensation for this U. S. atrocity: "It is open season again for the weaker nations to stomp on the toes of big ones. . . . Leading the pack in big-power baiting these days is one of the smallest of nations, the Southeast Asian kingdom of Cambodia" with its "clever, headstrong, erratic leader," whom Washington finds "lacking some of the talent and
270 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
temperament for the job," although "the Administration's instinct has been to try to save a wayward young nation's independence in spite of itself and, at times, despite its own leaders. " Washington is also alarmed by "Cambodia's current effort to force the United States into a major conference that would embarrass its Thai and Vietnamese friends," Frankel continues, an effort that will "be resisted"-referring to a conference that would settle border questions and guarantee Cam- bodia's neutrality at a time when the United States was desperately seeking to undermine international efforts to neutralize South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia so as to avert the major war toward which the United States was driving because of its political weakness in Indo- china.
This classic of colonialist paternalism reflects quite accurately the general mood of the day-as does the refusal to report such trivial matters as the regular V. S. -ARVN attacks on Cambodia, which have largely passed from history in the United States, apart from the dissi- dent literature.
6. 2. 4. Phase I: The U. S. destruction of Cambodia
On March 18, 1969, the notorious "secret bombings" began. One week later, on March 26, the Cambodian government publicly condemned the bombing and strafing of "the Cambodian population living in the border regions . . . almost daily by U. S. aircraft," with increasing killing and destruction, alleging that these attacks were directed against "peaceful Cambodian farmers" and demanding that "these criminal attacks must immediately and definitively stop. . . . " Prince Sihanouk called a press conference on March 28 in which he emphatically denied reports circulating in the United States that he "would not oppose U. S. bombings of communist targets within my frontiers. " "Unarmed and innocent people have been victims of U. S. bombs," including "the latest bombing, the victims of which were Khmer peasants, women and children in particular. " He then issued an appeal to the international press: "I appeal to you to publicize abroad this very clear stand of Cambodia-that is, I will in any case oppose all bombings on Cambo- dian territory under whatever pretext. "45
It will come as no surprise that his appeal went unanswered. Further- more, this material has been suppressed up to the present time, apart from the dissident literature. '"' The standard position within the main-
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 271
stream, adopted by defenders of the bombing and critics as well, is that "Sihanouk did not protest" (William Shawcross). When the "secret bombings" became public knowledge in 1973, it was claimed that Siha- nouk had privately authorized bombing of Vietnamese bases near the border areas. True or false, that is irrelevant to the suppression of Sihanouk's impassioned appeals, which referred to the bombing of Khmer peasants. Furthermore, as we observed in earlier discussion, "while commentators and media analysts may draw whatever conclu- sions they please from the conflicting evidence available, this does not entitle them to suppress what is, by any standards, crucial evidence, in this case, Sihanouk's attempt to arouse international protest over the U. S. bombing of the civilian society. "47
Reviewing this period in his Cambodia Year Zero, Franc;ois Pon- chaud remarks that Sihanouk called the U. S. bombings of "Vietcong bases" a "scandal and a crime over Radio Phnom Penh, but nobody was deceived. " Ponchaud and his readers, however, are deceived: Sihanouk publicly denounced the bombing and other attacks on Khmer peasants, and not only over Radio Phnom Penh but in quite public documents and appeals to the international press. In his Sideshow, Shawcross says only that Cambodia "continued to denounce" American air and artil- lery attacks through 1969, but "made no public protest that specifically mentioned B-52 attacks" (p. 94}-true, but irrelevant for the reasons repeated in the last paragraph. 48
In May 1969, William Beecher reported B-52 raids on "Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps in Cambodia," citing U. S. sources. Beecher stated that "Cambodia has not made any pro- test," disregarding Sihanouk's appeals and his protest against the mur- der of "Khmer peasants, women and children in particular," not Vietnamese military bases. Beecher also commented that "in the past, American and South Vietnamese forces had occasionally fired across the bOrder and even called in fighters or helicopter gunships to counter fire they received from enemy units there," ignoring the somewhat more important fact that U. S. aircraft and U. S. -ARVN-South Korean forces had been attacking Cambodian villages, according to the "friendly" government of Cambodia. The headline for his article states falsely: "Raids in Cambodia by U. S. Unprotested. " Beecher's article caused consternation in Washington, setting off the first stage of what later became the Watergate scandaL As we have commented elsewhere, "It is remarkable that Beecher's unique though quite inadequate ac- count is now held up as evidence that the press maintained its honor throughout this period, despite the crimes of Richard Nixon. "49
Once again, the U. S. escalation of the war against Cambodia in 1969
272 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
coincided with similar efforts in Laos and Vietnam. The general reac- tion was similar throughout, and remains so. The post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign, which thoroughly demolished the civilian base of the NLF, was regarded as so uninteresting that it is passed over in virtual silence in the popular retrospectives. As for the wars in Laos and Cambodia, Elterman comments, after reviewing the major media cover- age, that apart from the "alternative press," they were virtually "invisi- ble" in the press in 1969 when they were expanding to new heights as the U. S. Air Force was shifted from North Vietnam to Laos and Cam- bodia after the "bombing halt. "50
In March 1970, Cambodia was drawn irrevocably into the camage sweeping Indochina. On March 18, Sihanouk was overthrown in "an upper-class coup, not a revolution," carried out for "interests of domes- tic and political expedience," and with at least "indirect U. S. support," if not more. ;']. Two days later, ARVN ground and air operations began in Svay Rieng Province, at the Vietnamese border, continuing through April and leading to the U. S. -ARVN invasion on April 29, conducted with an extreme brutality sometimes vividly depicted in the media, which were particularly appalled by the behavior of the ARVN forces. Much of the enormous civilian toll, however, resulted from air power, including U. S. bombing strikes that leveled or severely damaged towns and villages. 52 One effect of the invasion was to drive the Vietnamese forces away from the border and deeper into Cambodia, where they began to support the growing peasant resistance against the coup lead- ers. A second effect, as described by U. S. correspondent Richard Dud- man, who witnessed these events at first hand after his capture by the Cambodian resistance, was that "the bombing and shooting was radi- calizing the people of rural Cambodia and was turning the countryside into a massive, dedicated, and effective revolutionary base. "B Cam- bodia was now plunged into civil war, with increasing savagery on both sides.
U. S. bombing continued at a high level after the withdrawal ofU. S. forces from Cambodia. By late 1971, an investigating team of the Gen- eral Accounting Office concluded that U. S. and Saigon army bombing is "a very significant cause of refugees and civilian casualties," estimat- ing that almost a third ofthe seven-million population may be refugees. U. S. intelligence reported that "what the villagers feared most was the possibility of indiscriminate artillery and air strikes," and refugee re- ports and other sources confirm that these were the major cause of civilian casualties and the flight of refugees. 54
Information about what was happening in the peasant society of Cambodia in the early 1970S was limited but not unavailable. There
THE INDOCHI~A WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 273
were, first of all, many refugees with stories to tell, although the media were not interested. There was also an eyewitness account by French Southeast Asia specialist Serge Thion, who spent two weeks in regions controlled by the Cambodian guerrillas. His reports were offered to the Washington Post, but rejected. 55 They were of no more interest than the reports of life under the bombing in Laos, or similar questions regard- ing Vietnam throughout the war and in the retrospectives.
As in Laos, the escalating war remained largely "invisible" in the media. Surveying a five-month period in early 1972 in the national press, Elterman found that "In terms of war casualties, the focus in The New York Times and Time was on military-related deaths and almost always only those that occurred in Vietnam, ignoring also the civilian deaths and refugees in that country too. . . . During the winter and spring of 1972, the war in Cambodia and Laos was ignored more than usually with most of the Indo-China news coverage given to the North Vietnamese offensive into South Vietnam and the United States bombing ofHanoi and Haiphong. . . . Time, in fact, had more coverage
on civilian casualties in Northern Ireland during the first half of 1972 than it did on the Indo-China War. "56
Meanwhile, Cambodia was being systematically demolished, and the Khmer Rouge, hitherto a marginal element, were becoming a significant force with substantial peasant support in inner Cambodia, increasingly victimized by U. S. terror.