"50
In March 1970, Cambodia was drawn irrevocably into the camage sweeping Indochina.
In March 1970, Cambodia was drawn irrevocably into the camage sweeping Indochina.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
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. As for the U. S. -backed Lon Nol regime, Michael Vickery points out that their "client mentality" and subse- quent "dependency led them to acquiesce in, or even encourage, the devastation of their own country by one of the worst aggressive on- slaughts in modern warfare, and therefore to appear as traitors to a victorious peasant army which had broken with old patron-client rela- tionships and had been self-consciously organized and indoctrinated
for individual, group, and national self-reliance. "S7
In early 1973, U. S. bombing increased to a scale that might truly
merit the term "genocidal" used by the Finnish Inquiry Commission. In the fi~'e-monrh period after the signing of the Paris peace accords, the bombing matched the level of the preceding three years,58 and it was to continue at that level until Congress forced a halt in August- although bombing and shelling of the countryside by armies of the U. S. -backed regime were to continue on a substantial scale, with U. S. guidance and supply, until the war's end. Over a million refugees fled to Phnom Penh, which became a horror chamber while the countryside was laid waste, including B-S2 bombing targeted "on the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia," where U. S. Air Force maps showed
"thousands of square miles of densely populated, fertile areas . . .
274 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
marked black from the inundation"-"the careless policies of the White House" criticized by William Shawcross. 59 At just this time, Khmer Rouge programs became extremely harsh, so available studies indicate, including a refugee study by Kenneth Quinn, of the National Security Council staff, who never considers a possible causal connection, how- ever, between the harshening of policy and the sharp increase in the program of saturation bombing. Timothy Carney, the second of the three major U. S. government specialists on Cambodia (Quinn, Carney,
Charles Twining), also notes that "sometime in 1973 the party appar- ently decided to accelerate its program to alter Khmer society," for no suggested reason. 60
6. 2. 5. Phase I in the media
During this period, there was extensive media coverage of Cambodia, and there was no dearth of evidence on what was taking place in the regions subjected to U. S. Air Force atrocities. It was not necessary to undertake a difficult expedition to the Thai-Cambodia border to find refugees who would tell what they knew, but the victims of phase I of "the decade of the genocide" who were huddled in the slums of Phnom Penh or other towns and villages to which they fled were of no more interest than those in the miserable camps on the outskirts of Vien- tiane-unless they had tales of terror by the Cambodian insurgents to recount (the Vietnamese long having faded into the background). 6I No books or articles were written by Father Ponchaud, who lived among the peasants and sympathized deeply with their plight, so he informed us when the time came to expose atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The same was true of many others who were later to expre~' their heartfelt concerns for Cambodians suffering under Khmer Rouge terror, but who did not seek to investigate and publicize the plight of the rural population during phase I of the genocide, when such efforts might have had a crucial impact on the policies that were destroying Cam-
bodia, a fact that might merit some thought.
The standard U. S. media picture of phase I is something like this.
"Umil the turning point in 1973, . . . on the surface, Cambodians smiled and were full of pleasantries,"62 but afterwards the mood of "Cambodi- ans" became one of "apathy" and "resignation" because "impoverished farmers, refugees and soldiers" (most of whom were press-ganged into service from among the poor and refugee communities) felt that their "leaders seem powerless to defend them against human and natural adversities. "63 There is a "spirit of doom" as the government is "teeter-
THE INDOCHINII WARS (Il): LAOS A:-JD CAMBODIA 275
ing on the wreckage of the democratic republic it set out to create" with the coup that overthrew Sihanouk. 64 The Americans try, but with little success, to "give the Cambodians some sense of confidence in their leadership," but, nevertheless, "Cambodian morale has been sliding steadily for a long time. " However, "Rather than any sense of urgency here [in Phnom Penh], there is the grand fatalism that is so much a part of Cambodia's Hindu-influenced Buddhism,"65 although it somehow does not seem to affect "the enemy," whose "determination" in the face of the awesome firepower unleashed against them "baffles" the Ameri- cans. But there is still "a feeling that the Americans will save the Cambodians at the last minute because they cannot save themselves. " "Almost every conversation with a Cambodian now is the same," namely, fear that the "demoralized army will collapse" when the American bombing terminates on August 15. The impending bombing cutoff is "painful" to the "Cambodians" because of "the recent steady successes of enemy troops" against overwhelming odds. In his final summary report from Phnom Penh as the U. S. bombing ended, Sydney Schanberg raised "the key unanswered question: How have the insur- gents-without any planes of their own, and without the extensive artillery support the Government troops have, with only small arms and mobile weapons . . . -been able not just to match the Government
forces, which are more than twice their size, but to push the Govern- ment forces back and sustain the offensive for six months without any significant lull? " "Since the insurgents are not superhuman, there must be other explanations for their success. " Perhaps they are so "deter- mined and capable" because they "are less fatalistic than the Khmers on this side" and "believe they can change their environment" (U. S. embassy official). In this regard, "the enemy" are quite different from "the Cambodian villager," who "usually has no politics" and "is not interested in taking sides, only to be left alone to farm and fish and feed his family and once in a while to celebrate on a Buddhist holiday. "66
The civil war, then, pits "the Cambodians" against "the enemy," Cambodian peasants who were surely not full ofpleasantries during the pre-1973 U. S. bombings. "The Cambodians," fatalistic and resigned, either want to be left alone ("the Cambodian villager") or hope that the United States will save them and their government, striving for democ- racy ("the Cambodians" generally). The enemy struggle on successfully against overwhelming odds, baffling the Americans-exactly as Ameri- cans building "democracy" have been baffled by the same problem in
South Vietnam, Central America, and many other places. Since these are the conclusions drawn from "almost every conversation with a Cambodian," they are surely realistic, at least as long as we understand
276 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
that "Cambodians" are those Cambodians who are not "the enemy" of 4 the objective press, just as "South Vietnamese" were South V ietnam ese' collaborating with the U. S. aggressors.
The framework is the usual one, although perhaps a shade more egregious in the light of what might have been passing through the minds of those Cambodians who were not "Cambodians" during phase I of the genocide.
About that topic, we learn very little from the media. The refugees flooding Phnom Penh and other areas where U. S. reporters traveled were virtually ignored. To gain a measure of this remarkable fact, let us review the reports during these months in the New York Time~ most of them by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Sydney Schan- berg, who, more than any other U. S. reporter, came to be regarded as the conscience of the media with regard to Cambodia.
Schanberg arrived in Phnom Penh in May 1973. at the height of the intensified bombing, which continued until the mid-August halt. Dur- ing this period, the Times published twenty-seven of his reports from Cambodia, many of them long and detailed, along with a column in which he expressed his contempt for the "so-called international press corps" who spend their time "interviewing each other" in the Hotel Le Phnom. 67
From the outset, Schanberg reports "refugees pouring into the city," 4 but there are no interviews with refugees who relate the circumstances "'I oflife under the bombs. We hear a "well to do Cambodian woman" who
tells us that "The bombing is terrible"; she is "not frightened, just 4 annoyed-because it wakes my baby up every night in the middle of
the night, and I have to get up" (May 3). But those villagers who want
to be left alone are not granted the opportunity to relay their accounts
of somewhat more serious concerns, apart from a few scattered phrases,
and there is not a word to suggest that refugees might have had any attitude, apart from fear, with regard to those "determined" fighters
who "believe they can change their environment:' although plainly
they had a solid base in the peasant society that was being torn to shreds
by saturation bombing. As in Laos a few years earlier, the refugees
simply had the wrong tale to tell, and the kinds of stories that readily
flow if one is sufficiently interested to inquire are lacking here.
Running through the columns seriatim for relevant material, number 5 (May II) quotes a Western European diplomat who says that "Ameri- can men in American planes are bombing the hell out of this place," and notes that the U. S. aircraft "do not always receive accurate an- swers" about civilians in the targeted areas "from the Cambodian com- manders" who direct the jet fighter-bombers. The Cambodians, then,
THE I~DOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS A~D CAMBODIA 277
are to blame for the civilian casualties that must result, although "no reliable figures are available" and refugees are not asked to supplement with their personal knowledge. The next two columns (May 24) 27) are the only ones concerned directly with the effect of the bombing in the countryside. The first reports "extensive" destruction from bombing that has wiped out "a whole series of villages" along the main highway, with often not even a piece of a house left standing for miles, while "a few people wander forlornly through the rubble, stunned by what has happened, skirting the craters, picking at the debris. " A group ofvillag- ers from Svay Rieng Province) abutting Vietnam) report the destruction of seven villages) with many killed. "The frightened villagers uprooted by the bombing have a great deal to say," Schanberg comments, but we do not read it here. Rather, he explains that "There is no doubt that the Seventh Air Force is making a marked effort to avoid civilian casualties-at least outside the eastern third of the country, which is solidly held by the enemy"; and if there are casualties it is the fault of Cambodian military officials who request air strikes with "almost no
concern about civilian lives or property. " The second column informs us that "the refugees frequently tell about the bombing," which has destroyed villages and "terrified all the rest of the villagers)" a Western diplomat reports. But the refugees are granted only two phrases, an "incongruously polite" request that "I would be very glad if the Gov- ernment would stop sending the planes to bomb," and a plea from a monk to ask the Cnited States and other governments: "Don't destroy everything in Cambodia. "
We hear no more from the refugees until column 15 (July 26), a graphic account of "a terror attack on the civilian population"-by Communist forces who shelled the outskirts of Phnom Penh. A weeping child describes how her little brother's hand was cut off, and the blood- stained road and doorsteps testify to Communist barbarity, as distinct from the operations of the scrupulous American command. Column 19 (Aug. 5) tells of thousands of new refugees "fleeing from enemy as- saults," and column 21 (Aug. 7) describes Cambodian soldiers looting a recaptured village that "looked as if struck by a storm with a tongue of fire," with many houses "smashed in by shells," but no word from the victims, who had fled. Then follow three columns (Aug. 7) 9, 12) describing in extensive detail the bombing of the village of Neak Luong-in error-killing many government soldiers and their families.
This is the sole example of American bombing that was shown in the film The Killing Fields, the only depiction there of phase I of the genocide) a memory that is acceptable since it was plainly an error.
We located eighteen additional reports datelined Cambodia) from
278 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
March 25 through August 18. 68 One quotes a villager who says "The bomben ma. y kill some Communists but they kill everyone else, too" (Browne, April II), but we found no other examples of reactions by the victims, although there is a picture of a Cambodian soldier weeping for his wife and ten children killed in the bombing ofNeak Luong by error (Aug. 10).
In forty-five columns, then, there are three in which victims of U. S. bombing are granted a few phrases to describe what is happening in Cambodia. Not a single column seeks to explore the reactions of the refugees not far from the Hotel Le Phnom, or in Banambang, or in the far more miserable refugee camps in the countryside nearby; or to attempt to develop some sense of what must have been happening under the frenzied bombing of these months. Recall that in Phnom Penh alone there were almost 1. 5 million refugees who had fled from the countryside, some, surely, who must have had some information to relate about phase I of the genocide at its peak. The reader could no doubt ascertain that terrible things were happening in the Cambodian countryside, but what they were remains obscure, and the Americans are explicitly exonerated, apart from the error of bombing the wrong village.
The story remained much the same as phase I of the genocide continued. The horrors in Phnom Penh itself were sometimes vividly described, primarily abroad,69 but there was little effort to determine what was happening in the areas held by the enemy of the U. S. govern- ment-hence the enemy of the U. S. press; virtually the entire country as "the Cambodians" were confined to urban centers swelled by a huge flood of refugees who remain as hidden from view as those in the teeming slums of Saigon or the camps around Vientiane.
Western correspondents evacuated from Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge victory were able to obtain a fleeting picture of what had taken place in the countryside. British correspondent Jon Swain sum- marizes his impressions as follows:
The United States has much to answer for here, not only in terms of human lives and massive material destruction; the rigidity and nastiness of the un-Cambodian like fellows in black who run this country now, or what is left of it, are as much a product of this wholesale American bombing which has hardened and honed their minds as they are a product of Marx and Mao. . . . [The mass evacuation of the cities] does not constitute a deliberate campaign of terror, rather it points to poor organisation, lack of vision and the brutalisation of a people by a long and savage war. . . . The
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II); LAOS AND CAMBODIA 279
war damage here {in the countryside], as everywhere else we saw, is total. Not a bridge is standing, hardly a house. I am told most villagers have spent the war years living semi-permanently under- ground in earth bunkers to escape the bombing. . . . The entire countryside has been churned up by American B-52 bomb craters, whole towns and villages razed. So far I have not seen one intact pagoda. 70
The conditions are much like those reported in 1970 by refugees from the Plain of Jars, in Laos; in both cases, these accounts were almost entirely excluded from the mainstream media.
So ended phase I of the genocide. In later years, those who had transmitted narrowly selected fragments of this tale of horror expressed their bitterness that Cambodia had been "forgotten. " On the tenth anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover, Sydney Schanberg wrote two columns in the New York Times entitled "Cambodia Forgotten. " The first highlights the phrase: "Superpowers care as little today about Cambodians as in 1970," the second dismisses Richard Nixon's 1985 claim that there was no "indiscriminate terror bombing" but only "highly accurate" strikes "against enemy military targets. " Schanberg comments that "Anyone who visited the refugee camps in Cambodia and talked to the civilian survivors of the bombing learned quickly about the substantial casualties. " He recalls that "the Khmer Rouge were a meaningless force when the war was brought to Cambodia in 1970. . . . In order to flourish and grow, they needed a war to feed on. And the superpowers-including this country, with the Nixon incur- sion of 1970 and the massive bombing that followed-provided that war and that nurtUring material. " He does not, however, inform us about which superpower, apart from "this country," invaded Cambodia and subjected it to massive bombing. With comparable even-handedness we might deplore the contribution of the superpowers, including the USSR, to the destruction of Afghanistan, or the attitude of the great powers, including Nazi Germany, toward the victims of the death
camps, whom Schanberg brings up in a later column the same month entitled "Memory is the Answer. " He also does not comment on what the reader of his columns might have learned about life in the Cambo- dian countryside from his reporting during the peak period of the bombing. 71
Others too stress that "memory is the answer. " Commenting on the award-winning film The Killing Fields, Samuel Freedman writes that "While Holocaust survivors have helped perpetuate the memory of Nazi infamy, the Cambodian genocide is already being forgotten,"
280 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
referring to phase II of the genocide, phase I having passed into obliv- ion with no concern. 72 The New York Times reminds us that "Cambodia remains perhaps the most pitiful victim of the Indochina wars," as it is caught between the forces of Pol Pot and Hanoi, which used Pol Pot attacks against Vietnamese villages as "a long-sought pretext to invade" and now exploits "Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army of 30,000 inside Cam- bodia" (in fact, mostly inside Thailand) as "the pretext for remaining in Cambodia. " "Unimaginable slaughter, invasion, brutal occupation have followed famine and pestilence," all attributable to the Commu- nists, although the suffering has been "aggravated by the cynicism of big powers," not further differentiated. As for the United States, "When Vietcong guerrillas used a neutral Cambodia as a sanctuary, it was pounded by American bombs and drawn into a war it hoped to avoid," but that is all. In a later comment, the editors concede that "murderous aerial bombing followed by brutal revolution, famine and civil war" brought Cambodia to ruin, but of all of this, "what cannot be sponged away are the Khmer Rouge's butcheries" and the actions of Hanoi, which has "subjugated and impoverished" Cambodia: phases II and III of "the decade of the genocide. "73
"Memory is the answer," but only when focused on proper targets, far from home.
6. 2. 6. The Pol Pot era
Phase II of "the decade of the genocide" began with the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975.
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-
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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. As for the U. S. -backed Lon Nol regime, Michael Vickery points out that their "client mentality" and subse- quent "dependency led them to acquiesce in, or even encourage, the devastation of their own country by one of the worst aggressive on- slaughts in modern warfare, and therefore to appear as traitors to a victorious peasant army which had broken with old patron-client rela- tionships and had been self-consciously organized and indoctrinated
for individual, group, and national self-reliance. "S7
In early 1973, U. S. bombing increased to a scale that might truly
merit the term "genocidal" used by the Finnish Inquiry Commission. In the fi~'e-monrh period after the signing of the Paris peace accords, the bombing matched the level of the preceding three years,58 and it was to continue at that level until Congress forced a halt in August- although bombing and shelling of the countryside by armies of the U. S. -backed regime were to continue on a substantial scale, with U. S. guidance and supply, until the war's end. Over a million refugees fled to Phnom Penh, which became a horror chamber while the countryside was laid waste, including B-S2 bombing targeted "on the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia," where U. S. Air Force maps showed
"thousands of square miles of densely populated, fertile areas . . .
274 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
marked black from the inundation"-"the careless policies of the White House" criticized by William Shawcross. 59 At just this time, Khmer Rouge programs became extremely harsh, so available studies indicate, including a refugee study by Kenneth Quinn, of the National Security Council staff, who never considers a possible causal connection, how- ever, between the harshening of policy and the sharp increase in the program of saturation bombing. Timothy Carney, the second of the three major U. S. government specialists on Cambodia (Quinn, Carney,
Charles Twining), also notes that "sometime in 1973 the party appar- ently decided to accelerate its program to alter Khmer society," for no suggested reason. 60
6. 2. 5. Phase I in the media
During this period, there was extensive media coverage of Cambodia, and there was no dearth of evidence on what was taking place in the regions subjected to U. S. Air Force atrocities. It was not necessary to undertake a difficult expedition to the Thai-Cambodia border to find refugees who would tell what they knew, but the victims of phase I of "the decade of the genocide" who were huddled in the slums of Phnom Penh or other towns and villages to which they fled were of no more interest than those in the miserable camps on the outskirts of Vien- tiane-unless they had tales of terror by the Cambodian insurgents to recount (the Vietnamese long having faded into the background). 6I No books or articles were written by Father Ponchaud, who lived among the peasants and sympathized deeply with their plight, so he informed us when the time came to expose atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The same was true of many others who were later to expre~' their heartfelt concerns for Cambodians suffering under Khmer Rouge terror, but who did not seek to investigate and publicize the plight of the rural population during phase I of the genocide, when such efforts might have had a crucial impact on the policies that were destroying Cam-
bodia, a fact that might merit some thought.
The standard U. S. media picture of phase I is something like this.
"Umil the turning point in 1973, . . . on the surface, Cambodians smiled and were full of pleasantries,"62 but afterwards the mood of "Cambodi- ans" became one of "apathy" and "resignation" because "impoverished farmers, refugees and soldiers" (most of whom were press-ganged into service from among the poor and refugee communities) felt that their "leaders seem powerless to defend them against human and natural adversities. "63 There is a "spirit of doom" as the government is "teeter-
THE INDOCHINII WARS (Il): LAOS A:-JD CAMBODIA 275
ing on the wreckage of the democratic republic it set out to create" with the coup that overthrew Sihanouk. 64 The Americans try, but with little success, to "give the Cambodians some sense of confidence in their leadership," but, nevertheless, "Cambodian morale has been sliding steadily for a long time. " However, "Rather than any sense of urgency here [in Phnom Penh], there is the grand fatalism that is so much a part of Cambodia's Hindu-influenced Buddhism,"65 although it somehow does not seem to affect "the enemy," whose "determination" in the face of the awesome firepower unleashed against them "baffles" the Ameri- cans. But there is still "a feeling that the Americans will save the Cambodians at the last minute because they cannot save themselves. " "Almost every conversation with a Cambodian now is the same," namely, fear that the "demoralized army will collapse" when the American bombing terminates on August 15. The impending bombing cutoff is "painful" to the "Cambodians" because of "the recent steady successes of enemy troops" against overwhelming odds. In his final summary report from Phnom Penh as the U. S. bombing ended, Sydney Schanberg raised "the key unanswered question: How have the insur- gents-without any planes of their own, and without the extensive artillery support the Government troops have, with only small arms and mobile weapons . . . -been able not just to match the Government
forces, which are more than twice their size, but to push the Govern- ment forces back and sustain the offensive for six months without any significant lull? " "Since the insurgents are not superhuman, there must be other explanations for their success. " Perhaps they are so "deter- mined and capable" because they "are less fatalistic than the Khmers on this side" and "believe they can change their environment" (U. S. embassy official). In this regard, "the enemy" are quite different from "the Cambodian villager," who "usually has no politics" and "is not interested in taking sides, only to be left alone to farm and fish and feed his family and once in a while to celebrate on a Buddhist holiday. "66
The civil war, then, pits "the Cambodians" against "the enemy," Cambodian peasants who were surely not full ofpleasantries during the pre-1973 U. S. bombings. "The Cambodians," fatalistic and resigned, either want to be left alone ("the Cambodian villager") or hope that the United States will save them and their government, striving for democ- racy ("the Cambodians" generally). The enemy struggle on successfully against overwhelming odds, baffling the Americans-exactly as Ameri- cans building "democracy" have been baffled by the same problem in
South Vietnam, Central America, and many other places. Since these are the conclusions drawn from "almost every conversation with a Cambodian," they are surely realistic, at least as long as we understand
276 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
that "Cambodians" are those Cambodians who are not "the enemy" of 4 the objective press, just as "South Vietnamese" were South V ietnam ese' collaborating with the U. S. aggressors.
The framework is the usual one, although perhaps a shade more egregious in the light of what might have been passing through the minds of those Cambodians who were not "Cambodians" during phase I of the genocide.
About that topic, we learn very little from the media. The refugees flooding Phnom Penh and other areas where U. S. reporters traveled were virtually ignored. To gain a measure of this remarkable fact, let us review the reports during these months in the New York Time~ most of them by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Sydney Schan- berg, who, more than any other U. S. reporter, came to be regarded as the conscience of the media with regard to Cambodia.
Schanberg arrived in Phnom Penh in May 1973. at the height of the intensified bombing, which continued until the mid-August halt. Dur- ing this period, the Times published twenty-seven of his reports from Cambodia, many of them long and detailed, along with a column in which he expressed his contempt for the "so-called international press corps" who spend their time "interviewing each other" in the Hotel Le Phnom. 67
From the outset, Schanberg reports "refugees pouring into the city," 4 but there are no interviews with refugees who relate the circumstances "'I oflife under the bombs. We hear a "well to do Cambodian woman" who
tells us that "The bombing is terrible"; she is "not frightened, just 4 annoyed-because it wakes my baby up every night in the middle of
the night, and I have to get up" (May 3). But those villagers who want
to be left alone are not granted the opportunity to relay their accounts
of somewhat more serious concerns, apart from a few scattered phrases,
and there is not a word to suggest that refugees might have had any attitude, apart from fear, with regard to those "determined" fighters
who "believe they can change their environment:' although plainly
they had a solid base in the peasant society that was being torn to shreds
by saturation bombing. As in Laos a few years earlier, the refugees
simply had the wrong tale to tell, and the kinds of stories that readily
flow if one is sufficiently interested to inquire are lacking here.
Running through the columns seriatim for relevant material, number 5 (May II) quotes a Western European diplomat who says that "Ameri- can men in American planes are bombing the hell out of this place," and notes that the U. S. aircraft "do not always receive accurate an- swers" about civilians in the targeted areas "from the Cambodian com- manders" who direct the jet fighter-bombers. The Cambodians, then,
THE I~DOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS A~D CAMBODIA 277
are to blame for the civilian casualties that must result, although "no reliable figures are available" and refugees are not asked to supplement with their personal knowledge. The next two columns (May 24) 27) are the only ones concerned directly with the effect of the bombing in the countryside. The first reports "extensive" destruction from bombing that has wiped out "a whole series of villages" along the main highway, with often not even a piece of a house left standing for miles, while "a few people wander forlornly through the rubble, stunned by what has happened, skirting the craters, picking at the debris. " A group ofvillag- ers from Svay Rieng Province) abutting Vietnam) report the destruction of seven villages) with many killed. "The frightened villagers uprooted by the bombing have a great deal to say," Schanberg comments, but we do not read it here. Rather, he explains that "There is no doubt that the Seventh Air Force is making a marked effort to avoid civilian casualties-at least outside the eastern third of the country, which is solidly held by the enemy"; and if there are casualties it is the fault of Cambodian military officials who request air strikes with "almost no
concern about civilian lives or property. " The second column informs us that "the refugees frequently tell about the bombing," which has destroyed villages and "terrified all the rest of the villagers)" a Western diplomat reports. But the refugees are granted only two phrases, an "incongruously polite" request that "I would be very glad if the Gov- ernment would stop sending the planes to bomb," and a plea from a monk to ask the Cnited States and other governments: "Don't destroy everything in Cambodia. "
We hear no more from the refugees until column 15 (July 26), a graphic account of "a terror attack on the civilian population"-by Communist forces who shelled the outskirts of Phnom Penh. A weeping child describes how her little brother's hand was cut off, and the blood- stained road and doorsteps testify to Communist barbarity, as distinct from the operations of the scrupulous American command. Column 19 (Aug. 5) tells of thousands of new refugees "fleeing from enemy as- saults," and column 21 (Aug. 7) describes Cambodian soldiers looting a recaptured village that "looked as if struck by a storm with a tongue of fire," with many houses "smashed in by shells," but no word from the victims, who had fled. Then follow three columns (Aug. 7) 9, 12) describing in extensive detail the bombing of the village of Neak Luong-in error-killing many government soldiers and their families.
This is the sole example of American bombing that was shown in the film The Killing Fields, the only depiction there of phase I of the genocide) a memory that is acceptable since it was plainly an error.
We located eighteen additional reports datelined Cambodia) from
278 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
March 25 through August 18. 68 One quotes a villager who says "The bomben ma. y kill some Communists but they kill everyone else, too" (Browne, April II), but we found no other examples of reactions by the victims, although there is a picture of a Cambodian soldier weeping for his wife and ten children killed in the bombing ofNeak Luong by error (Aug. 10).
In forty-five columns, then, there are three in which victims of U. S. bombing are granted a few phrases to describe what is happening in Cambodia. Not a single column seeks to explore the reactions of the refugees not far from the Hotel Le Phnom, or in Banambang, or in the far more miserable refugee camps in the countryside nearby; or to attempt to develop some sense of what must have been happening under the frenzied bombing of these months. Recall that in Phnom Penh alone there were almost 1. 5 million refugees who had fled from the countryside, some, surely, who must have had some information to relate about phase I of the genocide at its peak. The reader could no doubt ascertain that terrible things were happening in the Cambodian countryside, but what they were remains obscure, and the Americans are explicitly exonerated, apart from the error of bombing the wrong village.
The story remained much the same as phase I of the genocide continued. The horrors in Phnom Penh itself were sometimes vividly described, primarily abroad,69 but there was little effort to determine what was happening in the areas held by the enemy of the U. S. govern- ment-hence the enemy of the U. S. press; virtually the entire country as "the Cambodians" were confined to urban centers swelled by a huge flood of refugees who remain as hidden from view as those in the teeming slums of Saigon or the camps around Vientiane.
Western correspondents evacuated from Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge victory were able to obtain a fleeting picture of what had taken place in the countryside. British correspondent Jon Swain sum- marizes his impressions as follows:
The United States has much to answer for here, not only in terms of human lives and massive material destruction; the rigidity and nastiness of the un-Cambodian like fellows in black who run this country now, or what is left of it, are as much a product of this wholesale American bombing which has hardened and honed their minds as they are a product of Marx and Mao. . . . [The mass evacuation of the cities] does not constitute a deliberate campaign of terror, rather it points to poor organisation, lack of vision and the brutalisation of a people by a long and savage war. . . . The
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II); LAOS AND CAMBODIA 279
war damage here {in the countryside], as everywhere else we saw, is total. Not a bridge is standing, hardly a house. I am told most villagers have spent the war years living semi-permanently under- ground in earth bunkers to escape the bombing. . . . The entire countryside has been churned up by American B-52 bomb craters, whole towns and villages razed. So far I have not seen one intact pagoda. 70
The conditions are much like those reported in 1970 by refugees from the Plain of Jars, in Laos; in both cases, these accounts were almost entirely excluded from the mainstream media.
So ended phase I of the genocide. In later years, those who had transmitted narrowly selected fragments of this tale of horror expressed their bitterness that Cambodia had been "forgotten. " On the tenth anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover, Sydney Schanberg wrote two columns in the New York Times entitled "Cambodia Forgotten. " The first highlights the phrase: "Superpowers care as little today about Cambodians as in 1970," the second dismisses Richard Nixon's 1985 claim that there was no "indiscriminate terror bombing" but only "highly accurate" strikes "against enemy military targets. " Schanberg comments that "Anyone who visited the refugee camps in Cambodia and talked to the civilian survivors of the bombing learned quickly about the substantial casualties. " He recalls that "the Khmer Rouge were a meaningless force when the war was brought to Cambodia in 1970. . . . In order to flourish and grow, they needed a war to feed on. And the superpowers-including this country, with the Nixon incur- sion of 1970 and the massive bombing that followed-provided that war and that nurtUring material. " He does not, however, inform us about which superpower, apart from "this country," invaded Cambodia and subjected it to massive bombing. With comparable even-handedness we might deplore the contribution of the superpowers, including the USSR, to the destruction of Afghanistan, or the attitude of the great powers, including Nazi Germany, toward the victims of the death
camps, whom Schanberg brings up in a later column the same month entitled "Memory is the Answer. " He also does not comment on what the reader of his columns might have learned about life in the Cambo- dian countryside from his reporting during the peak period of the bombing. 71
Others too stress that "memory is the answer. " Commenting on the award-winning film The Killing Fields, Samuel Freedman writes that "While Holocaust survivors have helped perpetuate the memory of Nazi infamy, the Cambodian genocide is already being forgotten,"
280 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
referring to phase II of the genocide, phase I having passed into obliv- ion with no concern. 72 The New York Times reminds us that "Cambodia remains perhaps the most pitiful victim of the Indochina wars," as it is caught between the forces of Pol Pot and Hanoi, which used Pol Pot attacks against Vietnamese villages as "a long-sought pretext to invade" and now exploits "Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army of 30,000 inside Cam- bodia" (in fact, mostly inside Thailand) as "the pretext for remaining in Cambodia. " "Unimaginable slaughter, invasion, brutal occupation have followed famine and pestilence," all attributable to the Commu- nists, although the suffering has been "aggravated by the cynicism of big powers," not further differentiated. As for the United States, "When Vietcong guerrillas used a neutral Cambodia as a sanctuary, it was pounded by American bombs and drawn into a war it hoped to avoid," but that is all. In a later comment, the editors concede that "murderous aerial bombing followed by brutal revolution, famine and civil war" brought Cambodia to ruin, but of all of this, "what cannot be sponged away are the Khmer Rouge's butcheries" and the actions of Hanoi, which has "subjugated and impoverished" Cambodia: phases II and III of "the decade of the genocide. "73
"Memory is the answer," but only when focused on proper targets, far from home.
6. 2. 6. The Pol Pot era
Phase II of "the decade of the genocide" began with the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975.
