Khmer Rouge’s Slaughter in Cambodia Is Ruled a Genocide

Well, that didn't take too long for them to determine...

The “American bombardment” referred to here - but not explained - meant that the total tonnage of US bombs dropped on Cambodia was at least in the range of 500,000 tons, possibly far more, and either equalled or far exceeded the tonnages that the US dropped in the entire Pacific Theatre during World War Two (500,000 tons) and in the Korean War (454,000). In per capita terms, the bombing of Cambodia exceeded the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan, and the US bombing of North Vietnam (but not that of South Vietnam or possibly, Laos). Remember that Cambodia's land area is about 180,000 square kilometres – similar in size to the US state of Oklahoma, and half the size of Germany. This bombing campaign 'drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success.' After every bombing the Khmer Rouge would 'take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been… Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them… Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.'

Check out this 1980 headline to discover who supported the Pol Pot regime: U.S. to Support Pol Pot Regime For U.N. Seat - Washington Post Sep 16, 1980 · The United States will support the seating of Pol Pot's "democratic Kampuchea" regime in the United Nations again this year despite its abhorrent record on human rights, Secretary of State Edmund ... www.washingtonpost.comhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/09/16/us-to-support...

To avoid revised history as some of the writers here are committing, I would only remark that until Kissinger persuaded Nixon to invade Cambodia and Laos the Khmer Rouge was an army of fewer than a thousand that had been rummaging the jungle for more than a decade, convincing nobody of the urge to revolt and revolution. As a curious footnote however, Khieu Samphan studied at the Sorbonne under Sartre, persuading him that Mao was the economic philosopher to promote, rejecting Marx, Fidel and el Che, whom Sartre considered the truest human alive. Under Sartre’s tutelage Khieu read western philosophy and write a dissertation about agrarian revolutionary economics, in effect creating the model put to the test when he returned to Cambodia. The Critique of Dialectical Reason was Sartre’s refutation of his own Being and Nothingness in favor first of Marxism and then of Maoism, at least in part preparing the way for his support of Khieu’s argument that education is the enemy of the people. As with his imagined lives of both Flaubert and Genet, Sartre mythified Mao and by this confused art with life. He later apologized.

There is a fantastic movie called "The Killing Fields", it is a true story of the carnage that the Khmer Rouge perpetrated on it's people. It is about a NYTs reporter (Sydney Schanberg) and Dith Pran, (a Cambodian journalist). I have watched it several times, I highly recommend it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087553/

I was in Phnom Penh earlier this year. I visited the Killing Fields. Unlike Auschwitz, the site is still very raw, with every rainfall still exposing human remains. The most disturbing thing I saw, and there were many, was a tree where, our guide told us, children were murdered by being smashed against it. I will never forget.

I've been to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Pehn. In August 1978, the Swede Gunnar Bergström, who was then president of the SKFA (Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association) as well as one of the Khmer Rouge's most ardent supporters, was the only Westerner allowed to visit Democratic Kampuchea together with three other Swedes. They also had dinner with Pol Pot. He reported back that everthing was A-OK .He was duped by Pol Pot, and the slaughter continued.

It's notable that just like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge was possessed by documenting all those they tortured and killed.

The closest comparison I can make to the Khmer Rouge are the Nazis. The main difference being, they went about genocide in a much more disarrayed manner. There is no justice (and can never be) for Pol Pot; their leader from 1963 to 1997; 34 years. He died a year later, peacefully in bed. It is outrageous Nuon Chea (age 92) and Khieu Samphan (age 87) are still breathing. I do not care what they are found guilty of today. Like people of Jewish heritage (of which I am), surviving relatives of the Spanish Civil War, Rwanda, Czechoslovakia, Syria, and on and on. Blood lust is the worst human side of humans. For all these cultures and too many more, there will never be true "justice". The primary thing is to never forget all of them, and (much more difficult), to learn from these deeds. The latter of which, inhabitants of this world apparently cannot or will not do.

No one EVER asks; how on earth did this happen? The US illegally bombed Cambodia thinking that the Viet Cong were hiding out there. Primitive villagers who had done nothing wrong watched their families being burned alive by incessant bombing. Since they were not at war, and there was not any reason for this slaughter, the only conclusion they came to was that technology itself was the evil cause. They went on a rampage of revenge against the cities, the schools and anything that was not simple agriculture. But you'll never hear anything but; 'it was evil communism'. Because the US can do no wrong. And more lately, the similar thing happened in Iraq. The US destroyed the nation's infra-structure, the new govt. left out the Sunnis, and into the power vacuum came ISIS fanatics. Evil begets evil.

And while we debate who is to blame for past genocides, current genocides go on without any real effort to bring them to an end. New killing fields are carved out and the best we can do is discuss old ones. Shame on us.

My former mother-in-law' s family had fled the Vietnam war in search of safe harbor in Cambodia. Though citizens of Vietnam, they were ethnically Chinese who had historically lived as travelling merchants. So as war encroached further South, the safest and most natural course of action was to flee across the border to Cambodia. My former mother-in-law couldn't join her parents and brother on the trip because she was pregnant and her husband was away as a U-boat guide to marines. Her family worried for her safety as they left her behind. The Cambodian border sealed shut, making her predicament of being alone and pregnant in a country at civil war all the more perilous. Then the Khmer Rouge killings swept through Cambodia. One day soldiers came to her family's house and ordered everyone outside. Before her mother's eyes, her father and brother were murdered. Afterward, her mother went insane. Reality had become unbearable, so she could no longer live there. Until her death decades later, she had to be cared for. Her sanity never returned. In a way, her mother died that day, too.

The real tragedy is that the younger generation barely remembers what happened during the Khmer Rouge era and the official yearly commemoration day of the defeat of the KR is seen as a holiday or government propaganda. There are still many unspoken gaping wounds that are badly masked by the scramble to get ahead in life. If the tribunal is not the answer, something else needs to be.

Let’s not forget that Henry Kissinger ushered in all this death, and that he still walks free on this earth, a national hero of sorts to many powerful Americans.

This serves no sensible purpose to waste millions to sentence a couple of very elderly men, already serving life sentences, to additional life sentences. What is the point? These fellows are now harmless. Parole them on unsupervised parole and let them have a few days of freedom and enjoy their descendants before they pass away!

"...little national introspection has occurred." Little of this, too, in the United States, whose bombing of Cambodia (perhaps half a million civilian deaths) enabled Pol Pot to quickly build his army from three or four thousand to 60,000 - large enough to seize the country. More American bombs were dropped on Cambodia than by all the Allies in all theaters of World War Two. This, too, was genocidal - unless you believe that international courts are for brown people only.