30 YEARS AFTER INVASION
What the U.S. did to Cambodia
By Deirdre Griswold
It is truly amazing. Search U.S. news sources and archives
for information about Cambodia's history between March 1970 and
April 1975 and you will find almost nothing. Those five years
have been virtually obliterated in our sanitized culture.
You will, of course, find reams about the later period of
the Pol Pot regime. The U.S. propaganda machine has made the
term "killing fields" synonymous with the Khmer Rouge, or
Cambodian communist army.
But why is there such an absence of information about the
years that preceded the victory of the Khmer Rouge?
Because they were five years in which bloody U.S.
intervention plunged Cambodia into war and disaster.
They started with a CIA-sponsored coup on March 18, 1970.
Cambodia until then had remained neutral in the U.S. war
against Vietnam, unlike its neighbor Thailand, which had become
a base for daily B-52 raids against Vietnamese villages and
rice paddies.
Cambodia's leader, Prince Sihanouk, had maintained good
relations with People's China, the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. The
CIA tried several times to have him assassinated, with no luck.
But finally, while Sihanouk was out of the country visiting
Moscow, he was deposed in a coup led by Lon Nol, the chief of
staff of the Cambodian Army.
CIA overthrew Sihanouk
According to an article in the Australian journal The Age by
Milton Osborne on Jan. 12, 1971, Lon Nol had been recruited
into the CIA in the fall of 1969 while receiving "medical
treatments" in the American Hospital at Neuilly sur-Seine
outside Paris. He then secretly began to bring into the country
Cambodian mercenaries trained at a CIA commando center in Nha
Trang, South Vietnam.
Lon Nol also used members of the Khmer Krom, a
U.S.-sponsored army of Cambodian fascists headquartered in
Thailand and commanded by Son Ngoc Thanh, who had collaborated
with the Japanese in World War II.
The CIA and the Fifth Special Forces unit in South Vietnam,
however, called the shots. The International Herald Tribune of
June 3, 1970, quoted Green Beret Capt. Robert F. Marasco as
saying his B-57 unit of right-wing Cambodian mercenaries had
been operating "as far as Phnom Penh," the capital, during the
Lon Nol takeover, even though they were barred by the Sihanouk
government.
Postings in Ralph McGehee's CIAbase say that Lon Nol, under
orders from the CIA, first ordered all North Vietnamese out of
Cambodia within 72 hours. Four days later the U.S. merchant
ship Columbia Eagle was commandeered by two CIA officers, who
steered it to the port of Sihanoukville. With guns and
ammunition from the ship, Lon Nol's forces seized control of
the government.
The intention of the coup was to install a pro-U.S. puppet
government that would allow the Pentagon free rein to attack
Vietnamese liberation fighters from Cambodian soil. Senate
Majority leader Mike Mansfield admitted on Oct. 13, 1971, in a
speech on the floor of Congress that "The coup was arranged
through the Cambodian High Command."
Demonstrations erupted against the fascist military regime
in 17 of Cambodia's 19 provinces. But they were drowned in
blood. Hundreds of Lon Nol's opponents were executed by
beheading.
When reporters later asked President Richard Nixon about Lon
Nol's slaughter of unarmed men, women and children, he replied:
"The Lon Nol government is a sovereign government. We cannot do
anything."
U.S. invasion follows coup
The U.S. was already carrying out secret military operations
inside Cambodian territory. But within weeks of the coup, on
April 30, 1970, the Pentagon openly invaded Cambodia, claiming
it was going after a mythical "command headquarters" of the
Vietnamese NLF.
The reaction inside the U.S. was immediate. Demonstrations
flared on hundreds of campuses as Washington widened the
war--while claiming to seek peace.
At Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi on
May 4, demonstrating students were shot dead by the state. It
was a turning point in the anti-war movement here. The mayhem
that U.S. intervention had brought to Southeast Asia was
beginning to be experienced at home.
Gen. William Westmoreland's strategy had long been to expand
the war. In February and March of 1971, U.S. troops invaded
Laos after years of a secret bombing campaign there. Troops of
the U.S.-puppet Saigon army were sent to fight in Cambodia as
well.
The open imperialist aggression consolidated a resistance
army in Cambodia. By August and September of 1971, the
liberation forces, known as the Khmer Rouge, had launched an
offensive called Operation Chenla 2. In the battle of Rum
Luong, they turned back 50,000 South Vietnamese troops and cut
the main highway to Phnom Penh.
700,000 killed in U.S. air raids
On New Year's Day of 1972, they took control of the river
linking Phnom Penh with South Vietnam. All this was done while
the U.S. was intensifying its air war, pounding guerrilla
positions with carpet bombing from B-52s. By the time the war
ended, 700,000 people had been killed in these air raids.
Little by little, however, the Pentagon was losing the war
in Southeast Asia. Both the Saigon and U.S. armies were in
crisis, troops were rebelling, demonstrations were growing at
home despite repression. And in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge
continued to make gains, until finally the Lon Nol clique
controlled only a 10-mile perimeter around Phnom Penh. But even
as the rebels took over Pochentong airport, Lon Nol's lifeline
to Pentagon supplies, U.S. planes continued to pound the
surrounding countryside.
By March 1975, the handwriting was on the wall. Phnom Penh
was a city where "Cabinet ministers ride to and from their
air-conditioned villas in chauffeured Mercedes" while
"refugees, crushed by food prices which have risen more than
1,000 percent ... stir the garbage in the gutter in search of
something salvageable." (New York Times, March 16, 1975)
Thousands of foreign agents of all kinds--U.S., Israeli,
south Korean, French, began leaving the country. All the
officials were thinking about how to get their wealth out. A
puppet army sergeant said, "We'll lose the war because the
officers are too busy making money." (Newsweek, March 10,
1975)
On April 1, 1975, Lon Nol fled Cam bodia for Indonesia on
his way to refuge in the U.S.
The Cambodian population only wanted an end to the war. A
New York Times correspondent wrote from Phnom Penh on April 13,
"The American presence meant war to them. ... The Americans
brought them planes and napalm and B-52 raids, not schools and
roads and medical programs."
The end came on April 17. The New York Post of that day
described the entry of the rebel troops into the city: "The
first Khmer Rouge troops came in from the north. From the
sidewalks, people cheered and waved white strips of cloth as
the victors walked in triumph through the downtown streets.
Crowds of cheering citizens surrounded small groups of the
insurgent soldiers and followed them about."
The Associated Press wrote on the same day: "Crowds on the
street cheered the black-uniformed Khmer Rouge forces as they
entered the capital this morning. The victors hugged government
soldiers and took them aboard their armored personnel carriers
for a parade along the waterfront."
Yet another full-scale U.S. assault
But the war wasn't over. After Cambodia detained a U.S.
ship, the Mayaguez, that had penetrated its waters, the
Pentagon on May 14 launched a full-scale assault. A-7 fighter
bombers from the aircraft carrier Coral Sea bombed Cambodian
boats in the Gulf of Thailand and attacked the large coastal
city of Sihanoukville.
U.S. Marines, accompanied by a flotilla of 12 U.S. naval
craft, invaded Cambodia's Koh Tang Island and met stiff
resistance.
To many in Cambodia, it must have seemed that the nightmare
was to start all over again. The response of the Khmer Rouge
was to accelerate their evacuation of Phnom Penh, which they
fully expected to become a main target of this new stage of the
war.
It was in this evacuation that countless people died--of
hunger and disease as well as abuse. The city population was
not accustomed to the hardships the peasant-soldiers had been
enduring.
The Khmer Rouge have been accused of everything from madness
to genocide by the U.S. bourgeoisie. Their victory became the
excuse for punishing U.S. sanctions on Cambodia that lasted for
years after the Pol Pot group, which became embroiled in a
border war with Vietnam, was removed from power.
In the enormous propaganda campaign that has followed, the
criminal U.S. record in Cambodia has been expunged. To even
speak of the U.S. responsibility is to be accused of
apologizing for the extreme measures taken by the Khmer
Rouge.
But in truth it was the U.S., driven by greedy imperial
ambition, that unleashed a civil war in Cambodia when no
seasoned revolutionary movement existed able to unite the
workers and peasants in reorganizing society on a socialist
basis.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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