Just how many people the United States killed and injured will never be known. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Kissinger relayed these orders to his military assistant, Gen. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. I don’t want the gunships, I want the helicopter ships. They have got to go in there and I mean really go in. In 1970, President Richard Nixon issued orders to National Security Advisor (and later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger: However, it is indisputable that there was also total disregard for civilian life. The ostensible targets of the bombings were North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”) troops stationed in Cambodia and, later, KR rebels. The exact tonnage of bombs dropped is in dispute, but a conservative estimate of 500,000 tons (almost equal to what the United States dropped in the entire Pacific theater of World War II) is unquestionable. From that year until 1973, the US Air Force dropped bombs from more than 230,000 sorties on over 113,000 sites. In fact, since the removal of the KR, only three individuals have been convicted for their roles in the genocide (the first conviction was not handed down until 2010 the other two came last year).īut Pol Pot’s rise to power, the Cambodian genocide, and the absence of justice for the KR’s victims are inseparable from broader US intervention policies in Indochina from 1945–1991 - in particular, the US’s vicious bombing campaign waged against Cambodia. He died in 1998 without ever having faced justice. Pol Pot, the leader of the KR from 1963–1997 and prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea, fled to the jungle. By the time the slaughter came to an end in 1979 - after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and removed the KR from power - some 1.7 million people (21 percent of the population) were dead. Resetting the clock to “Year Zero,” the KR forced urban dwellers to the countryside, and began to “purify” Cambodia through a genocidal purge of intellectuals and minority groups. On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge (KR) forces stormed Phnom Penh and reestablished Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea - a supposedly self-sufficient, entirely agrarian society.
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