Cambodia Relief - WHY US?

Reflections for U.S. Catholic Parish Outreach Groups
by Dan Onley

This is an ongoing reflection on unsettling questions about our government's past involvement with Cambodian leadership, including its king and the Khmer Rouge itself. Discussion is invited.

In addition to the call to us by our U.S. bishops to Global Solidarity with all peoples, we are called to remember that between 1970 and 1975 our armed forces dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Cambodia in a secret war carried on without congressional approval. 43,415 U.S. air attacks took place within Cambodia, and most scholars cite the devastation they caused as a reason for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and their ability to attract the initial support of the mostly-rural villagers.

This page got fired up as part of my trying to deal as both U.S. citizen and a Catholic to very disturbing reports by respected journalists. In particular, I was struck by the following, and I hope your parish committee folks will wonder about this along with me, sad as the story may be . . .

It is all too easy and too dangerous to remember Pol Pot as a unique monster. What is remarkable about the U.S. coverage of his death is the omission of U.S. complicity in his rise to power, a complicity that sustained him for almost two decades. For the truth is that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical nonentities--and a great many people would be alive today--had Washington not helped bring them to power and the governments of the United States, Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them and restored them. In other words, the iconic images of the piles of skulls ought to include those who, often at great remove in distance and culture, were Pol Pot's accessories and Faustian partners for the purposes of their own imperial imperatives.
To hear Henry Kissinger deny recently that the United States and especially the Nixon Administration bore any responsibility for Cambodia's horror was to hear truth denigrated and our intelligence insulted. For Cambodia's nightmare did not begin with Year Zero but on the eve of the U.S. land invasion of neutral Cambodia in 1970. The invasion provided a small group of extreme ethnic nationalists with Maoist pretensions, the Khmer Rouge, with a catalyst for a revolution that had no popular base among the Cambodian people. Between 1969 and 1973, U.S. bombers killed perhaps three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist. During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of World War II, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. Evidence from U.S. official documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that this U.S. terror was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. "They are using [the bombing] as the main theme of the propaganda," reported the C.I.A. Director of Operations on May 2, 1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men [and] the propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes."

Full Report by Anthony Pilger

There are plenty of links on this website to tell you the stories on what really happened to the innocent people of Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, above all. The sad thesis of this page is that the U.S. Government holds a very solid second place to the K-R and Pol Pot for responsibility about the terrors which inflicted Cambodia's people several decades ago.

The Khmer Rouge as an organization self-destructed, but only VERY recently, and the surviving peoples of Cambodia are just now beginning to pick up the pieces of shattered cities, villages, families and individual lives. The Catholic outreaches working in Cambodia, in our name as Church, deserve our awareness of their projects and needs.

At the very least, please use this website as a tool to familiarize yourself with what really happened in Cambodia during the U.S. war with Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge reign of terror and genocide, their own war with Vietnam, and many more years of national instability and suffering until very recent times. You see, if you at least KNOW the Cambodian situation, you just might be able to spark an insight for somebody else you know or have yet to meet. A somebody else who might get things going in another parish, even a diocese, or a business. We even tell you stories about how even one person or family can make a real difference in a village or orphanage, but we especially encourage you to support Catholic ministries already in place with a reputation for using money and other resources wisely.

Becoming AWARE of the needs - and the opportunities - is the first step.

As a nation, we did horrible things to the people of Cambodia in our decades-ago zeal to rid Asia of the "yellow peril," our own insulting acronym for our good fight against Asian "red communists" -- who now supply us with most of that discounted stuff we run out to grab at WalMart.

We're making media-orchestrated "peace" at all levels with our Vietnamese foes/friends, but we Americans still OWE Cambodia bigtime and seem quite silent about this debt. We Americans killed, plain and simple, about half again as many Cambodian citizens as did the wicked Pol Pot and his Angkor "Year Zero Organization" during 1975-79. Today, I think I'm correct in understanding such death caused by 43,000+ US military attacks to be "collateral damage" readily dismissed in military/press terminology.

8/5/2000: TO BE REFINED/CONTINUED

Just Imagine:
43,415 U.S. air attacks
on a country about the size of
Missouri . . . or Germany