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By Root 2807 0

is massive and the sympathy of the most advanced western powers is enjoyed,” but where conditions in the peasant society were so terrible that “since 1980 substantial foreign ‘refugee’ aid near the border has been given to ‘Affected Thai Villagers,’ whose health and living standard, much to the shock of foreign aid personnel, were found to be little better than the condition of Cambodian refugees.”28 No such comparison was undertaken, nor was there even a flicker of concern over simultaneous reports, buried in appropriate obscurity, about the tens of thousands of children, many under ten years old, working as “virtual slaves” in Thai factories resembling concentration camps,29 nor over the normal conditions of peasant life in the region, now exposed to the visitors flocking to the border camps to witness the consequences of Communist terror and express their compassion for its victims.

The actual scale of the slaughter and destruction during the two authentic phases of large-scale killings during the “decade of the genocide” (phases I and II) would be difficult to estimate at best, and the problems have been compounded by a virtual orgy of falsification serving political ends that are all too obvious.30 The Finnish Inquiry Commission estimates that about 600,000 people in a population of over seven million died during phase I, while two million people became refugees.31 For the second phase, they give 75,000 to 150,000 as a “realistic estimate” for outright executions, and a figure of roughly one million dead from killings, hunger, disease, and overwork. Vickery’s analysis is the most careful attempt to sort out the confused facts to date. He accepts as plausible a “war loss” of over 500,000 for the first phase, calculated from the CIA estimates but lower than their conclusions (see note 31), and about 750,000 “deaths in excess of normal and due to the special conditions of DK,” with perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 executed and a total population decline for this period of about 400,000.32

These estimates, the most careful currently available in print to our knowledge, suggest that the toll under phase II of “the genocide” is somewhat greater than that under phase I, although not radically different in scale. But before accepting these figures at face value we must bear in mind that part of the death toll under phase II must be attributed to the conditions left by the U.S. war. As the war ended, deaths from starvation in Phnom Penh alone were running at about 100,000 a year, and the U.S. airlift that kept the population alive was immediately terminated. Sources close to the U.S. government predicted a million deaths in Cambodia if U.S. aid were to cease. A Western doctor working in Phnom Penh in 1974–75 reported that

This generation is going to be a lost generation of children. Malnutrition is going to affect their numbers and their mental capacities. So, as well as knocking off a generation of young men, the war is knocking off a generation of children.

The U.S. embassy estimated that available rice in Phnom Penh would suffice for at most a few weeks. The final U.S. 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 Osborne 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 bombing turned “thousands of young Cambodians