Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [193]
It is superfluous to observe that the United States deployed its ample means of violence in defense of urban privilege. But, in fact, these tasks were only of secondary importance. For the United States, the destruction of rural Cambodia was ancillary to the goal of maintaining in power the client regime in South Vietnam.
Contrary to the arrangements in Laos and Vietnam, the Geneva Accords afforded no recognition to the anti-French resistance in Cambodia, a source of much bitterness. The country was ruled by Prince Sihanouk until March 1970, when he was overthrown in a coup supported by the United States.41 Throughout this period, Sihanouk attempted a difficult balancing act both internally and externally. Within Cambodia, he repressed the left and peasant uprisings and attempted to hold off the right, although power largely remained in the hands of right-wing urban elites throughout. Externally, he tried to preserve a measure of neutrality against the background of the expanding Indochina war, which, he expected, would end in a Communist victory.42
Sihanouk’s neutralist efforts were unappreciated by the United States and its allies. Diem’s troops attacked border regions from 1957, and there were also Thai provocations. A coup attempt in 1959, probably backed by the CIA, as generally assumed in Cambodia, was foiled; this should be seen in the context of general U.S. subversion in the region in the post-Geneva period, including a CIA-backed coup and invasion aimed at overthrowing Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958, subversion of the elected government of Laos in the same year, and the efforts to destroy the anti-French resistance within South Vietnam and to consolidate the Diem dictatorship while undermining the political arrangements at Geneva. By 1963, CIA-backed Khmer Serei forces frequently attacked Cambodia from South Vietnamese and Thai bases at a time when the United States was intensifying its clandestine operations in Laos and maneuvering, with increasing violence, to block a political settlement in South Vietnam. By 1966, the Khmer Serei “declared war on Cambodia and claimed responsibility for incursions across the border.”43
Attacks by U.S. and Saigon army forces against border posts and villages in Cambodia intensified from the early 1960s, causing hundreds of casualties a year. Later, Vietnamese peasants and guerrillas fled for refuge to border areas in Cambodia, particularly after the murderous U.S. military operations in South Vietnam in early 1967, giving rise to cynical charges from Washington, echoed in the media, about Communist encroachment into neutral Cambodia. By the time of the 1970 coup that overthrew Sihanouk, Vietnamese were scattered along border areas to a maximum depth of about twenty-five kilometers, according to most sources. The first evidence of Vietnamese encampments in Cambodia was discovered in late 1967, close to the unmarked border. While there was much outrage in the United States about “North Vietnamese aggression,” the internal view in Washington was considerably more nuanced. From the Pentagon Papers we learn that as late as May 1967—well after the U.S. operations that caused cross-border flight—high Pentagon officials believed that Cambodia was “becoming more and more important as a supply base—now of food and medicines, perhaps ammunition later.” A year earlier, an American study team investigated specific charges by the U.S. government on the scene and found them without substance although they did come across the site of a recent U.S. helicopter-gunship attack on a Cambodian village (one of many, according to the local population), first denied by the U.S. government, then conceded, since American eyewitnesses (including CBS-TV) were present—the usual pattern.
The Cambodian government reported many such incidents. Thus Cambodia