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a scale that might truly merit the term “genocidal” used by the Finnish Inquiry Commission. In the five-month period after the signing of the Paris peace accords, the bombing matched the level of the preceding three years,58 and it was to continue at that level until Congress forced a halt in August—although bombing and shelling of the countryside by armies of the U.S.-backed regime were to continue on a substantial scale, with U.S. guidance and supply, until the war’s end. Over a million refugees fled to Phnom Penh, which became a horror chamber while the countryside was laid waste, including B-52 bombing targeted “on the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia,” where U.S. Air Force maps showed “thousands of square miles of densely populated, fertile areas . . . marked black from the inundation”—“the careless policies of the White House” criticized by William Shawcross.59 At just this time, Khmer Rouge programs became extremely harsh, so available studies indicate, including a refugee study by Kenneth Quinn, of the National Security Council staff, who never considers a possible causal connection, however, between the harshening of policy and the sharp increase in the program of saturation bombing. Timothy Carney, the second of the three major U.S. government specialists on Cambodia (Quinn, Carney, Charles Twining), also notes that “sometime in 1973 the party apparently decided to accelerate its program to alter Khmer society,” for no suggested reason.60

6.2.5. PHASE I IN THE MEDIA

During this period, there was extensive media coverage of Cambodia, and there was no dearth of evidence on what was taking place in the regions subjected to U.S. Air Force atrocities. It was not necessary to undertake a difficult expedition to the Thai-Cambodia border to find refugees who would tell what they knew, but the victims of phase I of “the decade of the genocide” who were huddled in the slums of Phnom Penh or other towns and villages to which they fled were of no more interest than those in the miserable camps on the outskirts of Vientiane—unless they had tales of terror by the Cambodian insurgents to recount (the Vietnamese long having faded into the background).61 No books or articles were written by Father Ponchaud, who lived among the peasants and sympathized deeply with their plight, so he informed us when the time came to expose atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The same was true of many others who were later to express their heartfelt concerns for Cambodians suffering under Khmer Rouge terror, but who did not seek to investigate and publicize the plight of the rural population during phase I of the genocide, when such efforts might have had a crucial impact on the policies that were destroying Cambodia, a fact that might merit some thought.

The standard U.S. media picture of phase I is something like this. “Until the turning point in 1973, . . . on the surface, Cambodians smiled and were full of pleasantries,”62 but afterwards the mood of “Cambodians” became one of “apathy” and “resignation” because “impoverished farmers, refugees and soldiers” (most of whom were press-ganged into service from among the poor and refugee communities) felt that their “leaders seem powerless to defend them against human and natural adversities.”63 There is a “spirit of doom” as the government is “teetering on the wreckage of the democratic republic it set out to create” with the coup that overthrew Sihanouk.64 The Americans try, but with little success, to “give the Cambodians some sense of confidence in their leadership,” but, nevertheless, “Cambodian morale has been sliding steadily for a long time.” However, “Rather than any sense of urgency here [in Phnom Penh], there is the grand fatalism that is so much a part of Cambodia’s Hindu-influenced Buddhism,”65 although it somehow does not seem to affect “the enemy,” whose “determination” in the face of the awesome firepower unleashed against them “baffles” the Americans. But there is still “a feeling that the Americans will save the Cambodians at the last minute because they cannot save themselves.