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By Root 2888 0

” “Almost every conversation with a Cambodian now is the same,” namely, fear that the “demoralized army will collapse” when the American bombing terminates on August 15. The impending bombing cutoff is “painful” to the “Cambodians” because of “the recent steady successes of enemy troops” against overwhelming odds. In his final summary report from Phnom Penh as the U.S. bombing ended, Sydney Schanberg raised “the key unanswered question: How have the insurgents—without any planes of their own, and without the extensive artillery support the Government troops have, with only small arms and mobile weapons . . . —been able not just to match the Government forces, which are more than twice their size, but to push the Government forces back and sustain the offensive for six months without any significant lull?” “Since the insurgents are not superhuman, there must be other explanations for their success.” Perhaps they are so “determined and capable” because they “are less fatalistic than the Khmers on this side” and “believe they can change their environment” (U.S. embassy official). In this regard, “the enemy” are quite different from “the Cambodian villager,” who “usually has no politics” and “is not interested in taking sides, only to be left alone to farm and fish and feed his family and once in a while to celebrate on a Buddhist holiday.”66

The civil war, then, pits “the Cambodians” against “the enemy,” Cambodian peasants who were surely not full of pleasantries during the pre-1973 U.S. bombings. “The Cambodians,” fatalistic and resigned, either want to be left alone (“the Cambodian villager”) or hope that the United States will save them and their government, striving for democracy (“the Cambodians” generally). The enemy struggle on successfully against overwhelming odds, baffling the Americans—exactly as Americans building “democracy” have been baffled by the same problem in South Vietnam, Central America, and many other places. Since these are the conclusions drawn from “almost every conversation with a Cambodian,” they are surely realistic, at least as long as we understand that “Cambodians” are those Cambodians who are not “the enemy” of the objective press, just as “South Vietnamese” were South Vietnamese collaborating with the U.S. aggressors.

The framework is the usual one, although perhaps a shade more egregious in the light of what might have been passing through the minds of those Cambodians who were not “Cambodians” during phase I of the genocide.

About that topic, we learn very little from the media. The refugees flooding Phnom Penh and other areas where U.S. reporters traveled were virtually ignored. To gain a measure of this remarkable fact, let us review the reports during these months in the New York Times, most of them by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Sydney Schanberg, who, more than any other U.S. reporter, came to be regarded as the conscience of the media with regard to Cambodia.

Schanberg arrived in Phnom Penh in May 1973, at the height of the intensified bombing, which continued until the mid-August halt. During this period, the Times published twenty-seven of his reports from Cambodia, many of them long and detailed, along with a column in which he expressed his contempt for the “so-called international press corps” who spend their time “interviewing each other” in the Hotel Le Phnom.67

From the outset, Schanberg reports “refugees pouring into the city,” but there are no interviews with refugees who relate the circumstances of life under the bombs. We hear a “well to do Cambodian woman” who tells us that “The bombing is terrible”; she is “not frightened, just annoyed—because it wakes my baby up every night in the middle of the night, and I have to get up” (May 3). But those villagers who want to be left alone are not granted the opportunity to relay their accounts of somewhat more serious concerns, apart from a few scattered phrases, and there is not a word to suggest that refugees might have had any attitude, apart from fear, with regard to those “determined” fighters who “believe they