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By Root 2810 0

Cambodia. Not a single column seeks to explore the reactions of the refugees not far from the Hotel Le Phnom, or in Battambang, or in the far more miserable refugee camps in the countryside nearby; or to attempt to develop some sense of what must have been happening under the frenzied bombing of these months. Recall that in Phnom Penh alone there were almost 1.5 million refugees who had fled from the countryside, some, surely, who must have had some information to relate about phase I of the genocide at its peak. The reader could no doubt ascertain that terrible things were happening in the Cambodian countryside, but what they were remains obscure, and the Americans are explicitly exonerated, apart from the error of bombing the wrong village.

The story remained much the same as phase I of the genocide continued. The horrors in Phnom Penh itself were sometimes vividly described, primarily abroad,69 but there was little effort to determine what was happening in the areas held by the enemy of the U.S. government—hence the enemy of the U.S. press; virtually the entire country as “the Cambodians” were confined to urban centers swelled by a huge flood of refugees who remain as hidden from view as those in the teeming slums of Saigon or the camps around Vientiane.

Western correspondents evacuated from Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge victory were able to obtain a fleeting picture of what had taken place in the countryside. British correspondent Jon Swain summarizes his impressions as follows:

The United States has much to answer for here, not only in terms of human lives and massive material destruction; the rigidity and nastiness of the un-Cambodian like fellows in black who run this country now, or what is left of it, are as much a product of this wholesale American bombing which has hardened and honed their minds as they are a product of Marx and Mao . . . [The mass evacuation of the cities] does not constitute a deliberate campaign of terror, rather it points to poor organisation, lack of vision and the brutalisation of a people by a long and savage war . . . The war damage here [in the countryside], as everywhere else we saw, is total. Not a bridge is standing, hardly a house. I am told most villagers have spent the war years living semi-permanently underground in earth bunkers to escape the bombing . . . The entire countryside has been churned up by American B-52 bomb craters, whole towns and villages razed. So far I have not seen one intact pagoda.70

The conditions are much like those reported in 1970 by refugees from the Plain of Jars, in Laos; in both cases, these accounts were almost entirely excluded from the mainstream media.

So ended phase I of the genocide. In later years, those who had transmitted narrowly selected fragments of this tale of horror expressed their bitterness that Cambodia had been “forgotten.” On the tenth anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover, Sydney Schanberg wrote two columns in the New York Times entitled “Cambodia Forgotten.” The first highlights the phrase: “Superpowers care as little today about Cambodians as in 1970,” the second dismisses Richard Nixon’s 1985 claim that there was no “indiscriminate terror bombing” but only “highly accurate” strikes “against enemy military targets.” Schanberg comments that “Anyone who visited the refugee camps in Cambodia and talked to the civilian survivors of the bombing learned quickly about the substantial casualties.” He recalls that “the Khmer Rouge were a meaningless force when the war was brought to Cambodia in 1970 . . . In order to flourish and grow, they needed a war to feed on. And the superpowers—including this country, with the Nixon incursion of 1970 and the massive bombing that followed—provided that war and that nurturing material.” He does not, however, inform us about which superpower, apart from “this country,” invaded Cambodia and subjected it to massive bombing. With comparable even-handedness we might deplore the contribution of the superpowers, including the USSR, to the destruction of Afghanistan, or the attitude of the great