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Who was more responsible for the Khmer Rouge? The US or China?
I thought we could add to our forum's repertoire by going beyond India, China, Pakistan, the US etc.
One knows little of the SE Asia.
I find that there are Vietnamese posters as also our old and reputed Chinese members in a very healthy discussion on Vietnam China relations.
One of the issues raised was about Cambodia, Khmer Rouge.
We, in India, know so little about the area.
Maybe our friends can help educate us and we could also join in to learn more.
During the UN assisted trials in 2009, high ranking former Khmer Rouge officials and lowly minions alike testified that Khmer Rouge could not have come to power but for Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and US policy in the region. Before CIA helped Lon Nol oust Sihanouk in a coup, Khmer Rouge was a small ineffectual party with no position or standing in the government. Sihanouk was hugely popular. He needed a power base from which to take his government back. He allied with the Khmer Rouge. When he did so, his Cambodian faithful joined him. Suddenly Khmer Rouge had the power to take control, and did. Pol Pot took charge and began to plow the Killing Fields. He could not have done so but for the fact that Uncle Sam handed him the plow.
The bombing helped Khmer Rouge, too. Although we were told the illegal bombing of Cambodia was to take out VC and NVA supplies and bases, no reliable credible unimpeached evidence of that was ever produced. It wasn't quite Weapons of Mass Destruction because some areas of both countries were being invaded by North Vietnamese and anti-government South Vietnamese troops, On the other hand, the bombs all fell on those areas where the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Pathet Lao in Laos had their strongest support. For 15 years successive presidents had tried to oust the Pathet Lao, but the party was so popular and had such numbers that every new Laotian government included a PL element. The bombing was the next logical step and Cambodia was included in the fireworks. Naturally people were going to gravitate to the most anti-American party after something like that. Operations Menu and Linebacker were enough, but declassified records now tell us that indiscriminate bombing was going on for at least 11 years. We'll never know how many thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent civilians those bombs slaughtered.
China simply continued to do business as usual with a neighbor with which it had historically dealt. China had nothing to do with the internal affairs of the Cambodian government. China could not, did not and should not have interfered with the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.
If you are looking for places to cast blame, consider that since 1945 the US has overthrown dozens of governments around the globe, often replacing popular, democratically elected reform leaders like Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran with bloodthirsty corrupt repressive tyrants like Carlos Castillo Armas and Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran.(organizing and training SAVAK to keep him in power). Saddam Hussein was hand picked by CIA for the hit team put together to take out Abd al-Karim Qasim in Iraq. That plot failed so CIA spent a few years building the Ba'ath Party to prominence and tried again, successfully, in 1963.
Other paradigms of human rights and personal liberty that CIA has helped to steal power, protected and propped up are Ngo Dinh Diem, Mobutu Seko, Sukarno, Augusto Pinochet, Fernando Marcos, Castelo Brancho, Carlos Castillo Armas, Papa Doc Duvalier and Baby Doc, the Samoza boys, Hugo Banzer, the juntas and dictatorships of Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, Zaire, and Greece, to mention a few. Brancho's Death Squads, the first in South America, were the model for most that followed. CIA helped set the up, and helped them find targets (having communist sympathies while living under a US puppet regime was very hazardous to one's health. As Saddam, Diem, Raphael Trujillo, Osama bin Laden and Manuel Noriega learned, once a puppet and pawn of Uncle Sam, it is unsafe to stop dancing to Uncle's tune. If you count up the bodies piled up by the guys the US directly aided, Pol Pot was an amateur. Unlike China in Cambodia, the US bears direct responsibility for those murders because the US participated directly in some of them, and put the perpetrators in power and watched over them and protected them, knowing full well what they were doing and in many cases not only encouraged them to continued but helped them do it.
Who was more responsible for the Khmer Rouge? The US or China? - Yahoo!7 AnswersChina and the Soviet Union- and their puppet North Vietnamese regime. Also idiotic US rules of engagement
The Khmer Rouge were a small, ineffectual movement. During the Vietnam War the NVA established a supply route through (supposedly neutral) Laos and Cambodia (so-called Ho chi minh trail). Laos had been colonised by the NVA years before, but Cambodia was supposedly independent. However the NVA controlled about 1/3 of the country
the US rules of engagement made it a crime to attack NVA soldiers in Cambodia- which meant that the NVA communists and their Khmer Rouge allies did as they pleased- helped by the thousands of tons of weapons from China and USSR- not to mention "experts" and "volunteers" imported to run the trickier bits of equipment
After the Dem controlled US congress abandonned the Vietnamese Republic, the NVA army was free to assist the Khmer Rouge in capturing power in Cambodia. And the carnage followed.
We learn of the Cambodian massacres in the "Killing fields". What is not mentionned is that the communists did exactly the same in Vietnam (both North and South) murdering over 4 milion people in so-called "re-education camps". In fact the carnage continues still today with the systematic extermination of the Hmong peoples (Montagnard tribes) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
I thought we could add to our forum's repertoire by going beyond India, China, Pakistan, the US etc.
One knows little of the SE Asia.
I find that there are Vietnamese posters as also our old and reputed Chinese members in a very healthy discussion on Vietnam China relations.
One of the issues raised was about Cambodia, Khmer Rouge.
We, in India, know so little about the area.
Maybe our friends can help educate us and we could also join in to learn more.