We turned our attention to Southeast Asia today. We began with the killing fields of Cambodia.
During the Vietnam War, the US began carpet-bombing Cambodia to cut off the Vietnamese Communists who were running the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail was a logistical system that ran from North Vietnam to South Vietnam through the neighboring kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia.
Between Oct 4, 1965 to Aug 15, 1973 US planes dropped 2,756,941 tons of ordinance on Cambodia, a country slightly smaller that Oklahoma. That is more tonnage than all the bombs the U.S. dropped over Europe during all WWII.
The bombing served as a direct catalyst for the Genocide –
• Drove Vietnamese Communists deeper into Cambodia – bringing them into contact with Khmer Rouge.
• Bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge
Chhitt Do, a Khmer Rouge organizer who defected said this of the bombings:
“The ordinary people were terrified by the bombing and the shelling, never having experienced war, and sometimes they shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Two hundred to 400 shells would fall in each attack, and some people became shell-shocked -- just like their brains were completely shattered. Even after the shelling had stopped, they couldn't hold down a meal. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute, not talking for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, they would believe anything they were told. And because there was so much shelling, they believed whatever the Khmer Rouge told them.
The Khmer Rouge would say that the purpose of the bombing was to completely destroy the country, not simply just to win the war, but to annihilate the population, and that it was only because we were taking cover -- moving around to avoid the bombing -- that some of us were surviving. So they used the bombing, the bomb craters and the bomb shrapnel to educate the people politically, to make the people hate and be enraged at the Americans.”
The Communist insurgency inside Cambodia continued to grow, aided by supplies and military support from North Vietnam. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary asserted their dominance over the Vietnamese-trained communists, many of whom were purged. At the same time, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) forces became stronger and more independent of their Vietnamese patrons. By the time Congress ended the "secret" bombing campaign in 1973 the Khmer Rouge forces were 200,000 strong and the CPK controlled nearly 60% of Cambodia's territory.
On New Year's Day 1975, Communist troops launched an offensive that, in 117 days of the hardest fighting of the war, collapsed the Khmer Republic. CKP forces captured Phnom Penh in April 1975 and ordered the evacuation of all cities and towns beginning their reign of terror.
Internal enemies of the CPK were the “new” or “17 April” people and people from the previous regimes whose social status was classified as capitalist or feudalist. This category also included people who were not ethnically Khmer. These internal enemies concerned the CPK leadership much more than anything else. The target groups considered as internal enemies included:
• Officials of the Khmer Republic government
• Minority groups:
o Indigenous Highlanders.
o Cham Muslims.
o Vietnamese
o Ethnic Chinese
• Intellectuals
• Alleged traitors
Life under Pol Pot and the CPK was strict and brutal. In many areas of the country people were rounded up and executed for speaking a foreign language, wearing glasses, scavenging for food, not working hard enough, and even crying for dead loved ones.
S-21 was a secret prison operated by the Pol Pot regime in the capital city of Phnom Penh from mid-1975 through the end of 1978. Individuals accused of treason, along with their families, were brought to S-21 where they were tortured until they confessed to whatever crime their captors charged them with, and then executed. The prisoners' photographs and completed confessions formed dossiers that were submitted to Khmer Rouge authorities, so that proof of the elimination of "traitors" was established. Of the 14,200 people imprisoned at S-21, which held between 1,000 and 1,500 at any one time, only 7 are know to have survived.
Solid estimates of the numbers who died in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 are not available, but it is likely that hundreds of thousands were brutally executed by the regime. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation and disease. Some estimates of the dead range from 1 to 3 million, out of a 1975 population estimated at 7.3 million.
A 1978 Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge into the countryside and touched off almost 13 years of civil war. The 1991 Paris Peace Accords mandated democratic elections and a ceasefire, which was not fully respected by the Khmer Rouge. UN-sponsored elections in 1993 helped restore some semblance of normalcy and the final elements of the Khmer Rouge surrendered in early 1999.
Afternoon
After lunch we took a tour of the Cambodia exhibit hosted by the Anthropology Department at NIU. I enjoyed looking at the details of the Sbeik Thom Shadow Puppets on display. I can see a possible use of shadow puppets in VOICES. After the visit, back to the classroom.
Indonesia
On 30 September 1965, six top Indonesian generals were kidnapped and killed. It is unclear whether or not the incident was part of a government takeover by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) or part of a right-wing military purge led by General Suharto. The events and supposed coup plotters of that night are referred to as "the September 30th Movement." The murders were used as an excuse, with intelligence supplied by the U.S., cracked down on the PKI. The army encouraged anti-communist organizations and individuals to join in killing anyone suspected of being a communist sympathizer.
Between October 1965 and March 1966, approximately 500,000 people were killed with most concentrated in Sumatra, East Java and Bali. The ethnic Chinese were also targeted, primarily for economic and racial reasons.
An official CIA report called the purge "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." A former US Ambassador to Indonesia and Australia, Marshall Green, provided the Indonesian armed forces with "shooting lists" bearing the names of thousands of local, regional and national leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Green confirmed a report by States News Service, published in the Washington Post on May 21, 1990, saying, "I know we had a lot more information [about the PKI] than the Indonesians themselves.”
East Timor
In early September 1975, following the announcement that 78 percent of voters chose independence from Indonesia all hell broke loose in East Timor. Using the pretext of the civil war Indonesia invaded the territory in December 1975. According to Sian Powell writing in The Australian, the Indonesian military used starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese, along with Napalm and chemical weapons, obtained from the United States, which poisoned the food and water supply
The day before the invasion, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, visiting President Suharto. There is little doubt that the U.S. gave Suharto the green light to invade, with Kissinger telling reporters in Jakarta that "the United States understands Indonesia's position on the question" of East Timor.
A detailed statistical report prepared for the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor cited a lower range of 102,800 conflict-related deaths in the period 1974-1999, namely, approximately 18,600 killings and 84,200 'excess' deaths from hunger and illness, most of which occurred during the Indonesian occupation.
Evening
In the evening, we had a tremendously moving experience as we met with four genocide survivors. I have taped their stories and hope to post them in this blog shortly. Sharing their stories with us made the history come painfully alive.
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