(5 of 10)
"Besides the sick and hungry refugees, the camp also contained a contingent of Khmer Rouge soldiers who had been beaten back into Thailand over the past three weeks by a Vietnamese offensive in the border areas. Though far better fed than the other refugees, toughened to hardship and accustomed to living by their wits in the jungle, the Khmer Rouge and their entourage had clearly reached the limit of their endurance. They did not look like human beings in the accepted sense of the term but rather like wild animals, completely brutalized. They slept huddled side by side like beasts in a cage. They seldom spoke and kept their eyes cast downward. They seemed so pathetic that it was almost possible to forget the abominable cruelties they had committed in trying to establish a new Communist civilization at a cost of millions of Cambodian lives."
In essence, it was Cambodia's unwilling role as a pawn in the Indochinese wars that led to what U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim calls "a national tragedy that may have no parallel in history." In the mid-1960s the country's peaceful mode of life, under the benevolently authoritarian rule of Prince Sihanouk, was suddenly imperiled by the Viet Nam conflict. At the time, Cambodia was an overwhelmingly agricultural country that exported rice. Though it could hardly have been termed prosperous—per capita income was only $110 a year—its people lived relatively well by Asian standards. Unfortunately, the Cambodian army was weak and poorly equipped; Sihanouk was unable to prevent the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese from using parts of the country as sanctuaries and resupply routes for their forces in South Viet Nam. The existence of these sanctuaries led the U.S. to launch what would become highly controversial secret bombing raids over Cambodia in 1969 and to invade the country the next year. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, he was ousted in a coup organized by Premier Lon Nol, an army marshal with mystical tendencies. Even with an infusion of U.S. supplies, Lon Nol proved unable to cope with the Vietnamese and the growing guerrilla army of the Khmer Rouge. The five years of fighting that followed put Cambodia well on its way to the cruel hunger of today. By 1974 the U.N.'s World Health Organization and the U.S. Senate Refugees Subcommittee reported that malnutrition was already a severe problem.
In his angry book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, British Journalist William Shawcross has charged that the bombing and invasion of the country set the stage for the Khmer Rouge conquest of Cambodia. U.S. policy, Shawcross argued, "was creating an enemy [the Khmer Rouge] where none had previously existed." In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger answered that the North Vietnamese were the first to violate Cambodia's neutrality, and that it is outrageous to blame American policy for the horrors that the Khmer Rouge unleashed on its own people after the collapse of the Lon Nol government in 1975.