Lessons Learned

I’m coming to the end of the spring semester. I’ve learned two very important things. I totally suck at math, but I totally kick ass at English!

I failed algebra and will have to take it again. Boo!

I got an A in English. My last assignment was a Research Paper. This is the feedback I got from my professor on the rough draft submission:

Exceptional work. The paper was well-written, assertively argued, and expertly supported with quality sources.

This is the feedback I got on my final draft:

You did an exceptional job on the research paper. Would you mind if I used your paper as a sample student paper for future students?

Oh yeah! I rock! Algebra can SUCK IT!!

If interested, you can read my paper below. (Psst…you might just learn something you didn’t previously know.)

U.S. and the Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge, a Cambodian communist guerilla organization, formed in the early 1970’s, overtook Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city, in 1975, creating what they called Democratic Kampuchea. Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, reigned terror over the people of Cambodia until 1979, killing an estimated 1.5 million Cambodians in the worst act of genocide in modern times. They were not stopped until the Vietnamese military intervened and overthrew the despotic government. The Khmer Rouge, although out of power, remained intact and active for three decades, thanks in no small part to the United Nations and the United States government and its policies, which failed to intervene or to hold Pol Pot and his regime responsible.

During this time period, which overlapped the United States’ involvement in the neighboring Vietnam War, the U.S. not only did not attempt to prevent the massacre of nearly one fourth of the Cambodian population, but actually assisted and armed the Khmer Rouge. The U.S. continued to support the murderous faction until policy changes in the 1990’s. In doing so, the United States, claiming to stand on the moral high ground and continuously touting moral and ethical human treatment, frequently maintains duplicitous policies.

In the book, Altered States: A Reader in the New World Order, the author Ben Kiernan states, “During the Pol Pot period… Cambodia was subjected to probably the world’s most radical political, social, and economic revolution. The country was cut off from the outside world, its cities were emptied, its economy was militarized, its Buddhist religion and folk culture was destroyed, and 1.5 million of its eight million people were starved and massacred…and all neighboring countries were attacked” (384).

Pol Pot was a Khmer, an ethnic group that comprised about 80 percent of the Cambodian population. He sought to eliminate those with any other ethnic makeup, generally those that were Vietnamese, Thai or Chinese Cambodians. Also, targeted for execution were intellectuals, and government and military officials from the previous administration. Pol Pot claimed to prefer the simple Khmer peasant, but, many of them were killed also, after being subjected to severe forced labor and starvation. Many others were killed for the inability to adapt to the forced labor camps or for being in the religious minority. In the end he managed to exterminate thousands of ethnic, so-called pure Khmers. Because of this, the term autogenocide was coined, which means the mass murder of one’s own people. The bones of millions of people litter Cambodia’s “Killing Fields” (Bergin 7).

According to the article by Peter Goodman in The Washington Post, on U.S. involvement, “Cambodians first felt the impact of American interests in 1969, courtesy of the Nixon administration’s secret bombing campaign during the Vietnam War” (C2). Goodman goes on to say, “Vietnamese troops fighting the U.S.-backed government in Saigon were taking sanctuary inside Cambodia; the United States responded by carpet bombing the technically neutral country. Amid the resulting food shortages and tides of refugees, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas thrived. They took the Cambodia capital, Phnom Penh, in April 1975, two weeks before Saigon fell” (C2)

Subsequent administrations continued flawed policies concerning Cambodia. In the book State Terrorism and the United States: From counterinsurgency to the War on Terror, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor during the Carter administration, claims “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot…Pol Pot was an abomination” (qtd. in Gareau 170). The United States, Brzezinski stated, “winked semi-publicly at Chinese and Thai aid for the Khmer Rouge” (qtd. in Gareau 170).

Support for the Khmer Rouge came in the form of millions of dollars in monetary and military aid, with its beginnings in the Nixon administration, all the way through the Reagan administration. They also continued to exist because Western governments, to include the United States and the United Nations, continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge government as the official government of Cambodia, even after the Vietnamese invasion and subsequent set up of a new government (Clymer 139-140). The U.S. continually vetoed aid proposals from the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund to assist Cambodians who were suffering. They did not change their stance until almost a year after the Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia. However, during the ten year period of Vietnamese occupation, the U.S. supported the Khmer Rouge militarily to the tune of $17-32 million per year (Kiernan 387).

Not until Vietnamese withdrawal and the U.S. and Soviet relations started to normalize in the 1990’s, did policies start to change, giving Cambodia a reasonable shot at normalcy. An article in The New York Times quotes a senior Asian diplomat as saying, “It came to the point that any move Hun Sen made, no matter how positive, was immediately discounted in Washington as a trick of the Vietnamese. It has been obsessive and counterproductive” (Erlanger).

The U.S. was instrumental in ensuring Pol Pot was never brought to justice for the worst genocide in the 20th century. Although, the new Cambodian government held trials, without the presence of Pol Pot and sentenced him to death, the Thai government refused to turn him over and the U.S. failed to demand they do so (Bergin 43). He remained comfortably positioned in Cambodia, although under house arrest, near the border of Thailand, until he died in 1998. His followers claimed he died from a heart attack, but it is also widely rumored he was killed, possibly poisoned by former members of his own group (Gareau 171).

The plight of the Cambodian people was not well known to the average American. The western media helped the U.S. government shield what was actually occurring. Stories of the genocide began to leak out of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge were displaced, but Americans did not understand it completely until the 1985 release of the movie The Killing Fields. The horrors of this period of time were beginning to be realized and the American people demanded something be done (Gareau 170).

The United States fixation with anything anti-Vietnamese and anti-Soviet formed devastating human rights policies in relation to Cambodia. More than a million people died and millions of others suffered torture and unbelievable cruelty. Just as Pol Pot was never held responsible on the world stage for the atrocities he instigated and committed, nor has the United States ever taken responsibility for their part in it.