Who is to Blame?

The KR Tribunal is a national court, so I guess it makes sense that they are not allowed to put countries on trial. But that is not very satisfying to a lot of people in Cambodia. The folks about to be put on trial are already pointing fingers of responsibility at the US and China while the local farmers still can’t quite believe that one of their own could have killed so many.

But with stories like this coming out, its going to be hard to convince the population here that the United States ought to be one of the first to face justice….

From the Cambodia Daily, 25 September: The total weight of bombs that the US dropped on Cambodia during its war with Vietnam may have been five times greater than previously thought, according to a new academic study.

The bombing of Cambodia also began in 1965, more than three years earlier than is widely believed, according to historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan whose analysis of US Air Force data released in 2000 appear in the October issue of Canada's The Walrus magazine.

Air Force data indicates that 2,756,941 tons of bombs were dropped in 230,516 sorties over 113,716 sites between 1965 and 1973, the authors say.

This surpasses the bomb weight dropped by the allied forces on all combat theaters during the whole of World War II, which totaled 2 million tons, they write.

...Information Minister and government spokesman Khieu Kanharith said the bombing encouraged rural Cambodians to join the Khmer Rouge. But he said he was not concerned with the numbers of bombs dropped. "We are Buddhists...so we try to forgive and forget," he said.

US Embassy spokesman Jeff Daigle could not be reached for comment.