A massacre and a lotus
http://www.thanhniennews.com/2007/pages/20...5232033495.aspx

Reported by Jon Dillingham

Just a few kilometers from the Cambodian border, the Ba Chuc Tomb stood in a clearing next to a bustling elementary school.
The tomb, Nha mo Ba Chuc, is a memorial to the 3,157 peasants who lost their lives when the Khmer Rouge destroyed Ba Chuc Village in April 1978.


In 1977-78, Pol Pot’s soldiers had launched a series of border raids in Ba Chuc, Tay Ninh, Ha Tien and on Tho Chu Island that left thousands of Vietnamese civilians dead.

The embittered American government had ignored these massacres when it chastised the newly-independent Vietnam for overthrowing the Khmer Rouge in early 1979.

The memorial consisted of a glass case containing the skulls of 1,100 Ba Chuc victims.

I stared at the skulls but did not feel the horror I had expected.

Vietnamese visitors quietly lit incense and prayed at an altar in front of the bones.

Such offerings help the dead find peace.

The tomb's display case was surrounded by golden lotus petals to create a bup sen (lotus flower just before bloom) around the tomb.

The lotus, which often grows in muddy swamps, is a symbol for the kind of beauty that rises out of ugliness, pain or destruction.

A few children and monks wandering the site were more than happy to chat and walk me around the grounds.

A group of smiling school kids befriended me in broken English and showed me to some pagodas.

I walked by the nearby school and peered in the windows.

The students were enthusiastic and the teachers lectured passionately.

Energetic responses came from all corners of the room.

Despite provincial education's reputation, Ba Chuc's teachers were dedicated and the students, only a generation separated from genocide, were engaged.

Ba Chuc had moved on.

Vietnam is humble and reserved about its overthrow of the Khmer Rouge.

Vietnam is equally humble and reserved when the American government, which bombed the Khmer Rouge into power and voted to give Pol Pot a seat in the UN, now castigates the country for its human rights record.

At the Ba Chuc Tomb, this humility triumphs over the arrogance that has helped create the swamps of massacre from which Vietnamese lotuses grow.

http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/2...a--hun-sen.aspx

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has categorically rejected the notion that Vietnam invaded the neighboring Southeast Asian kingdom in the 1970s, saying Vietnamese soldiers had sacrificed their lives for “the survival of the Cambodian people and the country.”

“I myself cannot explain all the meanings of the word ‘Vietnam’. In brief, Vietnam means the revival and development of Cambodia,” he said at a press briefing on January 3 in Dong Nai Province after a ceremony to launch a monument for Unit 125 the earlier day.

Founded by Hun Sen, Unit 125 was the initial force of Cambodia’s resistance movement prior to the founding of the United Front for Salvation of Cambodian Motherland on December 2, 1978 that eventually defeated the genocidal regime.

The monument was launched to mark what would be the 33rd anniversary of the ouster of the Khmer Rouge regime on January 7.

At the press conference, Hun Sen said he wanted to express his thanks to Vietnamese veterans and war martyrs who “sacrificed for the survival of Cambodian people and the country.”

Commenting on accusations by a former Khmer Rouge leader at a trial last month that Vietnam had invaded Cambodia in the 1970s, Hun Sen said it was not necessary to respond to such “deceitful” words.

“The killer and genocide (perpetrator) defending himself in an effort to evade the crime. Everybody knows our country used to have a genocidal regime and [now] we and the world have opened a trial against them,” he said.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, commonly known as the “Khmer Rouge Tribunal,” is a national court established under an agreement between the Royal Government of Cambodia and the United Nations to try senior members of the Khmer Rouge.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 without facing justice but the regime's four most senior surviving members, accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, finally went on trial in Cambodia late last year.

Noun Chea, 85, is among four defendants in the tribunal’s Case 002 together with Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Thirith. They face charges of crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and genocide, according to the tribunal’s website.

Led by Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the Khmer Rouge regime pursued an extreme policy designed to establish an urban utopia that forced people to leave cities, abolished money and outlawed religion. Its brutal practices of wanton executions, overworking of the population and starvation are estimated to have wiped out some two million people from 1975-1979 before the Vietnamese army drove them out of power.

In the book Hun Sen: Strong man of Cambodia, authors Harish Mehta and Julie Mehta wrote that Hun Sen was very angry when asked about Vietnam’s “invasion of Cambodia.”

Reminded of the anger at the press conference, Hun Sen said some people had wrongly described Vietnam’s military assistance to Cambodia as an invasion.

“I am ready to strongly reject any such allegations. Vietnam’s presence in Cambodia was to meet a demand of Cambodian residents and for their survival… Has any country helped Cambodia as much as Vietnam? No! Only Vietnamese people and army helped Cambodia when it faced the worst difficulties.

“Many of our people were killed by Pol Pot, why can’t we ask for Vietnam’s assistance? Whenever we became stronger, Vietnam would withdraw its military force. In reality, they withdrew in 1989. They have not been present for more than 20 years,” he said.

Edwin Martini, author of Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000 and Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University, said the US had backed the Khmer Rouge and blamed Vietnam for the invasion of Cambodia.

“The long-term US position on blaming Vietnam for the invasion of Cambodia, and the Third Indochina War in general, really was made permanent during the Reagan administration of the 1980s,” he told Vietweek.

“There was, simply, no sense in Washington that the Vietnamese might also be responsible for stopping the genocide in Cambodia,” he said.

In an interview with Vietweek in July last year, Martini pointed out that the US was providing “all these supplies and materials to what they called the ‘non-communist resistance’ when everybody knew full well that most of those supplies and most of those materials were going to the Khmer Rouge.”

“There's certainly a recognition among most scholars and historians that Vietnam played a significant role in ending the Cambodian genocide and that the invasion was provoked by the Khmer Rouge,” he said.

Carl Robinson, an Associated Press correspondent in South Vietnam during the 1968-75 period, shared similar views about the US blaming Vietnam.

“I believe the American reaction to Vietnam's invasion and overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime was one of the most shameful episodes in US foreign policy after 1975,” Robinson told Vietweek.

“What's more, they continued to support the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations for many years.

I believe the ‘hard-liners’ won the debate and wanted to punish Hanoi for the way the war had ended only four years before with its attack on the Saigon regime,” he said.

Retired Colonel Andre Sauvageot of the US Army had referred to US’s support for the Khmer Rouge at the time in his statement at a hearing before the Subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations in March 2008.

“The United States supported China and the genocidal Khmer Rouge against Vietnam's liberation of Cambodia, e.g., by lobbying the UN to keep ‘Democratic Kamphuchea's’ seat at the UN and lobbying ASEAN to form a united front against Vietnam in Cambodia,” he testified at the time.

Sauvageot had nine years of active duty in the US Army, serving in Vietnam from 1964-73, followed by post-war stints with the US government service to provide political analysis.

He said Vietnam’s role was critical because Vietnam acted unilaterally, with diplomatic support from only the Soviet Union. “The reality is that Vietnam – and only Vietnam – saved the Khmer people from the genocidal, maniacal rule of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge,” he told Vietweek.

“It was the heroic, but humane People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) which after quickly overthrowing the Khmer Rouge effective 7 January 1979, closed the torture chambers/death camps such as Tuol Sleng, stopped the mass killings, known as the ‘killing fields’ and opened a path for a new Cambodian government under the leadership of Heng Samrin and Hun Sen… which eventually would be strong enough to insure that the horror and terror of the Khmer Rouge could never again return to Cambodia.”

He said Vietnam, even though it was still impoverished itself from years of fighting for its independence and freedom, shipped food into Cambodia to help Cambodians whose harvest had been disrupted by the necessary deployment of PAVN to end the horrific rule of the Khmer Rouge.

He alleged that China “was using the Khmer Rouge raids as part of its strategic attempt to force Vietnam to distance itself from the Soviet Union and accept being a satellite in the Chinese Orbit. Beijing also believed Vietnam would not dare do anything to counter their Khmer Rouge allies.

“Sadly, my friends/colleagues in the US government believed the same thing. Khmer Rouge, Chinese, American assessments were all wrong. And frankly I predicted that at the time,” he said.

According to Sauvageot, Vietnam did not want to go into Cambodia and had tried hard to persuade China to quit supporting the Khmer Rouge but to no avail. “Vietnam tried to persuade Khmer Rouge to stop the raids - again could not do so,” he added.

“So only course of action left for Hanoi to protect the freedom and independence of Vietnam was to deploy PAVN’s heroic young soldiers into Cambodia.

“Hanoi not only did not want to go into Cambodia, the Party/Government did not want to remain any longer than necessary to insure that the Khmer Rouge terror (and Chinese supported raids into Vietnam) could never return,” he said.

Even Cambodian women fought the K Rouge

The good thing about Cambodia is they have a strong man leader, like Steve Jobs of Apple, the downside is he may become a mealomaniac.

There is no leader in VN, only a committee, that is bad because, unlike a strong leader, a committee lacks passion and vision.

Cambodia should invade VN and install a strong leader

Strong leader? May I remind you that Hun Sen was installed as a puppet by Viet Nam? And so every committee lacks passion and vision? Why would you say something like that? Just because there are more people, doesn't mean all the members become dumb! You comments are without backing~ And btw, Cambodia is nowhere close to being able to take on Viet Nam/...

Hun Sen was installed, but in the last 20 years he has been the strongman without military support from Vietnam. No matter whether you like someone like HS or not, the fact is he is leading Cambodia with his personality.

In Vietnam there is no such character, everything has to be agreed by 3 or more people, which slows everything up - this can be a good or bad thing, but its definitely boring, like Apple without Steve Jobs or Libya without Gaddafi.