[Vision2020] Mass Slaughter in Vietnam?

[Mark Solomon]

Nick,

Cambodia has been changing rapidly, for the worse, in the past few 
years. Sihanouk resigned as King in an attempt to force political 
reform. He has been replaced as King by one of his sons who spent 
most of his life in Paris and is a creature of the Prime Minister. 
The PM, Hun Sen, is a former Khmer Rouge thug who "saw the light" as 
the Vietnamese Armies were crossing the border and switched 
allegiances. As partial payback for being given a country to own, Hun 
Sen recently "negotiated" a new border with Vietnam which of course 
gives a good chunk of the highlands where the Montagnard tribe lives 
to Vietnam. Needless to say, given the Montagnard/American history of 
the Vietnam War, the Montagnards are in deep #$@%. The theoretical 
democracy is only that, a theory. Hun Sen rules with absolute power, 
including its corollary, absolute corruption. Opposition political 
leaders either are in exile or dead at Hun Sen's hand. Until the 
foreign donor countries that prop up Hun Sen pull the foreign aid 
plug, it will only get worse. China and Vietnam are now the largest 
donor countries followed by the EU.

It's very sad. I spent several months there two years ago 
working/teaching metal sculpture techniques to Khmer artists using 
decommissioned weapons, mostly AK47s, for our raw material. A life 
changing experience for them, and me.

The best in-country source of news I know of is Khmer Intelligence: 
http://www.khmerintelligence.org/3Q2004.html

the website is only sporadically maintained but you can subscribe to 
their yahoo news group for periodic messages of the low down in 
Cambodia. Link to subscribe from their website.

Mark S.




At 10:17 AM -0800 12/15/06, <nickgier at adelphia.net> wrote:
>Greetings:
>
>Some more really wild claims from down the hill, this time about 
>Vietnam.  Where is the evidence for mass slaughter in Vietnam after 
>we left?  Yes, many were sent to reeducation camps, and many of 
>those fleeing lost their lives to pirates in the South China Sea.
>
>More people are being killed, maimed, and born malformed by leftover 
>munitions and Agent Orange than ever lost their lives at the hands 
>of the Communist regime.  I would also hazard to guess that we 
>killed more Vietnamese (at least one million) than the Viet Cong 
>ever would have killed if we had not intervened.
>
>Before we invaded Cambodia, the country was stable and ruled by 
>Prince Sihanouk, who, along with his wife, are now King and Queen of 
>Cambodia.  (When I was there in 2002, their pictures were 
>everywhere.) Our invasion, plus support for right-wing thugs, 
>alienated the people and forced them right into the hands of the 
>Khmer Rouge.
>
>The Killing Fields are just as much our responsibility as theirs. 
>The great irony of course is that Communist Vietnamese troops 
>defeated the Khmer Rouge, and the UN had one of greatest successes 
>in making elections possible there.
>
>The Johns Hopkins report on Iraqi causalities, which looked at every 
>single death certificate (90 percent of households surveyed produced 
>one), showed that a majority of deaths occurred by coalition air 
>strikes.  This survey was done before the upsurge in sectarian 
>killings, mainly in Baghdad.  Taking the low end of their estimates 
>at 400,000 dead, it would take Shias and Sunnis a very long time to 
>top Bush's slaughter.
>
>Yours for accurate history,
>
>Nick Gier
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