U.S. Involvement

In The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffe, they portray the Cambodian genocide through 2 men’s experiences. The movie does not include the macroscopic view of what was happening at the White House as these events were happening. In one of the first scenes, Sydney Schanberg experiences one of the U.S. bombings in Phnom Penh, the country’s capital. He asks people at the embassy why they were bombing the city, but they were frantically telling him different reasons, none of which seem to be truthful. At first, they tell him that they had mistaken the coordinates as they were trying to attack Viet-Cong forces, then he gets another opinion saying they're not allowed to say anything.

            Trying to sift through all the information about what President Nixon was doing behind scenes, or what really sparked it all is a challenging task. The details entangling the Cambodian crisis are messy, scattered, and far-reaching. As far as the American government is concerned, there is information, but we can’t help but feel that some of the information we have researched should be taken with a grain of salt. There are varying opinions on whether Nixon took the right approach or not, and many speculate that the approach was really the catalyst to the Khmer Rouge’s takeover. To preface the situation, the United States was committed to stopping the spread of communism. In the previous years, the Soviet Union and China had backed Vietnam, and the nation was divided between the communist north and the defending south; the United States got involved and chose to ally with the south in its efforts to stay away from communism (Blanton, 2004).

            The Paris Peace Accords in December of 1972 determined that the United States would cease direct involvement in Vietnam and Laos. Cambodia is neighbor to both, and so the United States began a secret operative to bomb in Cambodia, where they believed Vietnamese to be. They were not wrong in this assumption, but they killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in their wake, along with devastating the food supply in the country. President Nixon ordered the Air Force to carry out these attacks, through communication with the American Embassy in Phnom Penh. The embassy therefore directed these illegal attacks throughout the country (Becker, 1998).

             Nixon made an official announcement back on April 30^th, 1970, that declared official involvement in Vietnam. This address was on the grounds that the Vietnamese had made enough impact in Cambodia that they were endangering the United States’ soldiers who were fighting in the areas. “To protect our men who are in Vietnam…I have concluded that the time has come for action,” ("President nixon's cambodia," 1970.) The United States did take action. These bombings were detrimental to Cambodia.

That same year, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a communist, was overtaken by General Lon Nol. Nol was supported by the United States because he was anti-communist and “right-wing.” As he escalated the war on communism, especially in Vietnam, Sihanouk partnered up with the Khmer Rouge group. Then, the group was relatively small in numbers, but this new shift in government gave the small group the opportunity it needed to siege control. The Khmer Rouge gained much support with the people of Cambodia because they opposed the war Lon Nol was waging so strongly. Their numbers grew dramatically during this time. Had it not been for the United States’  mostly unpublicized involvement in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge might not have reached the amount of power they did, or maybe it just would have taken longer; either way, the far-reaching and devastating affects of their regime have left many Cambodians in dismal conditions.