Cambodia, 1969-1979
These nine photographs were shot in a movie theater in Cambodia during the summer of 2005. The film playing there explained the ten year history of Cambodia between 1969 and 1979. It tells the complex story of how the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon’s decision to proceed with the carpet bombing of Cambodia, affected the rise of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge revolution, which ultimately resulted in the Cambodian genocide.
The images are roughly chronological and can be read from left to right in three sets, starting with the top row.
1 — In the late 1960’s, America’s involvement in the Vietnam War increases. In 1969, the war spills over into Cambodia.
2 — That year, President Richard Nixon authorizes the carpet bombing of neutral Cambodia to eliminate North Vietnamese supply chains along its eastern border with Vietnam. These massive American bombings are carried out in secret. Any claims of this mission made by the American media are denied and discredited by the administration. “Cambodia,” Richard Nixon later declared, “is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.” By this, he meant that the United States would aid Cambodia in its fight against communism, but would avoid the military commitments that might lead to ground-combat interventions similar to Vietnam. The ongoing US bombing raids of Cambodia are never mentioned.
3 — In 1970, Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk, the ruling head of government, is removed from power through a coup while traveling abroad. He is left exiled in China and offered refuge by Chairman Mao. The current Cambodian Prime Minister, Lon Nol, is now seen as a right-wing ally of the United States.
4 — Under the leadership of Sorbonne educated Pol Pot, Cambodia’s radical communist insurgency, the “Khmer Rouge” see an opportunity for gaining popular support by politically aligning themselves with the deposed prince.
5 — By inciting Cambodian peasants against the puppet government of Lon Nol and the carpet-bombing Americans, the Khmer Rouge rapidly expand their base in the countryside. It is the beginning of full-scale civil war in Cambodia.
6 — During the early 1970’s, Nixon continues to accelerate the relentless B-52 bombings of Cambodia. In the first eight months of 1973 alone, hundreds of thousands of tons of US bombs rain across Cambodia – more than the entire tonnage dropped on Japan during all of World War II.
7 — Invigorated by Vietnamese and Chinese support, the Khmer Rouge continue to grow in strength and size. In 1975, the violent and radical Khmer Rouge peasant army finally topples the US supported Lon Nol government and gains complete control of Cambodia.
8 — In April of 1975, the Khmer Rouge empty the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in a mass exodus of city dwellers streaming out into the countryside. This begins the “Year Zero”, a Khmer Rouge term for a society of nothingness: a mandate for the loss of individual identity in exchange for an expendable life with no memory of the past and no thoughts of the future.
9 — The entire population of Cambodia is forced to live as human slaves in an agrarian society of subsistence farming in which one in four Cambodians dies through murder, disease or starvation. The country is sealed off from the outside world for four years, until 1979. During this time, nearly two million Cambodians lose their lives and all schools, universities, libraries and theaters, hospitals and medicine, banks and money, television and radio, art, music and literature, villages and towns, extended families and any other structures of civil society are destroyed.