Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout Indochina.

Five days later, 1 February, President Nixon sent a message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam reiterating and expanding upon this pledge. The first two principles put forth in the Presidents message were:

(1) The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions. (2) Preliminary United Stares studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in [he range of $3.2.5 billion of grant aid over 5 years. Other forms of aid will be agreed upon between the two parties- This estimate is subject to revision and to detailed discussion between the Government of the United States and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.62

For the next two decades, the only aid given to any Vietnamese people by the United States was to those who left Vietnam and those who were infiltrated back in to stir up trouble. At the same time, the US imposed a complete embargo on trade and assistance to the country, which lasted until 1994.

Are the victims of the Vietnam War also to be found in generations yet unborn? Tens of millions of gallons of herbicides were unleashed over the country; included in this were quantities of dioxin, which has been called the most toxic man-made substance known; three ounces of dioxin, it is claimed, in the New York City water supply could wipe out the entire populace. Studies in Vietnam since the war have pointed to abnormally high rates of cancers, particularly of the liver, chromosomal damage, birth defects, long-lasting neurological disorders, etc. in the heavily-sprayed areas. Other victims were Americans. Thousands of Vietnam veterans fought for years to receive disability compensation, claiming irreparable damage from simply handling the toxic herbicides.

After the Second World War, the International Military Tribunal convened at Nuremberg, Germany. Created by the victorious Allies, the Tribunal sentenced to prison or execution numerous Nazis who pleaded that they had been only following orders . In an opinion handed down by the Tribunal, it declared that the very essence of the [Tribunals] Charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.

During the Vietnam war, a number of young Americans refused military service on the grounds that the United States was committing war crimes in Vietnam and that if they took part in the war they too, under the principles laid down at Nuremberg, would be guilty of war crimes.

One of the most prominent of these cases was that of David Mitchell of Connecticut. At Mitchells trial in September 1965, Judge William Timbers dismissed his defense as tommyrot and degenerate subversion , and found the Nuremberg principles to be irrelevant to the case. Mitchell was sentenced to prison. Conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., not celebrated as a champion of draft resistance, noted shortly afterward:

I am glad 1 didnt have Judge Timbers job. Oh, I could have scolded Mr. Mitchell along with the best of them. But Id have to cough and wheeze and clear my throat during that passage in my catechism at which I explained to Mr. Mitchell wherein the Nuremberg Doctrine was obviously not at his disposal.63



In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief United States prosecutor at Nuremberg, suggested rather strongly that General William Westmoreland and high officials of the Johnson administration such as Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk could be found guilty of war crimes under criteria established at Nuremberg.64 Yet every American court and judge, when confronted by the Nuremberg defense, dismissed it without according it any serious consideration whatsoever.

The West has never been allowed to forget the Nazi holocaust. For 55 years there has been a continuous outpouring of histories, memoirs, novels, feature films, documentaries, television series ... played and replayed in every Western language; there have been museums, memorial sculptures, photo exhibitions, remembrance ceremonies ... Never Again! But who hears the voice of the Vietnamese peasant? Who has access to the writings of the Vietnamese intellectual? What was the fate of the Vietnamese Anne Frank? Where, asks the young American, is Vietnam?

20. Cambodia 1955-1973

Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism

John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization. I refused ... I considered SEATO an aggressive military alliance directed against neighbors whose ideology I did not share but with whom Cambodia had no quarrel. I had made all this quite clear to John Foster, an acidy, arrogant man, but his brother [CIA Director Allen Dulles] soon turned up with a briefcase full of documents proving that Cambodia was about to fall victim to communist aggression and that the only way to save the country, the monarchy and myself was to accept the protection of SEATO. The proofs did not coincide with my own information, and I replied to Allen Dulles as I had replied to John Foster: Cambodia wanted no part of SEATO. We would look after ourselves as neutrals and Buddhists. There was nothing for the secret service chief to do but pack up his dubious documents and leave.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in his memoirs1

The visits of the Brothers Dulles in 1955 appear to have been the opening salvos in a campaign of extraordinary measures aimed at pressuring the charismatic Cambodian leader into aligning his nation with the West and joining The Holy War Against Communism. The coercion continued intermittently until 1970 when Sihanouk was finally overthrown in an American-backed coup and the United States invaded Cambodia.

In March 1956, after Sihanouk had visited Peking and criticized SEATO, the two countries which sandwich Cambodia-Thailand and South Vietnam, both heavily dependent upon and allied with the United States-suddenly closed their borders. It was a serious move, for the bulk of Cambodias traffic with the outside world at that time passed either along the Mekong River through South Vietnam or by railway through Thailand.

The danger to the tiny kingdom was heightened by repeated military provocations. Thai troops invaded Cambodian territory and CIA-financed irregulars



began to make commando raids from South Vietnam. Deep intrusions were made into Cambodian air space by planes based in the two countries.

To Sihanouk, these actions looked more and more like preliminary softening-up probes for his overthrow. He chose to thrust matters out into the open. At a press conference he scolded the US, defended Cambodias policy of neutrality, and announced that the whole question would be on the agenda of his partys upcoming national congress- There was the implication that Cambodia would turn to the socialist bloc for aid.

The United States appeared to retreat in the face of this unorthodox public diplomacy. The State Department sent a couple of rather conciliatory messages which nullified a threatened cut-off of certain economic aid and included this remarkable piece of altruism: The only aim of American policy to Cambodia is to help her strengthen and defend her independence. Two days before the national congress convened, Thailand and South Vietnam opened their frontiers. The local disputes which the two countries had cited as the reasons for the blockade had not been resolved at all.2

The measures taken against Cambodia were counter-productive. Not only did Sihanouk continue to attack SEATO, but he established relations with the Soviet Union and Poland and accepted aid from China. He praised the latter lavishly for treating Cambodia as an equal and for providing aid without all the strings which, he felt, came attached to American aid.3

Such behavior should not obscure the fact that Sihanouk was as genuine a neutralist as one could be in such a highly polarized region of the world in the midst of the cold war. He did not shy away from denouncing China, North Vietnam or communism on a number of occasions when he felt that Cambodias security or neutrality was being threatened. I foresee perfectly well, he said at one time, the collapse of an independent and neutral Cambodia after the complete triumph of Communism in Laos and South Vietnam. 1

In May 1957, a National Security Council (NSC paper acknowledged that the United States has been unable to influence Cambodia in the direction of a stable [i.e., pro-Western] government and non-involvement in the communist bloc. 5

The following year, five battalions of Saigon troops, supported by aircraft, crossed the Cambodian border again, penetrated to a depth of almost 10 miles and began putting up new boundary markers. Sihanouks impulse was to try and repel the invaders but, to his amazement, he was informed by the American Ambassador to Cambodia, Carl Strom, that US military aid was provided, exclusively for the purpose of opposing communist aggression and in no case could be used against an American ally. The ambassador cautioned that if a single bullet were fired at the South Vietnamese or a single US-supplied, truck used to transport Cambodian troops to a military confrontation with them, this would constitute grounds for canceling aid.6

Ambassador Strom was called back to Washington, told that Sihanouk would now have to go and that US aid would be cut off to precipitate his fall. Strom, however, did not think that this was the wisest move to make at that point and was able to convince the State Department to hold off for the time being.

William Shawcross, in his elaborately-researched book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, notes that NSC papers of the period cited in the Pentagon papers confirm that Washington saw Thai and Vietnamese pressure across the borders as one of the principal weapons to be used in an effort to move Sihanouk toward a more pro-American position. 8

In addition to Thai and South Vietnamese troops, the CIA had at its disposal two other forces, the Khmer Serei and the Khmer Krom, composed largely of ethnic



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