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>>>>>A day of reckoning for those responsible for one of the most evil crimes of the 20th century is long overdue<<<<

How true. The murder of gentle Khmer society (peaceful for 500 years) is indeed the crime of the 20th century.

However:

1. The mass murder has not started in 1975 but in 1970 with 'secret" bombing of Cambodia. Who will, if ever be responsible for hundreds of thousands murdered Khmer civilians, turning of Cambodian countryside into Moonscape and opening the doors for mad, genocidal Pol Pot's goons.

2.Gerald Ford has warned what will happen,but American media choose to look the other way. Liberals were quite content with Pol Pot. While genocide was going on, it was non-event for American liberal media.

3. The mass murder of genocidal Pol Pot regime did not end 25 years ago, it continued with Western help several more years (Pol Pot continued attacks on Cambodia from Thailand, with full Western support)

4. UN General Assembly is complicit in crimes coimmitted by Pol Pot AFTER January 1979 because THEY ALLOWED POL POT to keep the seat in UN.

5. The origin of Pol Pot's mad idea need closer look, and his connections with Western and Chicom services must not be overlooked.

The blood of innocent Kmers is not only on Pol Pot's hands.

The Cambodian genocide taught me a lot. The people who opposed the war in Viet Nam were completely silent during this slaughter. And in the end it was the Vietnamese Army that did the Lord's work in bringing it to an end, which taught me that if you or I refuse to do his work, he'll find someone who will. Even someone you least expect.

Still, the first responsibility for the Khmer Rouge killings were the Khmer Rouge themselves.

The philosophical underpinnings for it was Maoist. Other "maoists" such as the Sendero Luminoso and the Nepalese guerrillas are similarly psychotic but nothing compares to the original, the Chinese Maoists who even managed to make Hitler and Stalin look like frat boys.

And it seems counter-intuitive to blame the US for the slaughter, because the US fought them. The US didn't fight the Chinese maoists, but they were even more deadly than their Cambodian little brothers. We never bombed Peru but the Senderos were positively steeped in blood.

I do blame us for not going back into the region to stop the killing once we knew. We said after Hitler that never again would we stand by, but of course, we did. But having walked away from the sacrifice of 60,000 American soldiers, whats a few million Cambodians?

If the US government was not prepared to fight, who was going to defend Thailand from either the Khmer Rouge or the VietNamese Army if fighting should spill across? The Thais were terrified of both of them, and certainly could not depend on us to fight for them. So while the fact that Pol Pot's men took control of some of the camps, its a reach to say that anyone "permitted" it or that anyone "supported" it. They permitted what they couldn't stop. After the Viet Nam War no US politician was going to countenance sending Americans back there for any reason. Its sad, it means we share in the guilt in an indirect way, but there is a big difference between being Pol Pot and being the people that fought him and then ran away.

The blood of innocent Kmers is not only on Pol Pot's hands.

Somehow you seem to miss the person who allowed all this to happen, and after the Khmer Rouge and their Chinese patrons the man most responsibile - Sihanouk.

The North Vietnamese and the VC had were using Cambodia as a convient way to get troops and supplies into the South.

Faced with the virtual occupation of a good chunk of the country, Sihanouk faced a stark choice. His advisors and the military pleaded with him to align with the US and force the invaders out.

He decided to do worse the nothing. Sihanouk went on a begging tour, personally begging the Soviets to stop the NVA. With Sihanouk's regime falling apart around his countrymen, and his craven diplomatic tour obviously doomed to failure from the start, Prince Matark and Lon Nol pulled off a coup d'etat while Sihanouk was still out of the country.

Tired of Sihanouk's duplicity and uselessness the US was happy to see him go - though we had no direct hand in the coup.

Sihanouk then did what was obviously the worst thing he could have done.

He had dithered away the most of the support he had in the country with his incompetent rule domestically, and he could find no allies abroad either.

But there was one group willing to help Sihanouk...the Khmer Rouge, at the time a rag tag group of no hopers. But strangely enough with Sihanouk the puppet at the top they began to be taken seriously. With Chinese support, they quickly became a serious guerrilla threat, and eventually after the US abandoned the region, they were able to come to power.

Not suprisingly, with Sihanouk no longer needed they broke their promises to him and began to unleash the horror of the worst democide in human history.

Sihanouk had managed to both end his own rule, and make sure the worst group of butchers one could imagine would follow by making bad and selfish decision after bad and selfish decision.