Cambodia: Thousands of war-era explosives found buried at high school

freagle , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

This article is a classic example of North Atlantic propaganda writing.

Cambodia remains one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, 48 years after the end of its brutal civil war.

Passive voice. It’s not that Cambodia was mined by someone, it just remains mined. Who mined it? Well, it apparently owns a brutal civil war, so presumably it mined itself?

gsp.yale.edu/…/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf

It was a civil war rooted in the French colonialism in the area giving way to US dominance (like in Vietnam) in the USA’s campaign to encircle China with nuclear military bases. Yes, Cambodians did mine their own country and they used Chinese mines to do it. And they did it because they didn’t have many other choices when facing the US military and the puppet regimes of European colonialism.

Even worse than the historical context around the mining, there’s literally no context for anything. Are landmines a thing of the past? Absolutely not. The US is still using landmines despite 90% of the world signing a treaty to stop using them because of how they kill so many innocent people for decades. In fact, Cambodia is one of the classic examples of why the treaty was signed. But the US still uses them. How is that not relevant to a story about landmines in Cambodia? Because it’s a BBC article.

But the layers of propaganda keep going. Not only is Cambodia one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, it’s one of the world’s most heavily bombed countries. And these bombs, especially the unexploded cluster bombs, remain throughout the country as well, killing innocents decades later. And why is Cambodia one of the most heavily bombed countries in the world? The USA. So we’ve got a story about a high school finding land mines in it, a statement that Cambodia is passively one of the most mined countries in the world, but zero accountability, except to say “civil war” so it allows ignorant readers to imagine it was all Cambodians.

And as if that context isn’t enough to add, Cambodia is but ONE of the 30 countries the US has bombed, and it ranks among the top bombed countries in the history of the world along with North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos. So, a story about Cambodia have unexploded ordinance in a school makes no mention of the context of unexploded ordinance in general, the basic history of who is responsible for the conflict (France, US) and how Cambodia is not exceptional for the region nor for the time period. None of that context matters, I guess.

But since we’re here, let’s add some more context. The bombings of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all came AFTER the USA nuked 2 civilian cities in Japan while in the middle of negotiations. Literally in the middle of negotiations, Japan is sending a message to the negotiators, the USA receives the message asking for dialog on particular points, and in response the USA nukes civilians in the world’s only ever nuclear attack. This is the context that precedes the US making 4 other countries the most bombed countries in the world. But, unlike in Japan, the US didn’t use nukes in these theaters. Instead, they left literally going on 50 years of unexploded ordinance in these countries that continues to kill people. And in Vietnam they brought in genocidal chemical warfare by developing and deploying Agent Orange. Agent Orange is a defoliant, and the US deployed it to literally destroy all of the leaves in massive chunks of rain forest because they claimed it would help them fight the Vietnamese better if the Vietnamese couldn’t hide in the trees. Well, turns out Agent Orange is so toxic that it still causes massive numbers of terrible disfiguring birth defects, stillbirths, and virulent cancers - not as bad but with echoes of the radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are literal multi-generation mass murder campaigns.

I wish that was the end of the context, but instead what we see is the USA continue this centuries-long genocidal mass murder program in Yugoslavia where it directed NATO to drop Depleted Uranium bombs in a densely developed European country. That region also has multiple generations of terrible birth defect, still birth, and cancers many many times the incident rate for countries in the region that were not bombed with nuclear waste. The US then proceeded to kill a million Iraqis, in a conflict where it used white phosphorous which burned thousands of innocent people to death much like the use of napalm in Vietnam, and where it used depleted uranium rounds, much more prolifically. The birth defects, stillbirths, and cancers in Iraq are sky high, again a multi-generational mass murder campaign.

Apologists can pretend that the US didn’t understand what it was doing to the Vietnamese or the Japanese, that the weapons were new and hadn’t been tested, and the long term effects just weren’t understood. I don’t think that’s true. But even if it were, Henry Kissinger was the architect of what happened in Vietnam and Cambodia, and he’s still alive today. They sent him to talk with China recently. You don’t get to say the US didn’t understand the effects of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, landmines, and cluster munitions in the conflicts it created in Yugoslavia, Iraq, other parts of Africa, etc. You don’t get to say the US is a net force for good when it does these things consciously, knowingly, systematically, and against a global cry for peace and for deescalation.

This is the context in which an article is written detailing some landmines found in a Cambodian high school. Cambodia remains the most mined country in the world after a devastating 48-year civil war.

autotldr Bot , 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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A high school in north-eastern Cambodia has been forced to close temporarily after thousands of unexploded munitions were discovered.

Cambodia remains one of the world’s most heavily mined countries, 48 years after the end of its brutal civil war.

At that time, the Queen Kosomak High School in Kratie province was being used as a military station.

Photos show tons of rusty explosives neatly stacked in rows, with grenades and anti-tank launchers among them.

In total, more than 2,000 pieces of ordnance was discovered over three days - Heng Ratana, director general of the Cambodian Mine Action Centre, told AFP news agency.

Landmines that are scattered across the country have killed more than 64,000 people, while 25,000 amputees have been recorded since 1979, according to The Halo Trust.

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