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Kissinger's Legacy Still Ripples Through Asia

by Titi Tran

   washington --

   Henry Kissinger will be remembered in much of the world as a foreign
   policy genius who ushered China into the world community, driving a
   wedge between Beijing and its Cold War ally Moscow, and eventually
   transforming the world economy.

   In Southeast Asia, the Nixon-era national security adviser and
   secretary of state who died this week at age 100 is being remembered
   differently.

   The opening to China that Kissinger engineered sent a rippling effect
   to Thailand, which, former Thai Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun said,
   had trepidation for Communism.

   "A lot of Thai people didn't understand China, believing that the
   communist China couldn't be trusted," Anand, who served as the prime
   minister of Thailand from 1991 to 1992, told VOA's Thai Service in May
   when Kissinger celebrated his 100th birthday.

   "I don't think it was [only because of] Kissinger's policy" toward
   China but "also because of the ties between the Thai and U.S. military"
   that focused on defense rather than diplomatic relations, said Anand.

   Architect of war strategy

   In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, meanwhile, Kissinger is remembered as
   the architect of a war strategy that devastated vast regions and killed
   uncounted numbers of people.

   "If we just focus on the region '¦ Kissinger's decisions in these
   areas, no matter how brilliant he may have been, no matter how skillful
   a negotiator he may have been, were disastrous for hundreds of
   thousands of innocent people," said Larry Berman, a professor emeritus
   at the University of California, Davis who has written extensively on
   the Vietnam War.

   "It is where the judgment of history will be," Berman told VOA's
   Vietnamese Service on Thursday.

   Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos

   The United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of
   bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1965 and 1975 -- twice the
   amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II, according to the
   website [1]Storymaps.

   At the time, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, which was
   supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries, was
   fighting the U.S.-backed Republic of Vietnam in the south.

   Analysts say Kissinger's policies aimed at quashing the communist
   forces were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

   North Vietnam moved troops and supplies to the South via Laos on what
   was known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. Kissinger and other American
   officials wanted that to end.

   From 1964-1973, the U.S. dropped 4 billion bombs on Laos, making it the
   most bombed country in the world, according to Legacies of War. Tens of
   thousands of people were killed.

   The U.S. dropped an estimated 500,000 tons of bombs in Cambodia as what
   began with a CIA operation in Laos expanded to Cambodia, said Erin Lin,
   assistant professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University,
   in her book, "When the Bombs Stopped."

   The bombing killed as many as 150,000 Cambodian civilians, said Yale
   University historian Ben Kiernan, cited by The Washington Post.

   In Cambodia, the bombing "enraged populace into the arms of an
   insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing
   began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into
   Cambodia, a coup d'état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge,
   and ultimately the Cambodian genocide," according to a Walrus magazine
   article in Yale University's genocide studies program.

   In Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, trained personnel, children and farmers
   are still finding unexploded ordnance more than 50 years after the last
   U.S. service member left Vietnam on March 29, 1973.

   Some of it is removed by those who know how. Some of it injures or
   kills the finder.

   Ros Chantrabot, a Khmer historian and personal adviser to Hun Sen,
   prime minister of Cambodia from 1985 until this year, told VOA's Khmer
   Service on Thursday that "Henry Kissinger had a huge responsibility '¦
   for involving Cambodia in the war, which killed many people and left
   many landmines in Cambodia today."

   "The sad reality is, he leaves this legacy which many, many Cambodians
   still pay the price for," said Sophal Ear, a Cambodian American
   political scientist, to The Washington Post. "To this day, there are
   people who '¦ lose limb and life in the process of trying to make a
   living in a land that has been filled with bombs."

   East Timor

   Brad Simpson, professor at the University of Connecticut Department of
   History, said Kissinger is also responsible for backing Indonesia's
   invasion of East Timor in 1975.

   Indonesia said at the time that annexation of East Timor was crucial to
   prevent the spread of communism.

   Simpson told VOA's Indonesian Service on Thursday that Kissinger
   "helped to expedite the flow of weapons and military equipment to
   Indonesia over the next year as it faced a determined guerrilla
   resistance from armed East Timorese resistance fighters."

   He continued, saying, "By the time Kissinger left office in the
   beginning of 1977, Indonesia had killed perhaps a tenth of the
   population of East Timor." At the time, the population was 619,308,
   according to the World Bank.

   The Indonesian invasion led to a long and bloody occupation of the
   territory that ended only after an international peacekeeping force was
   introduced in 1999 and as many as 200,000 people had died, according to
   National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 62.

   The Korean Service, Khmer Service, Vietnamese Service, Indonesian
   Service and Thai Service contributed to this report.

References

   1. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390bba4735cdb