Friday, May 25 , 1973 T1-1E SUMMER DAILY Page Eleven CAMBODIAN CIVILIANS Innocent victims o By DENNIS NEELD villages and hamlets have been army gave the wrong coordinat- Associated Press Writer burned by insurgent forces who es." PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - have been on the offensive since THERE IS NO accurate record The stepped-up U.S. air war early in the year. of civilians killed and wounded in Cambodia is in its fourth Mao Poch is a farmer and part- by the round-the-clock U.S. tacti- month and the people in the time government soldier in the cal air strikes and saturation countryside are feeling its ef- vilage of Chhnok Trou. He told raids by B52s. Many casualties fects., of a bombing mistake on May remain behind Communist lines. Despite complex target screen- 1 when he was wounded in both Government hospitals list v i c-: ing procedures by American air legs. tims of the air war only as plotters, there are reports that "Eighty houses were destroyed "wounded by shrapnel." bombs are falling into civilian and yet there were no Commun- The Cambodian government areas because of inaccurate in- ists in the village," he said. "I lists 12,273 civilian dead and 28,- formation from Cambodian field was talking with friends in my 665 wounded in three years af commanders or because of mis- house when the bombs hit. With war. Since the beginning of the takes. my own eyes I saw 20 people current enemy offensive, only ADDED TO THIS, hundreds of killed and 10 wounded. T h e 156 are listed as killed and 204 wounded. But the figures are for only those whose families a r e said to have claimed relief pay- ments. "In war, some civilian casual- ties are unavoidable," said Col. Am Rong; spokesman for t h e Cambodian command. "We pre- sume some have been killed by < bombing. It is inevitable." THE THAI-BASED 7th Air Force and the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh - which plays a major role in screening targets- nevertheless have worked out procedures which they say are limiting civilian bombing victims to a minimum. But since B52s strike mostly at suspected Communist-led con- centrations - staging areas and US. bombing supply caches usually some dis- Requests for air assistance ori- tance behind the front lines - ginate with the Cambodian high civilians wounded in a B52 at- command and are based 'on in- tack would have trouble reach- formation from reconnaissance ing a government hospital. flights and intelligence gathering AT FIRST, much of the air operations. action was concentrated against Many non-American military supply routes in eastern Cam- experts in Phnom Penh say that bodia, used by North Vietnam to Cambodian intelligence machin- channel troops, tanks and war ery in inadequate for the task, supplies to South Vietnam. however, with the result that too From a February average of many air strike requests are 28 missions a day, America's air made, causing excessively high involvement steadily escalated, civilian casualities. and the focus of operations shift- ALTHOUGH all air strike re- ed to the more heavily populated ALTHOUGH all by str y central, southern and sonthwes- quests are screened by military tern provinces in direct support personnel in the U.S. embassy in of hardpressed Cambodian ground Phnom Penh, procedures there forces.d are also felt to be inadequate to By mid-March the United prevent massive killing of civil- States was launching from bases ats. in Guam and Thailand an aver- Even if civilian casualties are age of 242 daily missions. The largely avoided, many fear the scale of operations was main- heavy bombing is heavily dam- tained through much of April and aging the area around Phnom there is no reason to believe it Penh and denuding the capital of has slackened off since' then. its home-grown food supplies. - AFTER a fact-finding visit to Deserted villages are being oblit- Phom Penh last month, congres- erated and may take years to re- sional aides James Lowenstein build. and Richard Moose reported to MANY Cambodian command- the Senate Foreign Relations ers rely almost entirely on air Committee that it was clear the support to flush out insurgents United States had "become far from bunkers and villages. more deeply and directly involv- ed than ever before in the con- Civilians sometimes get in the duct of the war in Cambodia . . ." way. 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