Dr. Steve Heder, “New Research on Kissinger’s Air War: US and South Vietnamese Bombing of Cambodian Civilians, 1969-1973”
The passing of Henry Kissinger in November 2023 precipitated an outpouring of public commentary on bombing in Cambodia in the early 1970s while he was US National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. Public interest in bombing campaigns has been further stimulated by the recent avalanche of coverage of the effects of airstrikes by the aerial warfare branch of the Israeli Defense Forces. In both cases, much concern has centred on the resulting deaths of civilians and the extent to which these are evidence of war crimes or worse. There has also, at least sometimes, been debate about what exactly happened in specific instances and questioning about the credibility of reported death tolls. Since 2017, Dr Steve Heder has been conducting extensive new field research on the Cambodia case. Unexpectedly, the results bring into question widely held beliefs about the air war in Cambodia, while also suggesting that comparison with the Gaza case highlights how much more intensely horrific war crimes are being committed there, even while being documented in real time.
About Speaker and Chair
Dr. Steve Heder was a journalist in Cambodia in 1974-1975 and has conducted research on Cambodia since that time, including for Amnesty International, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Human Rights Watch, the Cambodia Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the “Khmer Rouge Tribunal”).
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).