CMAC: The US is bound by law to remove their chemical weapons from Cambodia

Tin Sokhavuth



Heng Ratana, Director General of the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), on Thursday, wrote on his Facebook page urging the US Government to fulfill their obligation following international law by providing full support to CMAC in a view to clear chemical weapons dropped by the US planes in Cambodia.

According to Mr. Ratana, the recent found chemical weapons in Svay Rieng province, were confirmed by experts from the US and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to be chemical weapons in the kind of Chlorobenzalmalononitrile (CS).

"The Kingdom of Cambodia, as a State Party of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), has an obligation to declare the presence of chemical weapons located in Cambodia's territory, as mentioning in Article III of the CWC," wrote Mr. Ratana.

The convention also requires all States Parties to destroy any chemical weapons they abandoned on the territory of other countries in the past.

"All States Parties have agreed to chemically disarm by destroying any stockpiles of chemical weapons they may hold and any facilities which produced them, as well as any chemical weapons they abandoned on the territory of other States Parties in the past," wrote OPCW on their website.

Concerning this issue, Mr. Ratana said that CMAC would do their best to clear these chemical weapons from the school in Svay Rieng province as soon as possible during this school holiday in order to keep the kids safe from this weapon of mass destruction.

Mr. Ratana also wrote that the Kingdom of Cambodia has been already filing a complaint to the UN about the unlawful use of chemical weapons on Cambodian soil by the US Government led by President Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War. But, President Nixon always denied such use of this kind of weapon of mass destruction in Cambodia.

However, Mr. Ratana added that only in one occasion, in response to the complaint made by the Cambodian government at the time, about the illegal use of chemical weapons dropped from the US planes in April 18, 1969 on a rubber plantation of about 70,000 hectares, the US Government has been sending an inspection committee, made up of inspectors from the US Department of State and independent inspectors from different place in the US, to investigate the incidence.

After the inspection, the US Government agreed to pay $12.2 million to the Cambodian government for the lawsuit. But, Mr. Henry Kissinger​, who was Secretary of State and National Security Advisor at the time, made efforts to postpone the payment until the military coup of March 1970 to overthrow the late King Norodom Sihanouk.

To this issue, Prime Minister Hun Sen, on Thursday, said that he had no hope that the US Government could clear the chemical weapons on time as requested by the international law. Instead, to solve this problem, the premier prefer using a special budget package.

"So, we have to react quickly anyway, it concerns us. I have asked the US to clear them, but we can wait forever until the day we die, the US won't be able to take [clear] them on time. So, for our own safety, we have to solve this problem through our National Authority for the Prohibition of Chemical, Nuclear, Biological and Radiological Weapons which will tell us to evacuate local residents or not," said Prime Minister Hun Sen in his speech during a graduation ceremony in Phnom Penh.

In response to Prime Minister Hun Sen's repeated attack on the subject of unexploded ordnance (UXO) left by the Vietnam War, in a press conference at the US Embassy in Phnom Penh on September 12, Ambassador William A. Heidt said that the US Government acknowledges what they had done and is committed to help the Cambodian government to clear landmine and UXO.

"Do you know that we have provided over $160 million to clear the country of unexploded ordnance? Half of that money has gone to clearing ordnance dropped by U.S. planes in the eastern part of the country. But the other half has gone to clearing Chinese, Soviet, and Vietnamese mines in the west – minefields that are ten times more deadly," said the ambassador.