For nine years, the United States dropped bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day over the territory of Laos. By the end of the Laotian Civil War in 1975, one-tenth of Laos population, or 200,000 civilians and military personnel, had been killed.Jan 22, 2022
Up to a third of the bombs dropped on Laos did not explode, leaving Laos contaminated with vast quantities of unexploded ordnance (UXO). Over 25,000 people have been killed or injured by UXO in Laos since the bombing ceased, 98 percent of them civilians.
From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 bombing sorties took place over Cambodia,. Early strikes and later carpet bombing were likely tactical, designed to support the nearly two thousand secret ground incursions conducted by the CIA and US Special Forces during that period. Those carpet bombing attacks by B-52s were totally devastating, nothing could survive. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history. All the above received no media attention.
Is there not an element of racism in not reporting US/NATO crimes against civilians in the Third World? (The civilian deaths from US bombing of European Serbia did receive a modest amount of media coverage.)
In Central America
In Guatemala a 1954 coup against a democratically elected president, Jacobo Ãrbenz, which was backed by the US. Washington backed the Guatemalan military, which was responsible for genocide[2] against the native population. An estimated 200,000 people were killed between 1960 and 1996. There was little or no media coverage.
The United Nations General Assembly and the Organization of American States condemned the invasion as a violation of international law.
El Salvador was also trapped in a cycle of violence that can be traced back to a civil conflict in which the US was a protagonist, training and funding rightwing death squads in the name of fighting communism. Over 75,000 civilians died. (1980-1992).
In Africa: Somalia (time and space makes for one country as an example of US/NATO genocide in Africa)
During the 1980s, the US backed a brutal dictatorship without regard to great starvation. 300,000 Somalis, mostly children died. [3]
In 2011, Kenyan armed forces entered Somalia, with US/NATO attack aircraft support, to combat al-Shabaab ("Youths' in Arabic language), who had taken up leading the fight against US supported warlords, when the popular conservative Islamic Courts Union government of their elders was overthrown by the deadly and brutal US proxy Ethiopian Army and Air Force invasion, which brought back those defeated US backed warlords resulting in more death, maiming, destruction and more importantly creating starvation. Oxfam reported "between 2010 and 2012, more than a quarter of a million people died in the famine in Somalia."[4]
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