Word: angkor
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...rare bright spot in the Indochina war has been the seemingly charmed survival of Angkor Wat, the fabulous, vine-covered imperial ruins that are revered today as the centerpiece of ancient Cambodian culture. Even after a Viet Cong regiment and several Khmer Rouge (Cambodian Communist) battalions slipped into the undefended city 20 months ago, Angkor Wat seemed protected by a United Nations convention preserving national monuments from wartime damage. A French-sponsored team that had been meticulously restoring the city's 800-year-old bas-relief galleries, statues and fluted balustrades was permitted by the Communists to continue...
Last week that unspoken truce was broken as 4,000 Cambodian troops began encircling Angkor in an attempt to cut off the Communists' supply lines and starve them into submission. It was an uneven contest. The Communists could strike out at any point on the city's 60-mile perimeter, and had all the defensive advantages of an underground bunker complex. Government troops, meanwhile, were under strict orders not to direct artillery fire at the city and to use even their rifles sparingly...
...tenth of the population of Indochina is killed annually by American weapons; Cambodia's Angkor Wat, one of the greatest works of religious architecture in the world, is gutted by American artillery shells; the brown earth of Laos blushes redder and redder from the blood of peasants killed by our saturation bombing. We perpetuate horror upon horror in a war we have already lost, a war we lost long ago, a war we could never have won, a war intolerable to the principles we avow as our own, and yet students remain if not unmoved, immobile...
...shelling secured three months ago but has been kept secret by the Phnom Penh government, informants said. Reports of the shelling came from travellers returning from Siem Reap, the town nearest Angkor. The reports were later confirmed by a government expert who saw photographs of the damage...
...Angkor Wat. which covers nearly a square mile, was built in the 12th century and is thought to be a funeral memorial as well as a temple. The history of the Khmer empire is depicted in its carved stone fres??, considered among the world's outstanding examples of bas-relief...