Word: cambodians
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Despite such daily scenes of horror, the besieged Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh held out for another desperate week. The Khmer Rouge insurgents kept up their asphyxiating pressure on the city's Mekong River lifeline, thereby depriving the capital of crucial supplies and diverting large numbers of government troops from the city's defense. Sosthene Fernandez, the Vietnamese-Filipino commander in chief of government forces, stoutly insisted that "we can open the river," but the chief of naval operations, Admiral Vong Sarendy, conceded that the situation on the Mekong was "hopeless." Meanwhile, the capital's sole maintaining...
...Ford policy aims to preserve American credibility on the world treaty market and to place Ford in a position to castigate Congress whatever the outcome in Cambodia. The missing element in Ford's thinking, as in the thinking of decades of American policy-makers, is a consideration of the Cambodian people...
Without American support, the Cambodian civil war would have ended by now. Any American aid the Congress approves will only go to maintaining an unpopular, corrupt regime and forcing an inevitable loss of life. In fact, it is precisely the rigid and self-serving nature of the American policy which is responsible for the "bloodbath" now in progress in Phnom Penh. To be sure, the Khmer Rouge shelling of civilian sections of Phnom Penh is a reprehensible act, but the prospect of a "bloodbath" in Phnom Penh is more likely if Congress approves more aid than if not. The Khmer...
...leading Communists in the movement are Saloth Sar, leng Sary and Son Sen, who helped found the Cambodian Communist Party in 1951 during their student days in Paris. Most Western observers assume that the Communist Party is the Khmer Rouge's driving force...
...collapse of the Cambodian domino, as Kissinger implied, might well enhance the prospects for an eventual Communist victory in South Viet Nam. Still, Vietnamese Communists have been able to put enormous pressure on Saigon even with Phnom-Penh in Lon Nol's hands, and the fall of his government is not likely to make a crucial difference. Beyond that, there remain obstacles to the spread of Communist influence in Southeast Asia. Neighboring Thailand, presumably the next endangered domino, is well equipped to resist Vietnamese influence. Communist insurgents in the northeast have achieved little so far, and Thailand has sufficient...