Word: cambodias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks that urgent radio message crackled from a redoubt deep in eastern Cambodia's Mondolkiri forest. The frustrated sender of the plea was the commander of two Khmer Rouge infantry companies. He had been cut off in the forest by Vietnamese troops who had invaded Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea). The broadcast was futile; Khmer commanders were too scattered and too harried to respond to the call. Like most other units in the estimated 73,000-man Communist Khmer Rouge force deployed to face the six-pronged Vietnamese attack, the isolated companies in the Mondolkiri forest had been outgunned and outmaneuvered...
...short, was all but lost. In scattered areas of the country the fighting continued at a furious pace, most notably in Kompong Som (once Sihanoukville, named for Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was hospitalized in New York City with fatigue from participating in the U.N. debate on Hanoi's takeover). In Kompong Som the two sides were fighting street to street and hand to hand for control of Cambodia's sole deep-water port, 136 miles southwest of Phnom-Penh (see map). Vicious fighting continued in the Mondolkiri forest as well, and at Siem Reap...
...curious appearance at the United Nations last week, on behalf of a government that he had never liked and that had ceased to exist, can be explained simply: he hates the Vietnamese more than he hated the Khmer Rouge regime of Premier Pol Pot, which had ruled Cambodia for four years until its overthrow by Vietnamese-backed rebel forces last week. For most of that time, Sihanouk had been kept under virtual house arrest in Phnom-Penh. Two weeks ago, Pol Pot sent for the Prince and asked him to go to the U.N. to protest the Vietnamese invasion. Sihanouk...
After his arrival in Manhattan, Sihanouk agreed to be interviewed by TIME Staff Writer James Wilde, who has known him since 1955. Wilde remembers Cambodia in the mid-1950s as a gentle, bucolic land of temple bells and gilded stupa spires gleaming in a green landscape. In those days, Sihanouk was known as something of a playboy who dabbled in songwriting, crooning, saxophone and accordion playing, moviemaking and women. On occasion, Wilde reported, "the Prince would hold press conferences in the open-air dance pavilion of his wedding-cake palace. Sometimes his daughter would execute classical Cambodian dances, and there...
Those were also the years when the volatile Sihanouk brilliantly maintained his balancing act of keeping Cambodia neutral. "He got the U.S. to build a four-lane highway, to the port of Kompong Som," recalls Wilde, "and when the monsoons washed parts of it away, he got the Russians to repair it. He delighted in inviting the diplomatic corps to help build irrigation projects. Every time he dug up a bit of earth at one of those ceremonies, the peasants would catch it, for he was sacred and so was everything he touched...