Word: cambodias
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This is what is meant by letting the military situation "play itself out." Such cool foreign-policy analysis rarely takes into account the suffering of people like Neh Kon and Top Sakhan. Nowhere is this truer than in Cambodia, whose modern misfortune has been to act as buffer and bargaining chip to nations more powerful than itself. Like Blanche DuBois, modern Cambodia has always depended for its survival on the kindness of strangers -- and the strangers have not always been kind. While diplomats negotiated their shameful and shameless deals, Cambodians were paying a fearful price: hundreds of thousands died between...
Moreover, it is not true that Vietnam has completely left Cambodia. A well- informed intelligence source in Indochina acknowledges that several hundred Vietnamese military advisers are still attached to Hun Sen's army, as are two understrength Vietnamese regiments of about 1,000 troops each. Two Vietnamese- speaking soldiers in Cambodian uniforms were aboard a recent flight from Phnom Penh to the provincial capital of Siem Reap, and interviews with residents there confirmed that many Vietnamese-speaking troops are assigned to government units in the area...
...that is a far cry from the armored units that had been fighting in Cambodia. Even with a lingering Vietnamese presence, the Hun Sen government is basically on its own at last. Although the government's international isolation continues -- only the Soviet Union, its allies and India confer full recognition -- Hun Sen's record so far is pretty good. On the battlefield, government troops have rolled back most of the border-area gains made by rebel forces earlier this year. And despite rising public anger at official corruption, political and economic reforms on the Vietnamese model have had a dramatically...
...does the U.S. Government fit into this mixed picture of revival and suffering? Unfortunately, in Cambodia now as in the past, the U.S. is part of the problem, not part of the solution. During the 1960s, American diplomats used to belittle the attempts by Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk to keep his country out of the Vietnam War. They also criticized Sihanouk's enforced willingness to look the other way while North Vietnamese troops used his border areas as sanctuaries and staging grounds for attacks into South Vietnam. In 1969 the Nixon Administration began the secret U.S. bombing...
...plans, the Khmer Rouge would even be permitted to serve in an interim coalition, pending elections. In all of them, Pol Pot's party has been given effective veto power -- with predictable results. A peace conference in Jakarta earlier this year failed basically because of Khmer Rouge opposition. Says Cambodia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Sok An: "If the international community continues to allow the Khmer Rouge to thwart the will of the conference, then we cannot have an agreement...