Word: cambodias
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...ideological guru of the Khmer Rouge was Cambodia's former head of state, Khieu Samphan. While a graduate student in France during the 1950s, he argued in a doctoral dissertation that a Communist-run Cambodia should "withdraw from the world economy and restructure the local economy on a self-centered basis" in order to purge the country of "decadent colonial influences." With unspeakable brutality, this deceptively bland program was imposed on "Democratic Kampuchea" (as that country was renamed) by the government of Premier Pol Pot after the Khmer Rouge took power. Phnom-Penh, once a placid, luxury-loving city...
...major goal of the Khmer Rouge was to destroy the intelligentsia. People who wore glasses were killed, on the suspicion that they knew how to read or write. Of the 500 physicians in Cambodia in 1975, only 57 survived the Khmer Rouge purge. People suspected of lagging on the job were punished by death, rendered by a hatchet blow on the back of the neck, or, as many refugees have reported, by evisceration. Groups of children who were found guilty of being the offspring of "undesirables" were reportedly chained together, then buried alive in bomb craters under dirt that...
...Khmer Rouge excesses were condemned almost everywhere except in China, which had long favored an independent Cambodia, one that would be outside North Viet Nam's sphere of influence. Peking propped up the Pol Pot regime with vast amounts of military and economic aid. The North Vietnamese, meanwhile, never gave up their dream of taking all of Indochina. In early 1978 Hanoi used the excuse of some Khmer Rouge raids on Vietnamese border villages to invade Cambodia. Ostensibly, the Vietnamese soldiers involved were "volunteers" assisting a "National Salvation Front" headed by Heng Samrin and other obscure Khmer Rouge defectors. Last...
...Cambodia's years of genocide were over, but the hunger problem was made worse, if possible, by the Vietnamese conquest. Hanoi's forces, numbering about 180,000, found themselves locked in a war with 20,000 to 30,000 dogged Khmer Rouge guerrillas, who still control much of the countryside. As a result of the continuing war, food has become a weapon on both sides. The Khmer Rouge routinely ravage the new paddyfields planted under the Vietnamese occupation. Not only are the Cambodians starving, but even the Vietnamese troops are said to be on short rations. Many of the Khmer...
Partly as a result of this historic hostility, Viet Nam has been unable to colonize or pacify Cambodia effectively. No one, least of all the Cambodians, believes that the present regime in Phnom-Penh is anything other than a Hanoi puppet government. Many analysts think that Cambodia is being run by a high council in Hanoi, headed by Vietnamese Politburo Member Le Due Tho, who was co-winner (with Henry Kissinger) of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for having brought peace to Indochina. Tho refused to accept the honor...