Word: indochina
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Famine is only the latest in a series of wrenching tragedies that have befallen Cambodia since it first became engulfed by the Indochina war in 1970. Following the Communist takeover by China-backed Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in 1975, between 2 million and 3 million Cambodians were systematically murdered or otherwise eliminated under a genocidal "purification" policy. It was aimed at destroying the educated class and creating a peasant society. Some journalists who have visited the country have seen mass graves and torture camps reminiscent of Dachau and Auschwitz...
...signature by foreign ministers would take place in Paris on Jan. 27. As a sop to Rogers, I had agreed not to attend the final culmination of these efforts. What we had struggled, prayed, hoped and perhaps even hated for-the end of our involvement in Indochina, and peace-was about to be celebrated...
...local population. Kissinger found this so absurd that, he writes, "I jokingly invited him to Harvard to teach a seminar on Marxism and Leninism after the war. He declined, saying that Marxism-Leninism was not for export-which will come as remarkable news to all the inhabitants of Indochina today." In any event, Kissinger soon learned that Xuan Thuy was a functionary, not a policymaker. The man he had to talk to was Le Duc Tho, who was clearly Hanoi's top representative in Paris...
...guarantee the neutrality of Cambodia, [either] bilaterally or in an international frame work. " But Tho abruptly dismissed any suggestion of neutralization or of a conference. He emphasized that "it was his people's destiny not merely to take over South Viet Nam but to dominate the whole of Indochina. The boasts were made in secret, but the military moves that expressed these ambitions were plain to see." The moves began in February 1970, when the North Vietnamese launched an offensive on the Plain of Jars in Laos. On March 16 Le Duc Tho turned down an immediate de-escalation...
From an inexhaustible national masochism there sprang the folklore that American decisions triggered the Cambodian nightmare, and the myth survives even today when the Vietnamese, without the excuse of American provocation but with barely a whimper of world protest, have finally fulfilled the ambition of conquering the whole of Indochina. The military responses we made were much agonized over and in our view minimal if we were to conduct a retreat that did not become a rout. Hanoi's insatiable quest for hegemony-not America's hesitant and ambivalent response-is the root cause of Cambodia...