Word: kampuchea
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Attacks like the strike against Rithysen have become an annual dry-season ritual in the six years since Viet Nam invaded Kampuchea, then known as Cambodia, and installed the Heng Samrin regime in Phnom Penh. Even though the brutal former Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot had been blamed for the deaths of as many as 2 million of the country's 6 million people between 1975 and 1978, many Kampucheans fought back against the Vietnamese invasion as best they could. Some 500,000 civilians and several thousand guerrillas took refuge in camps close to the Thai border. Year after...
...decades ago, it has always been assumed that Moscow would mend fences with Peking before its East bloc allies did. But so far all attempts at rapprochement have foundered. The Chinese complain about the "three obstacles" of Soviet foreign policy: Moscow's support for the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, continuing Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and the massive troop buildup along the Chinese border. The Soviets, for their part, have been irked by the apparent warmth in U.S.-Chinese relations following the Reagan visit to Peking last spring, and accuse the Chinese of trying to pick a fight with Viet...
...nearly four years the Khmer Rouge tore through their homeland, smashing temples, slitting throats, nailing old women to the walls of their houses, beating babies to death against trees. By late 1978, when Viet Nam invaded Kampuchea, as many as 3 million of the country's 7 million people were dead. Yet those who survived reportedly had worse in store for them. In one episode, soldiers from neighboring Thailand pushed 826 Kampuchean refugees over a cliff; in another, they forced 43,000 to walk home in the dark down treacherous mountain paths surrounded by minefields...
Thus does grim irony follow upon gruesome tragedy in The Quality of Mercy (Simon & Schuster; 464 pages) by British Journalist William Shawcross. In his 1979 work, Sideshow, the author argued that through secret bombings the Nixon Administration had almost casually devastated Kampuchea (then called Cambodia), thereby facilitating the murderous rise of the Communist guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge. Here Shawcross investigates the horrors that came after the bloodbath. Drawing extensively from official reports, international-relief-organization memos, firsthand experiences and interviews with protagonists from all sides, he has put together an assiduously detailed account of how, as one senior...
China has a vested interest in keeping the border war going. With troops positioned along the frontier, Viet Nam has been unwilling to carry out a full-scale offensive against Chinese-backed guerrillas next door, in Kampuchea. China is not the only neighbor upset with Viet Nam. At a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia last week, attended by U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, the region's foreign ministers joined in condemning Viet Nam's "illegal occupation" of Kampuchea...