Word: khmer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...true, can only mean more terror for the two million residents of Phnom Penh. Since 1971--when Nixon decided to send American troops on an "incursion" into Cambodia to break NLF supply lines to South Vietnam--Cambodia has been sliding deeper into war. The struggle there between the Khmer Rouge revolutionaries and the troops of the Lon Nol regime has reached a crisis. The Khmer Rouge have the capital city surrounded, with all land and water approaches cut off and they are shelling the city now from an four sides. According to reports in the western media, they now control...
...Cambodia, as in South Vietnam, the regime is now completely dependent on American aid. Its resources have run out--either ferretted away down the well-greased tubes of official corruption, or expropriated by the Khmer--and Lon Nol has become a pathetic junkie for American dollars. The Cambodian army is disorganized, inefficient and apathetic it has almost no popular support. Almost immediately after the coup that brought Lon Nol to power in 1970, the Khmer Rouge began to expand rapidly, and since then they have been slowly winning support in the countryside and steadily regaining the ground Lon Nol took...
LITTLE ELSE, however, is known about them. Few western journalists have been able to study the Khmer since their formation, and even the State Department is in the dark...
...general confusion exists about the Khmer leadership. Before the 1970 coup, Sihanouk actively expressed the Communists Party of Cambodia. Since his exile in Peking began, though, he has become sympathetic to the Khmer and they, in turn, have given him at least tacit support. In a series of pronouncements from Peking during the last few years, Sihanouk has indicated, in phrases reminiscent of Nixon, that he would like to return to Cambodia after Lon Nol's ouster as a kind of self-styled elder statesman. The Khmer have given little indication of what role they expect Sihanouk to play...
Soft Hats. Widespread corruption has squelched whatever hope there may have once been among the people to control their own destinies. Foreign diplomats speak openly of the "military Mafia"-high-ranking officers who sell deferments to rich Sino-Khmer fathers and draw the pay of thousands of phantom troops on their rolls. Out on Route 5 and Highway 7, and down in besieged Neak Luong, government soldiers are fighting the war in rubber sandals and soft hats. One corporal complained about the lack of boots and fatigues and how corrupt officers tried to make his wife pay 5,000 riels...