Word: khmer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...year ago this month, in one of the worst battles of the war, Communist-led Khmer insurgents pounded the Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh with artillery and rocket fire for seven straight weeks. Somehow the city survived. Last week, it was once again hunkering down for another brutal assault. The insurgent forces, who now control most of Cambodia outside the major cities, are currently concentrating their attacks on Neak Luong, a small but vital Mekong River shipping channel 32 miles southeast of the capital. But there are daily rocket attacks in and around Phnom-Penh, and it is only...
...week's end, though government forces seemed strong enough to hold the city, there was little rice or medicine available even for people with money to buy it. In a gruesome reminder that the Cambodian war was getting not only hotter but more savage, the insurgent Khmer Rouge last week wantonly slaughtered 50 villagers in Prek Phneou ten miles northwest of Phnom-Penh; newsmen arriving on the scene only hours after the atrocity discovered that all had died from stab wounds, not, as is more usual, from being caught accidentally in a crossfire...
Cambodia is in no better shape. With the arrival of the dry season in late January, the Khmer insurgents are expected to resume their attacks against Phnom-Penh and the few other major cities still controlled by the Lon Nol government. Neither side appears strong enough to deliver a knockout blow, and many more statistics will certainly be added to the already ghastly five-year toll: 600,000 Cambodians killed or wounded and one-half of the 7 million population made into homeless refugees...
...work and no food; it means that some Cambodian women are being forced to resort to prostitution to feed their families; it means families have had to try to sell some of their children to stay alive. Cambodia is also still in a state of military conflict. The Khmer Rouge, who have fought Lon Nol since his 1970 coup that drove Prince Norodom Sihanouk into exile, now control three fourths of the land area in Cambodia. Only massive amounts of American aid--$700 million annually, most of which is military--and the threat of American retaliation prevent the rebels from...
...many areas, the U.S. holds the key to peace and progress in Cambodia. In the absence of American dollars and other forms of continued intervention it seems probable that the Lon Nol regime would fall almost immediately. While the Khmer Rouge provides no guarantee of building a model democratic socialist state in Cambodia, they constitute a definite progressive alternative to the current regime. Cutting all American aid is the necessary first step out of the current stalemate...