Word: khmer
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...concerns of the day. But for the people of Cambodia, the nightmare is never-ending. First there was the murderous U.S. "sideshow" to the Vietnam War that took the form of B-52 raids on innocent civilians in the early 1970s. When the U.S. left Indochina in 1975, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot took over and instituted a bloodbath in the name of one of the most insane ideologies to come to the face of the earth. And their bloody rule gave way in 1978 to that of the Vietnamese, who are determined to fight "to the last Cambodian...
...Killing Fields," tells the harrowing story of the friendship between New York Times correspondent Sidney Schanberg and his Cambodian assistant, Dith Pran, who was separated from his friend when the country fell in 1975 and who through his wits and luck survived through the three bloody years of Khmer Rouge rule that ensued...
...outbreak of battles shows that the anguish so brilliantly depicted by the movie's makers continues to haunt Cambodia. This winter, as they have in each "dry season" since they invaded the country six years ago, the Vietnamese have launched an offensive aimed at wiping out the various Khmer rebel groups that continue to resist the puppet government they installed. The fighting was reported to have been particularly bloody this time, as the Vietnamese destroyed one of the rebels' main bases and pursued the insurgents over the border into Thailand...
...onslaught, though, signs of an end to the fighting are nowhere to be seen, as the Cambodian people remain caught in a complex web of ages-old feuding and geopolitical intrigue. Inside the country, the fighting is at a standstill, analysts believe, as the leading non-communist group, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (now at about 15,000 guerrillas) gains in strength, while the reviled Khmer Rouge, with its 30,000 fighters, continues to harass the Vietnamese occupiers...
Diplomatically, however, the guerrilla alliance has been holding a strong hand: the Heng Samrin regime has never been recognized as legitimate by the United Nations. The Khmer Front and the Sihanouk forces have the backing of the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines). A sustained Vietnamese attack on the front thus weakens a non-Communist alternative to the Heng Samrin government. By themselves, the stronger and more aggressive Khmer Rouge are far less likely to draw international sympathy to the resistance cause, since they are still remembered by the rest...