Word: khmer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DURING THE VIETNAM ERA the would viewed Indochina through a blood-spattered lens crammed with searing images: napalmed and massacred villagers: a defiant Buddhist monk remaining upright during the final stages of self-immolation; a Vietcong suspect being shot point-blank through the temples; Khmer Rouge soldiers axing civilians; a widow wailing over a body...
During Lien's teenage years Lon Nol's anti-communist government troops battled against increasingly intransigent Khmer Rouge forces in the countryside. Although such conflicts occasionally disrupted Phnom Penh city life and the introduction of military conscription placed a cloud over the future for Lien's two brothers, her family carried on as usual...
...scope and fury of purges by ideologues may even be increasing. In the mid-'70s the Communist Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot undertook a savage "ruralization" plan that drove millions of urban Cambodians from their homes and even hospital beds into the countryside. The deaths have never been tallied. The planners of this barbarism were not peasants; they were teachers, economists and bureaucrats who had studied in France. Observes Johnson: "Like Lenin, they were pure intellectuals. They epitomized the great destructive force of the 20th century: the religious fanatic reincarnated as professional politician...
...tensions began to build in 1978, when ethnic Chinese fled Viet Nam as a result of Hanoi's economic policies. Then, shortly after the Soviet-Vietnamese treaty was signed, came Viet Nam's invasion of Kampuchea. Hanoi's forces quickly toppled the bloodthirsty, Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot and installed in its place a pro-Vietnamese government headed by Heng Samrin. Today 180,000 Vietnamese troops are tied down in Kampuchea, while an additional 45,000 are encamped in Laos...
...Peking also fears that Hanoi's actions are part of a larger Soviet scheme to threaten China's southern flank. Aside from launching their brief attack across Viet Nam's northern border in early 1979, the Chinese have been giving weapons and supplies to the remaining Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Kampuchea. Hanoi, for its part, contends that its troops were sent into Kampuchea partly to end Pol Pot's killing spree and partly to blunt Chinese designs on Viet Nam. Despite Hanoi's intervention in Kampuchea, life in that beleaguered land is clearly better today...