Word: khmer
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Cambodia is still in appalling physical shape ten years after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by an invading army from Viet Nam. The country's economy operates at only 60% of its prewar level, its port facilities at just one-third. There is a 50,000-ton rice shortage in a country that was once a major exporter. Over everything hangs the threat of renewed civil war -- and the possibility of a return by the Khmer Rouge, whose murderous leaders have taken their place in the nation's demonology...
...nightmare all the more likely if he decides -- as some of his aides and key Congressmen are urging -- to start sending U.S. arms to the non-Communist resistance forces. Under present circumstances, and under current U.S. policy, that "lethal assistance" would be directed against Phnom Penh, not the Khmer Rouge...
...Administration repeatedly, and no doubt sincerely, says it does not want the Khmer Rouge to "dominate" a new Kampuchea. But it endorses the idea of a four-part coalition government that would embrace and thereby, it is hoped, co-opt the Khmer Rouge. Speaking of the prospective coalition, Secretary of State James Baker told the Senate last month, "You're going to have the Khmer Rouge there . . . That's a fact of life." That is true only if the U.S. and the Khmer Rouge's principal patrons, China and Thailand, make...
What is, alas, all but inevitable is more civil war after the Vietnamese pull out. With their record, the Khmer Rouge can hardly be expected to submit to elections or to participate in a peaceful democracy. If they and the non- Communists remain aligned against the Phnom Penh leaders, the three- against-one combination will probably end in the defeat of the odd faction out; that will allow the Khmer Rouge to turn their guns on the other...
Despite Baker's apparent fatalism, the U.S. does have another choice. It could back a three-part coalition that includes the two non-Communist factions and the leaders in Phnom Penh but forcefully excludes the Khmer Rouge. Not unless and until the two non-Communist groups accept that realignment should Washington provide them with arms. The result would be a different three- against-one equation that might lead to the eventual disintegration of the Khmer Rouge. And that would be a far happier fact of life for Kampuchea -- as well as a consequence for U.S. policy of which Americans could...