Word: khmers
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...years after the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (Kampuchea), Hanoi's puppet regime, led by Heng Samrin, is firmly installed in Phnom-Penh and has restored a measure of order to the wartorn, famine-stricken country. Even so, stubborn resistance continues in the countryside, spearheaded by the Khmer Rouge, the fighting force of the ousted Pol Pot regime. An estimated 40,000 strong, the Khmer guerrillas have managed to hang on to crucial sanctuaries with the help of substantial political and military aid from Viet Nam's hostile neighbor to the north, the People's Republic...
Peking regards the Vietnamese occupation as Soviet expansionism by proxy, and has sought to drum up international support for the Khmer Rouge. It has successfully persuaded the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Na tions (ASEAN) and other anti-Soviet countries to back the Khmer Rouge and its shadow government, called Democratic Kampuchea in the United Nations. The U.S. and other Western countries have gone along, but with extreme distaste. The reason: Democratic Kampuchea is the outgrowth of Pol Pot's four-year reign of terror, in which as many as 3 mil lion Cambodians are believed...
...Khmer Rouge's reluctant inter national patrons have long sought a more acceptable alternative to what is at best the lesser of two evils in Cambodia. Chi na has quietly prodded the Khmer Rouge to link up with anti-Communist resistance forces led by Son Sann, a 70-year-old for mer Prime Minister. Simultaneously, in a stunning reversal, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, 58, who has lived in exile in China and North Korea since he was initially overthrown in 1970, agreed to make peace with the Khmer Rouge and lead a united front against the Vietnamese...
...that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who Sihanouk says indocrinated innocent youngsters into committing one of the most heinous crimes of the century, were insanely fanatical is perhaps an understatement. Khieu Samphan (who claims to have repented for his past sins and to have come to tolerate capitalism) has explained how it was necessary to incite fanatical hatred against the North Vietnamese in order "to unite our compatriots through the party, to bring our workers up to their highest level of productivity, and to make the yotheas (young soldiers) ardor and valor in combat even greater...
...somehow, Shawcross was able to deduce from all of this that the Rouge was "brutalized" by U.S. actions. Nowhere have the Khmer Rouge gone on record explaining their actions as a necessary result of U.S. bombings and other military actions, and Shawcross has not demonstrated that Khmer Rouge words or actions changed after the United States entered the fray. Perhaps Shawcross should listen to Sihanouk, who upon a stay in a liberated zone in 1973, observed that U.S. bombings were "violent and profuse, but fortunately not particularly effective...