Word: khmers
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Responding angrily to the worldwide clamor, the Heng Samrin government has condemned the international aid offers as a "maneuver by the imperialists and international reactionaries" to assist the Khmer Rouge insurgents. Justifying its refusal to allow relief supplies to be brought in by truck, the government claimed that the port of Kompong Som and the airport of Phnom-Penh were "perfectly adequate" for the purpose. But according to on-the-scene investigations by the three U.S. Senators, only 12,000 tons of food and medicine can be brought in by air and ship each month, whereas 30,000 tons...
...Besides the sick and hungry refugees, the camp also contained a contingent of Khmer Rouge soldiers who had been beaten back into Thailand over the past three weeks by a Vietnamese offensive in the border areas. Though far better fed than the other refugees, toughened to hardship and accustomed to living by their wits in the jungle, the Khmer Rouge and their entourage had clearly reached the limit of their endurance. They did not look like human beings in the accepted sense of the term but rather like wild animals, completely brutalized. They slept huddled side by side like beasts...
...year. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, he was ousted in a coup organized by Premier Lon Nol, an army marshal with mystical tendencies. Even with an infusion of U.S. supplies, Lon Nol proved unable to cope with the Vietnamese and the growing guerrilla army of the Khmer Rouge. The five years of fighting that followed put Cambodia well on its way to the cruel hunger of today. By 1974 the U.N.'s World Health Organization and the U.S. Senate Refugees Subcommittee reported that malnutrition was already a severe problem...
...angry book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, British Journalist William Shawcross has charged that the bombing and invasion of the country set the stage for the Khmer Rouge conquest of Cambodia. U.S. policy, Shawcross argued, "was creating an enemy [the Khmer Rouge] where none had previously existed." In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger answered that the North Vietnamese were the first to violate Cambodia's neutrality, and that it is outrageous to blame American policy for the horrors that the Khmer Rouge unleashed on its own people after the collapse of the Lon Nol government...
...ideological guru of the Khmer Rouge was Cambodia's former head of state, Khieu Samphan. While a graduate student in France during the 1950s, he argued in a doctoral dissertation that a Communist-run Cambodia should "withdraw from the world economy and restructure the local economy on a self-centered basis" in order to purge the country of "decadent colonial influences." With unspeakable brutality, this deceptively bland program was imposed on "Democratic Kampuchea" (as that country was renamed) by the government of Premier Pol Pot after the Khmer Rouge took power. Phnom-Penh, once a placid, luxury-loving city...