Word: khmers
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...that a nation is in its death throes. All of the refugees were clad in black, appropriately, for they are the walking dead. There was no imagining what horrors they had witnessed and survived, or perhaps even committed, since some of them are cadres of the ruthless and decimated Khmer Rouge army. After a few days of rest and replenishment in Thailand, they will probably have to return, lame and sick and malnourished, to their dreaded homeland: Cambodia...
...years since Phnom-Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, more than a third of the population of Cambodia, once estimated at 8 million, has perished from war, disease and the genocidal policies of the murderous Pol Pot regime. Last week, as the Vietnamese prepared for a final onslaught on sanctuaries near the Thai border used by the Pol Pot forces, Cambodia faced yet another horror: a famine. At least 2 million people are believed to be on the verge of death by starvation or disease. Many have been reduced to eating the leaves off trees, peeling the bark and boiling...
Without our incursion, the Communists would have taken over Cambodia years earlier. The bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation for the murderous Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk does not believe this; they were men he had kicked out of Cambodia in 1967 as a menace to his country. He told me in April 1979 that the Khmer Rouge leaders were "always killers...
...Sihanouk, who there upon took refuge in Peking and turned against the U.S. Kissinger 's critics argue that the U.S. engineered Sihanouk's downfall and later, by attacking the North Vietnamese sanctuaries, caused the war to engulf all of Cambodia and to ensure victory for the Communist Khmer Rouge. Kissinger maintains with much documentation that the coup took the U.S. completely by surprise, that it came about because "the sanctuaries increasingly aroused the nationalist outrage of Cambodians," and that Hanoi's forces began overrunning Cambodia as early as the end of March 1970. Kissinger reveals...
...record leaves no doubt that the North Vietnamese, also caught by surprise by the March coup, bear the heaviest responsibility for events in Cambodia. Their illegal and arrogant occupation of Cambodian territory had torn apart Sihanouk's neutralist country; they created the Khmer Rouge as a force against Sihanouk well before his overthrow. It was they, not we, who had decided on a fight to the finish on the bleeding body of a people that wanted only to be left alone...