Word: khmers
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...When they no longer need me, they will spit me out like a cherry pit," Prince Norodom Sihanouk once said about Cambodia's new Khmer Rouge rulers. Last week the prince's pithy prediction came true. In a radio broadcast, Vice Premier Khieu Samphan, the iron-fisted guerrilla who has ruled the country since the Communist takeover a year ago, announced that Sihanouk had resigned as chief of state, even though he had been reconfirmed in that post by the National Assembly on March 20. Samphan said that the prince, heir to a long line of Khmer royalty...
...voluntary-and there were widespread doubts that it was-Sihanouk seemed to accept his fate. Shortly after Samphan's broadcast, the prince declared: "I request the representatives of the people to allow me to retire, while remaining to the end of my life an ardent supporter of the Khmer revolution, the democratic people and the government." There were subsequent but unverified reports that Sihanouk had left the country for China...
Frequently Wept. Forced into exile in Peking by the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime that ousted him in 1970, Sihanouk had backed the Communist Khmer rebels. But since their capture of Phnom-Penh, the prince has reportedly been unhappy about the new regime's ruthless campaign of intimidation and reprisals against everyone with any connection to Cambodia's past. On a world tour last year, friends say, Sihanouk frequently wept over the course of events...
There is now little doubt that the Cambodian government is one of the most brutal, backward and xenophobic regimes in the world. Cambodians themselves refer to the Khmer Rouge simply as "the Organization." Refugees who have managed to flee to Thailand -often after days and weeks of walking through thick forests and jungles along the border-describe the revolution as a chilling form of mindless terror. In sharp contrast to Laos and Viet Nam, where party cadres have subtly tried to win popular support for social change, there are no revolutionary songs, slogans, poetry, party newspapers or "reeducation" centers...
Since the Communist victory last year, an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 people-one-tenth of Cambodia's population-have died from political reprisals, disease or starvation. After the Khmer Rouge takeover, the authorities ordered a shocking forced march of 25,000 patients from their Phnom-Penh hospital beds to work in the countryside. This set the pattern. The populations of every city have been evacuated-young, old, sick, well-and forced, at rifle point, to work in the rice fields. All shops, schools and hospitals have been closed. Phnom-Penh has shrunk from a war-swollen population...