Word: khmers
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Despite such daily scenes of horror, the besieged Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh held out for another desperate week. The Khmer Rouge insurgents kept up their asphyxiating pressure on the city's Mekong River lifeline, thereby depriving the capital of crucial supplies and diverting large numbers of government troops from the city's defense. Sosthene Fernandez, the Vietnamese-Filipino commander in chief of government forces, stoutly insisted that "we can open the river," but the chief of naval operations, Admiral Vong Sarendy, conceded that the situation on the Mekong was "hopeless." Meanwhile, the capital's sole maintaining...
Despite signs that the city was on the verge of collapse, the Khmer Rouge army refrained from making a full-scale assault on the capital, whose population has been tripled in the last year alone by the presence of 1,400,000 refugees from the countryside. Instead the insurgents maintained their successful-and relatively inexpensive-campaign of attrition. "The Khmer Rouge are everywhere," reported TIME Correspondent Peter Range. "They do not concentrate their forces heavily, do not overextend themselves, do not shoot for the large objectives until they have taken several smaller ones first...
...weeks; troops still loyal to Lon Nol are disorganized and demoralized. The regime now rests on a single pillar; the daily American airlift of rice and ammunition into Phnom Penh. American experts and policy-makers are unanimous in their opinion that Phnom Penh would fall almost immediately to the Khmer Rouge without the airlift...
...United States should continue the bloody stalemate in Phnom Penh. President Ford--echoing Johnson and Nixon--has been telling Americans that Congress must approve his requested $250 million supplemental aid to "honor our commitments" so that Cambodia will not "fall" and to avoid the "bloodbath" he envisions if the Khmer Rouge enter the city. The Ford policy aims to preserve American credibility on the world treaty market and to place Ford in a position to castigate Congress whatever the outcome in Cambodia. The missing element in Ford's thinking, as in the thinking of decades of American policy-makers...
...Congress approves will only go to maintaining an unpopular, corrupt regime and forcing an inevitable loss of life. In fact, it is precisely the rigid and self-serving nature of the American policy which is responsible for the "bloodbath" now in progress in Phnom Penh. To be sure, the Khmer Rouge shelling of civilian sections of Phnom Penh is a reprehensible act, but the prospect of a "bloodbath" in Phnom Penh is more likely if Congress approves more aid than if not. The Khmer Rouge are fighting a war against their own countrymen and will have to establish...