Word: khmers
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Another recurring question is who would lead a Khmer Rouge government. Exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk remains the most popular man in Cambodia and the "Premier" of the Royal Government of National Union, the Khmer Rouge shadow government nominally based in Peking where he lives. He might return to Phnom-Penh as a figurehead leader, but his influence within the Khmer Rouge movement is limited. In late 1973 all but two of the cabinet posts in the shadow government were transferred from his supporters to "members of the internal resistance" operating inside Cambodia. Apparently accepting this decline in his fortunes, Sihanouk...
Real power seems to lie in the hands of Khieu Samphan, Deputy Premier of the shadow government and commander in chief of the 60,000-man Khmer Rouge armed forces. Once a member of Sihanouk's government, he is one of the three former ministers-sometimes known as the "three ghosts"-whom Sihanouk was supposed to have ordered killed in 1970. As it happens, the two other "ghosts" are also active in the shadow cabinet, Hu Nim as Information Minister and Hou Youn as Minister of the Interior...
...leading Communists in the movement are Saloth Sar, leng Sary and Son Sen, who helped found the Cambodian Communist Party in 1951 during their student days in Paris. Most Western observers assume that the Communist Party is the Khmer Rouge's driving force...
Cadre Shortage. If only because the Khmer Rouge has also suffered in recent fighting, the Lon Nol government could hold out until the rains return in May, thereby gaining several more months of power. On the other hand, the insurgents could decide to hold back in their attack on the capital, preferring to let the government cave in sooner or later from its own weight. In this way the Khmer Rouge could put off assuming the awesome burden of running -and feeding-a capital that is overflowing with thousands of hungry refugees and hundreds of wounded soldiers and civilians...
...Phnom-Penh government. In defense of their request, White House officials and Cabinet members trotted out several arguments. Most compelling was the warning that without an emergency infusion of ammunition, the government of President Lon Nol is in imminent danger of falling to the Communist-led Khmer Rouge insurgents. "An independent Cambodia cannot survive unless the Congress acts very soon to provide supplemental military and economic assistance," President Ford wrote to House Speaker Carl Albert, adding that "if additional military assistance is withheld or delayed, the government forces will be forced, within weeks, to surrender to the insurgents...