Word: khmers
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Until the 1970 coup d'etat, in which Marshal Lon Not overthrew the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Cambodian rebel force, then known as the Khmer Rouge, was a ragged band of perhaps 3,000 guerrillas who were affiliated with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Since then, the rebels have grown into a seasoned revolutionary army of at least 45,000 troops, with a solid support cadre of more than 70,000 civilians. Last week, after visiting Phnom-Penh, TIME Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand sent this report on the insurgents...
DROP into Phnom-Penh and begin talking about the antigovernment forces now attacking round the capital, and it soon becomes apparent that the "faceless enemy" out there is not faceless at all. Indeed the problem is just the opposite: the Khmer insurgents (or the K.I., as intelligence officers call them these days) have so many faces that it is nearly impossible to keep them straight...
...official policy of the Lon Nol government is to lump all antigovernment forces together as "the Vietnamese Communists." By contrast, a young Khmer with royal blood and intelligence contacts makes an impassioned case that the K.I. are not really Communists at all, but anti-Lon Nol forces who would quickly settle the war if the marshal were put out to pasture...
Rallying Point. The American embassy pushes another line: the leadership of the K.I. is Khmer (native Cambodians), but they are also hard-core Communists who are irreversible servants of Hanoi. One Western military attache has still another theory. He claims that the insurgents are divided between the Khmer Rouge (the old Communists), the Khmer Rumdos (the Sihanoukists) and the Khmer Issarak (the old anti-French forces). Then there is the opinion of Sihanouk, who says that the insurgency movement is a patriotic national liberation army loyal to the exiled Prince...
These claims are all lies. The bombing, as some reporting has started to show, is directed against an indigenous revolutionary movement, the Khmer Rouge, a force numbering in the hundreds of thousands which is attempting to topple the Lon Nol regime, Nixon's two-year-old creation. The aerial war does not discriminate between military and civilian targets: indeed, there is no difference between the two in a people...