Word: khmers
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...Khmer Rouge seemed to fear that the Cambodian People's Party, which represents the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, had used the powers of incumbency to reward and intimidate so successfully that it was likely to take a majority of the 120 seats in the new constituent assembly. The only solution was to terrorize voters into staying away from the polls. The Khmer Rouge forces, believed to number about 16,000, have aggressively moved men and armaments into sparsely populated regions within striking distance of many major towns and villages. Their hit-and-run attacks, says a U.N. military...
Many Cambodians acknowledge that they are afraid. Says a university student: "Even in Phnom Penh people fear a bomb going off when they vote." The anxiety extends to U.N. staff monitoring the vote. The Khmer Rouge have killed a total of 10 U.N. officials, leading more than 55 of 430 election supervisors to resign. As a result, the U.N. has had to reduce the number of polling stations from...
...began their comeback late in 1985, when the Vietnamese army seemed on the verge of wiping the movement out. Pol Pot joined with other anti-Vietnamese forces and launched an ideological campaign based on strident nationalism. His forces dropped all references to building a communist state. Villagers in Khmer Rouge zones were encouraged to cultivate their own plots and raise their own livestock, an approach designed to appeal to the 6 million subsistence farmers who form the bulk of Cambodia's 9 million inhabitants. During the early years of Pol Pot's reign, they suffered far less than urbanites...
...peasants also find, says a U.N. official in western Cambodia, that "Khmer Rouge guerrillas make fewer demands on villagers than government soldiers do." Banditry in remote areas is a major problem for peasants. The government must tax them or extort contributions to finance local security, but the guerrillas provide it free out of the millions of dollars they have earned by selling logging and gem-mining concessions to Thai businessmen...
...cities and towns, Pol Pot's forces enjoy some support among intellectuals. Their pitch is that only they can root out the rampant corruption of the present regime and force some 500,000 hated ethnic Vietnamese from the country. Says a 24-year-old university student: "The Khmer Rouge can do some things better than the government. They can abolish corruption. They can ensure Cambodia's sovereignty...