Word: khmers
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Reversing a position that dates back to the Carter White House, Baker said the U.S. would withdraw diplomatic recognition of the Cambodian resistance coalition that includes the Khmer Rouge and would open talks with Vietnam about a Cambodian settlement. Officials in Washington and Moscow were caught off guard; diplomats in Hanoi and Beijing were stunned; and most Southeast Asian nations, with the exception of Thailand and Vietnam, were dismayed...
...degrees shift came as a shock, it should have been no real surprise. U.S. support of the bloodstained Khmer Rouge -- however grudging -- had long looked too contradictory and too immoral to sustain. The Bush Administration's strategy has three goals: securing the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia, preventing the Khmer Rouge's return to power, and holding free elections to seat a new government...
...achieved last September when the last of Vietnam's 200,000 combat troops returned home -- though some have apparently returned to bolster the faltering Cambodian army. As for Goal No. 2, it never made sense for Washington to support a three-part coalition that included the Khmer Rouge while decrying the possible return to power of Pol Pot's forces. With last week's unequivocal shift away from the Khmer Rouge, the U.S. Administration finally brought strategy and policy into line on Goal No. 2, paving the way for movement on Goal...
...decision resulted primarily from the Administration's belated recognition of battlefield realities in Cambodia and political realities on Capitol Hill. Over the past six months, the Khmer Rouge forces, an estimated 30,000 strong, have been pursuing a rural-based strategy similar to the one that enabled them to encircle and take the capital city of Phnom Penh in 1975. While the Khmer Rouge are stronger militarily than at any other time since they were chased from power by Vietnam 11 years ago, some well-informed analysts do not believe the gains made during this rainy season represent a dramatic...
Taken in by an American family in 1980, Arn Chorn is now 22 and a college student in Rhode Island. He understands in retrospect that he was brainwashed into becoming a Khmer Rouge. Yet he also remembers how thrillingly fright and excitement mixed. He can still describe the sweaty terror before an attack, squatting in the reeds, trembling. Then the fear metabolized into adrenaline, enhanced by the delight of pumping an automatic rifle. "Sometimes," he says, "you enjoy yourself in battle...