Word: lon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fighting from the jungle redoubts against the Lon Nol government in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge insurgents were shrouded in mystery. If anything, the mystery intensified last week as the rebels dropped what might be called a Khmer curtain over the country they had just conquered. As of week's end, ten days after the fall of Phnom-Penh, very little was known about the composition of the new regime, how it was running the war-torn state or what had become of the defeated leaders who were unable to escape. With normal lines of communication severed...
...fate of some key members of the Lon Nol regime remained unclear. Former Premiers Long Boret and Sirik Matak were assumed to have been arrested by the Communists, along with several hundred lower-level officials who first found refuge in the French embassy compound but were later forced to leave. Some of these may already be dead; a radio broadcast from inside Cambodia told of beheadings, but could not be confirmed. Political trials in Phnom-Penh were said to be beginning...
Both Long Boret and Sirik Matak were on the old Khmer Rouge list of "seven traitors" slated for death. Four others, including President Lon Nol (see story below), escaped before the capital fell. Another, former Premier In Tarn, waited until it was almost too late, and finally fled across the border into Thailand, with Communist troops firing at him. Also in Thailand are approximately 1,000 other Cambodian refugees; most are expected to stay on or to settle permanently in the U.S. and France...
Cambodia's former President Lon Nol reached Hawaii three weeks ago. He and members of his retinue are fixing to stay. He is negotiating to buy a $103,000 two-story, four-bedroom home in Mariner's Cove (pop. 400), an upper-middle-class suburb east of Honolulu. He should have no trouble paying off a mortgage. On the day before he left his homeland, the National Bank of Cambodia reportedly asked Manhattan's Irving Trust Co., with which it has a correspondent relationship, to pay $1 million to the order of Lon Nol. Irving Trust...
...surrender ended a bloody chapter that began in March 1970, after a bloodless coup ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk as chief of state. The new regime, headed by General Lon Nol, almost immediately launched a campaign to drive Hanoi's troops from their base camps inside Cambodia and quash the Khmer Rouge, a ragtag band of 3,000 to 5,000 leftist guerrillas. After initial hesitations, Washington backed the new regime. The U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, directed against North Vietnamese sanctuaries, was partly designed to help Lon Nol. Also helpful were $1.8 billion in aid and thousands...