Word: lon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
...part Sihanoukist. Equally clear is that their military training and direction come from Hanoi. The 1970 coup, the subsequent U.S. and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and the American bombing, served as the rallying point to bring all these factions together. They are united too in their contempt for Lon Nol, who is widely viewed as an American puppet-and an ineffectual and corrupt one at that...
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...
...intervention in Cambodia. But if the new President chooses to continue, we are ready to go on independently until 1980. We have enough courage to do that." Sihanouk insists that the insurgents will negotiate only if the U.S. stops its bombing of Cambodia, withdraws support from the Lon Nol regime, and unilaterally withdraws all American military personnel from Phnom-Penh...