Word: phnom-penh
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Peace in Indochina last week continued to look rather ominously like war anywhere else. Fighting continued sporadically in South Viet Nam. Meanwhile, Communist forces in Cambodia continued to tighten the noose around the capital of Phnom-Penh, raising again the question of how long the bumbling government of ailing President Lon Nol could effectively survive. Amidst these signs that the cease-fire agreement has all but collapsed, the White House announced that Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger would return to Paris in mid-May for another round of talks with the silver-haired chief North Vietnamese negotiator...
Without question, the primary topic at the new negotiations will be the desperate situation in Cambodia, where Communist and a wide variety of other antigovernment forces are making impressive headway. Last week they seized a part of the east bank of the Mekong River opposite Phnom-Penh's downtown port area. Ferries bustled back and forth bringing swarms of refugees fleeing villages only two miles away on the opposite bank...
...some nights, Phnom-Penh residents were kept awake until dawn by the rumble of high-flying B-52s and the boom of F-111s dropping their bombs only four or five miles distant from the city. Communist gunners fired at least ten rockets at the capital's only airport, killing 19 people and wounding 62, but the airport remained open...
...representatives of the nation's political parties, that would act as an advisory body. In fact, most foreign observers thought that Lon Nol's moves were little more than a cosmetic change and doubted that the various political factions would go along. As one Western diplomat in Phnom-Penh put it: "Lon Nol left things too late. Last year, perhaps, his old colleagues would have cooperated with him. Now, no one trusts his younger brother Lon Non, no one believes there will be any sharing of power." At week's end, however, there were rumors in Saigon...
Overripe Fruit. The political maneuvering took place in the midst of a crumbling military situation. The Communist forces continued their methodical cutting of the five major highways leading to Phnom-Penh; almost as soon as government troops open one road, another is closed. Diplomats, however, ruled out a Communist attempt to overrun the capital. "They don't want to capture it," one observer said. "They want to create such economic chaos that there will be riots-and then the Lon Nol government will fall like an overripe fruit." In the city itself last week, prices continued to rise...