Word: phnom-penh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chancy matter in Southeast Asia. This week's story of the coup in Cambodia posed its full share of problems for TIME'S correspondents. By good fortune, we already had T.D. Allman, who is normally stationed in Laos, on the scene, but he was in Phnom-Penh, the Cambodian capital, in the wake of anti-Communist riots the week before. The problem was how to get his eyewitness report out of the country, since all communications were immediately cut. Allman solved that by giving his file to a messenger who somehow drove to Thailand. Later, Allman was able...
Developments in neighboring Cambodia were equally unsettling. In Phnom-Penh, anti-Communists led by Premier General Lon Nol and Deputy Premier Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk as chief of state and ordered North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops out of Cambodia. In a number of border clashes with Communist troops, the Cambodian army called for - and got - help from U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. With the war continuing in South Viet Nam and with the North wrestling with the grave problems that have grown out of the conflict, all four states of Indochina were on the boil...
...February, the governors of Cambodia's 19 provinces met in Phnom-Penh. As they reported, one by one, on their problems, it slowly became apparent that unrest extended over most of the nation - and that the chief source of the trouble was the North Vietnamese presence. Lon Nol and Sirik Matak decided that something had to be done to drive home the seriousness of the situation to both the wandering Sihanouk and the North Vietnamese...
Other factors helped crystallize their feelings. The continuing disintegration in Laos, for instance, was an object lesson in the perils of a large North Vietnamese troop presence. In addition, exploratory post-riot talks with the affronted North Vietnamese in Phnom-Penh got nowhere. The Communist diplomats brushed aside the rights or wrongs of their military presence; they were only interested in reparations and a public apology for their ruined embassies. At that point Sihanouk weighed in with a cable warning of Soviet unhappiness with the demonstrations and indicating that he had no plans to get tough with Hanoi...