Word: pols
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...early years of the Viet Nam War, Cambodia unwittingly became a base for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, and the target of savage U.S. bombings. Its popular Chief of State, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was overthrown by Premier Lon Nol in 1970. Lon Nol was in turn deposed by Pol Pot when the Khmer Rouge, as the Cambodian Communist forces are called, took over the country in 1975. After four years of mass terror and murder under the Khmer Rouge the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia last December and installed a puppet regime headed by President Heng Samrin...
Cambodia's agony continues. Hanoi, with 180,000 soldiers operating in the country, has now embarked on an intensive effort to wipe out the remaining Khmer Rouge forces loyal to Pol Pot. Unless the fighting is halted somehow, Cambodia itself could be the ultimate casualty...
Sihanouk may regard Vietnamese colonialism as evil No. 2, but the non-Communist nations of Southeast Asia are as hostile to Hanoi's puppet regime in Phnom-Penh as they are to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Viet Nam has been repeatedly rebuffed in its efforts to have the legitimacy of the Heng Samrin regime endorsed by the world's major powers. Indeed, only the Soviet Union, its satellites and a few other smaller countries have recognized the present Phnom-Penh government. Hanoi suffered a particularly humiliating defeat in September when the U.N. General Assembly...
...Cambodia should "withdraw from the world economy and restructure the local economy on a self-centered basis" in order to purge the country of "decadent colonial influences." With unspeakable brutality, this deceptively bland program was imposed on "Democratic Kampuchea" (as that country was renamed) by the government of Premier Pol Pot after the Khmer Rouge took power. Phnom-Penh, once a placid, luxury-loving city of broad avenues and towering hibiscus trees, became a ghost town as the Khmer Rouge force marched the city's refugee-swollen population to resettlement on rural communes that were no better than slave-labor...
...Khmer Rouge excesses were condemned almost everywhere except in China, which had long favored an independent Cambodia, one that would be outside North Viet Nam's sphere of influence. Peking propped up the Pol Pot regime with vast amounts of military and economic aid. The North Vietnamese, meanwhile, never gave up their dream of taking all of Indochina. In early 1978 Hanoi used the excuse of some Khmer Rouge raids on Vietnamese border villages to invade Cambodia. Ostensibly, the Vietnamese soldiers involved were "volunteers" assisting a "National Salvation Front" headed by Heng Samrin and other obscure Khmer Rouge defectors. Last...