Word: sihanouk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cambodia, a ten-member South Vietnamese delegation was on hand to try ironing out longstanding border disputes between the two countries. Cambodia's Prince Norodom ("Snookie") Sihanouk had just tried to hold similar border talks with North Viet Nam-an interesting endeavor, in view of the fact that Cambodia has no border with North Viet Nam, only South Viet Nam. Apparently rebuffed by a mystified Ho Chi Minh, Sihanouk protested that Hanoi's Reds had been "as vague as the Anglo-Saxons." But that did not necessarily make him any friendlier toward the South Vietnamese delegates...
Prince Norodom Sihanouk has long demanded that Britain and the U.S. come up with a plan to guarantee Cambodia's neutrality and safeguard its frontiers from archenemies Thailand and South Viet Nam. But when no proposal met his approval, Sihanouk became convinced of a Western plot to partition his nation. Last week, Sihanouk's obsessive suspicion of the West cued a violent riot in Pnompenh which resulted in the sacking of the British and U.S. embassies and spotlighted Cambodia's alarming drift toward Communism...
Though the Cambodian government promised to pay for the damages, Sihanouk called the riot "inexcusable but comprehensible," said that the mob was goaded by "the repeated humiliations inflicted on their country by the Anglo-Saxon powers" (total U.S. aid to Cambodia since 1954: $340 million). In a calculated slap at the West, Sihanouk went on to discuss neighboring Laos in a way that all but recognized the Communist Pathet Lao as its real government, also announced that he would soon send a delegation to Hanoi to negotiate a border-demarcation agreement with Communist North Viet Nam. Since South Viet...
...Sihanouk's drift to the left is based on his conviction that all southern Asia will one day be dominated by Communist China. By cozying up to the Reds now, he hopes to get the best terms possible if and when Cambodia is finally forced to become a Chinese satellite. "I see things as they are," he says, "not as I would like them...
...cared enough about Britain's admission to break up such a thriving concern. Across the world in Asia, the U.S. championed the independence of Cambodia from French imperialism. Now Cambodians view Americans as conniving rascals and France as a friend in need. Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk last week hailed France for the "incontestable prestige she has been able to recover in the course of the last few years," and burbled that France "is perhaps the only power able to throw a solid bridge between the Occident and Orient, separated by an abyss of incomprehension...