Word: sihanouk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cambodia, a soldier's family often follows him into the field. Troops wounded in the fighting at Prek Phnou are evacuated by Jeep or helicopter to a receiving hospital set up in the basketball stadium in what was once Sihanouk's Olympic City. Most of the wounded arrived with their wives and sometimes their children. A whole family often cowered silently in a corner of the operating room while surgeons cut a jagged 82-mm. mortar fragment from a soldier's chest...
Since the 1970 coup which sent Prince Norodam Sihanouk into exile, Lon Nol has failed to win popular support and has conducted an administration almost universally recognized as openly corrupt. After more than four years of civil war, Cambodia is deeply scarred. The countryside, once a source of glowing reports from visitors, has been laid waste; Phnom Penh is under daily shelling; and civilians have become the victims of guns and poverty...
Another recurring question is who would lead a Khmer Rouge government. Exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk remains the most popular man in Cambodia and the "Premier" of the Royal Government of National Union, the Khmer Rouge shadow government nominally based in Peking where he lives. He might return to Phnom-Penh as a figurehead leader, but his influence within the Khmer Rouge movement is limited. In late 1973 all but two of the cabinet posts in the shadow government were transferred from his supporters to "members of the internal resistance" operating inside Cambodia. Apparently accepting this decline in his fortunes, Sihanouk...
Real power seems to lie in the hands of Khieu Samphan, Deputy Premier of the shadow government and commander in chief of the 60,000-man Khmer Rouge armed forces. Once a member of Sihanouk's government, he is one of the three former ministers-sometimes known as the "three ghosts"-whom Sihanouk was supposed to have ordered killed in 1970. As it happens, the two other "ghosts" are also active in the shadow cabinet, Hu Nim as Information Minister and Hou Youn as Minister of the Interior...
...prospects, in short, are bleaker than they have been at any time since he overthrew Sihanouk in 1970. Regardless of whether he receives more emergency U.S. aid, there is little he can do except try to hold out long enough to work out some sort of settlement with his enemies. "Time is running out," U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean fairly shouts to Western newsmen in Phnom-Penh these days, referring to prospects for U.S. aid. It is also running out for Phnom-Penh...