Word: sihanouk
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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...
...peace between the four-month-old Federation of Malaysia and President Sukarno's belligerent Indonesia. First, Attorney General Robert Kennedy arranged a cease-fire in the smoldering jungle war and set up a peace parley in Bangkok for this week. Then Cambodia's anti-American Prince Norodom Sihanouk ("Snookie" to some) criticized Bobby for "meddling," and tried to arrange a separate peace conference. The upshot was that nobody was quite sure who was meeting whom where...
...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...
Washington termed Sihanouk's conditions "totally unacceptable." In fact, Sihanouk is probably only taunting the U.S. out of fear of the Red Chinese and wants to avoid an overt diplomatic break. Sihanouk is still anxious for a Geneva Conference to guarantee Cambodian neutrality, but such a conference is meaningless without U.S. participation. As Sihanouk himself said last week after closing Cambodia's embassy in London, "It appears necessary, without a diplomatic break, to put our relations in slumber...