Word: sihanouk
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After nearly two decades of war, peace may be coming to Kampuchea at last. Officials of the Heng Samrin government met outside Jakarta last week with representatives of the three resistance groups that have been fighting the Phnom Penh regime and its Vietnamese supporters. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former head of state who last month resigned as leader of the resistance coalition, declined to attend the talks but made plans to meet with Kampuchean Prime Minister Hun Sen in Paris in October. While the so-called cocktail party failed to produce immediate results, it was nonetheless considered a psychological breakthrough...
...dreaded Khmer Rouge, during whose five-year reign an estimated 2 million of Kampuchea's 7 million people were killed. An exception is Bour-Chinell, 64, chief of the provincial public works department in Kampot, who says, "I want national reconciliation. It's a good idea to bring Prince Sihanouk back. The old people still love him, and the young people have all heard...
...current military strength of the Khmer Rouge, largest of the three guerrilla groups (the others are Sihanouk's Nationalist Army and former Premier Son Sann's Khmer People's National Liberation Front), is in dispute. Soviet and Vietnamese military advisers insist that the Kampuchean armed forces can contain the threat, but Western analysts have their doubts. Kampuchea's 30,000-man regular army and the 100,000 irregulars assigned to defend their country are largely untested. Many Kampucheans fear that once the Vietnamese draw down their forces, the Khmer Rouge may succeed in grabbing power once more...
Never let it be said that Prince Norodom Sihanouk is reluctant to change his $ mind. In January he suddenly resigned as leader of a guerrilla coalition that is battling Kampuchea's Vietnamese-backed government; the next month he just as abruptly resumed his post. After Viet Nam stepped up its troop withdrawal from Kampuchea, ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed to be host to peace talks in Djakarta next week between the warring sides. But then Sihanouk, who ruled Kampuchea (then called Cambodia) until 1970, quit his job again...
...Sihanouk claimed that the Khmer Rouge, the strongest but least palatable of his coalition partners, was trying to "liquidate" the prince's rebel faction. Predicting that Sihanouk would ultimately attend the peace talks, Foreign Minister Siddhi Savetsila of Thailand saw his resignation as a way to gain leverage in shaping his country's future...