It has been nine years since Hanoi, fresh from its long-fought victory over South Vietnam, expanded its influence west to Cambodia, sending 200,000 troops across the Cambodian border to assume control from the Khmer Rouge government.
Today, the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and its deposed leader, Pol Pot, are bitter memories for most Cambodians, but the Vietnamese troops remain their bitter reality; still occupying the embattled Cambodian nation, they continue to deny the Khmer people the right of self-determination.
Not surprisingly, Cambodia now exhibits the characteristics of many other communist dictatorships: The country faces severe economic turmoil (the average worker's monthly wage is $2); terror is frequently employed against the population; religion is on the verge of extermination; freedom of speech, press, and assembly are denied; people are suffering from starvation and undernourishment; and human rights are systematically violated. To date, 275,000 Cambodians have fled Vietnamese repression for refugee camps in bordering Thailand, and tens of thousands more have picked up weapons hoping to liberate their homeland from the occupying forces. A Cambodian refugee camp, Site 2, where 130,000 refugees now live, is the second-largest home for Cambodians after Phnom Penh. And not unlike the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia is evoking both global outrage and significant domestic rebellion.
There are approximately 61,000 Cambodians presently under arms and actively engaged in combat against the occupying Vietnamese military, making this combined resistance movement the second largest in the world, after the Afghan mujahideen. The war has received scant attention in the West; only a handful of Western journalists have ever visited these resistance fighters. Against 140,000 Vietnamese troops, liberally supported by the Soviet Union, their chances have generally been considered slim.
In September 1987, this author was among the first American journalists permitted to visit with both the leadership and armies of the two noncommunist Cambodian resistance movements, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF), headed by Son Sann, and the Sihanoukist National Army (ANS), headed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in their clandestine camps in both Thailand and Cambodia. Though these fighters face an uphill battle in their effort to restore self-determination to their homeland, they are effectively pressuring Vietnam in a gritty conflict that has Hanoi visibly concerned. The same Vietnamese military that only a couple of decades ago prided itself in its ability to outwit a powerful American army through jungle-based guerrilla tactics now finds itself frequently outsmarted at what was once its own game.
The domino fact
Both the ANS and KPNLF resistance fighters consider America's defeat in Vietnam the core of the problem they now face in their homeland. Critics of the Vietnam War might have scoffed when President Richard Nixon vocalized his "domino theory," but the dominoes--Laos and Cambodia--did indeed fall. "If the United States stayed in Indochina," says Jum Sombat, an aid to the KPNLF chief of staff based near Poipet, Cambodia, "I think life would be very good--not like this, not like now. Right now in Indochina, life is very
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