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Needed: New Policies Toward Cambodia
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17853 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1990 |
3,878 Words |
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Lawrence W. Reed
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When the U.S. role in Southeast Asia came to an abrupt and ignominious end with the fall of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the spring of 1975, Americans psychologically turned away and washed their hands of the region. Recriminations quickly gave way to a national, self-imposed detachment.
Even more than Vietnam, the tiny domino of Cambodia - only briefly on the front burner during America's Indochina involvement - was put out of sight and out of mind. Not until the early 1980s did Americans - nor, indeed, most of the world - come to understand so much as the smallest dimension of the horror that happened after 1975. Now the world has come to know Cambodia as the scene of one of history's most savage killing machines - the Khmer Rouge communists.
That killing machine, ousted by the Vietnamese in 1979, is on the move again. With the failure of peace talks in mid-1989, civil war resumed. Late October brought word that Khmer Rouge guerrillas had captured a district capital in northwestern Cambodia. In January, the Khmer Rouge claimed to have launched a major offensive against the country’s second-largest city, Battambang.
Understanding the complexities and contradictions that define the Cambodian experience is anything but simple. Visiting the country is almost a prerequisite, and that's what I did for 11 days last August. I saw the country's sites and people, and I heard its sounds and voices - not only with my own eyes and ears but also through those of people with a personal history with which to compare all the immediate perceptions.
My associates on the trip were Cambodian-Americans who had fled their homeland to escape the Khmer Rouge and for whom this return was the first in more than a decade. Chief among them was Haing S. Ngor won an Academy Award for acting the role of Pran in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. This film more than anything else, awakened millions around the world to the Cambodian holocaust.
OCCUPATION AND RECONSTRUCTION
Ou Thun, an English teacher in Phnom Penh, voiced a common statement to me in August: "Of course, we want the Vietnamese to leave. We want our own country, just like everybody else does. But this does not blind us to the fact that it was Vietnam which liberated us. Without them, there might be no Cambodia at all."
Vietnamese troops fought for 10 years in Cambodia against three resistance factions: the Khmer Rouge, forces loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and a third faction under the leadership of former Prime Minister Son San. Most of the world has treated Vietnam as a pariah for its invasion. The three resistance factions have been recognized as a coalition government-in-exile and have been given Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. Weary of the economic and political costs of occupation, Vietnam announced that it had withdrawn the last of its army in September, leaving the Hun Sen government to fend for itself.
Reflecting the phased troop withdrawal and the consequent decline of Vietnamese influence in the past few years, Phnom Penh was becoming thoroughly "Cambodianized" well before September. Government departments, police, and courts have been run for some time by Cambodians, not
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