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Title: Cambodia: YUON + AMERICAN = DESTRUCTION 0F KAMPUCHEA (1/5) [EN] View count: 757 Rating: 5.0 (9 ratings) Description: Senator Edward Kennedy called it an infamous agreement, totally careless of Cambodian lives. Another view was expressed by the House majority Leader Thomas P. Tip ONeill. He said the bombing should stop because Cambodia is not worth one American life. Geneva marked a historical split among the Khmer Communists. Those were taken to Hanoi remained there, growing older, more pro-Vietnamese and more remote from their country. But a few hundred Khmer Communist guerrillas dissolved Hanoi and stayed in the marquis after 1954. They saw the Geneva as an outright betrayal of the Cambodian resolution. Twenty-three years later, the Communist Prime Minister of Cambodia complained that this revolutionary struggle of our people and the war was booty that was subsequently captured, dissolved into thin air through the Geneva Agreements. The trouble in those days, he said, was that Cambodians did not know which direction to follow and which forces to rely on. Evidently Hanoi was not a reliable force and, in order to distance the Khmer Rouge from their Vietnamese origins, the Partys history was rewritten and its founding dated in 1960, not 1951. In Paris on January 27, 1973, one week after Nixons second inauguration, the United States, the Republic of Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam signed an Agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam. Soon after dawn on the morning of January 29, 1973, the crump of mortars, the whistle of bullets and the whine of artillery shells began to die all over South Vietnam. In the wreckage of the provincial capital of Quang Tri, men on both sides tentatively lifted weary heads from foxholes and gazed silently upon one another. But while the agreement was certainly an achievement, it was not designed or destined to bestow peace. In Laos a sort of peaceful transfer of power was arranged. It is less easy to demonstrate why no solution to the war in Cambodia was found after the Paris Agreement. The crucial point was that neither Washington nor Hanoi wanted a cease-fire in Cambodia before Vietnam. At least until 1973 each wished its associate to continue a limited war.So long as Lon Nol remained to conduct his holy struggle against the demon Communists no cease-fire was likely. From now the Thais and South Vietnamese were ostensibly Cambodias allies, but a unilateral settlement by the Khmers would likely bring South Vietnamese and possibly Thai incursions, which would subject the Khmer countryside to continue damage and destruction and possible foreign domination of another stripe. The threat was clear; the Cambodians could not win, but if they tried to retire, war would be waged against them as aggressively as now-by their current friends. During the second stage, between summer of 1971 and 1973, the growing Khmer Rouge started to break away from Hanois control and to discard the totem of Sihanouk and his supporters; collectivists measures were begun. Then, from the time of the Paris Agreement in January 1973 onward, the Khmer Rouge were largely on their own; they depended on North Vietnamese logistics but had no guaranteed aid from any foreign power and were free to launch their own military initiatives. But then in 1973, when the Paris Peace Agreement prevented American bombing of first Vietnam and then Laos, the entire Seventh Air Force was switched back to Cambodia. All of this had more to do with political and organisational requirements in Washington and South Vietnam than with the military needs of the Lon Nol government. Until August 1973, when Congress brought the bombing to an end, hundreds of thousands of bombs dropped by the American South Vietnam and Cambodian air forces onto Cambodia fell unreported and uncontrolled on areas occupied first by the North Vietnamese and then by the Khmer Rouge. Tags: kampuchea, khmer, cambodia, angkor, sihanouk, salot, sar, yuon, Author: AhmekKhmer |
