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Cambodia at a Crossroads
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13957 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1988 |
2,304 Words |
| Author
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Michael Johns
Michael Johns is a foreign policy analyst at the Heritage
Foundation in Washington, D.C., where he specializes in the
Third World and Africa. |
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
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