>>>I believe it was Prince Sihanook (spelling?) and Pol Pot. Eventually, there were two communist-backed regimes. The Vietnamese-backed one drove Pol Pot out, then eventually withdrew from Cambodia. <<<
Close, but not exactly. This is my recollection. Prince Sihanook was the hereditary ruler of Cambodia when Nixon started invading and bombing it. Our side saw him as insufficiently friendly to this process. We conducted a coup to install our guy, Lon Nol, a general who would later become one of cambodia's mass murderers.
This provided one of my few newspaper column scoops at the time, as I predicted this a few days before it happened. I did this because I followed the movements and statements of Sihanook and others there fairly closely, and I became convinced that a timely visit to Russia and China by the prince was to avoid capture during a coup. (This didn't require a genius to figure out in those days. We were turning over puppets in Vietnam at quite a clip.)
So, Lon Nol was our guy. Pol Pot was the so-called 'Red Prince', the Chinese-backed communist butcher of 'Killing Fields' fame who recently died. He was called the Red Prince because he used to spread the story that he was a brother or cousin of Sihanooks. Which I don't know about one way or another, come to think of it.
Later, the Vietnamese invaded and put one of their guys in control, and it was the best thing that had happened there in a long time, ironically. This according to CIA field guys I used to talk to casually at that time.
Now, of course, there are better developments. With Pol Pot dead, and the US backing off of Vietnam, the Cambodians are no longer in between china and the US, getting squeezed. The UN is making some progress. All a terrible bloody mess they never asked for and did nothing to encourage. |
