The population of Pnompenh gave a tumultuous welcome to the victorious Khmer Rouge troops when they entered the Cambodian capital on April 17.
“Three hours after the surrender,” said an April 18 Associated Press dispatch, “thousands of students paraded along the main boulevards, waving banners to greet the Communist forces.”
President Ford’s April 10 speech was designed to impress the world with the threat of resumption of full-scale American military intervention in the civil war in Vietnam.
Since the rout of Thieu’s army, the Pentagon has indicated in various ways that it is pressing to send in B-52s and U.S. troops. The excuse, of course, is “to protect American lives.” To show that it means business, the Pentagon has deployed naval forces off the coast of Vietnam. By April 10, 4,000 troops were standing by.
“They’ve succeeded beyond their fondest dreams,” said one Western source quoted by New York Times correspondent Bernard Weinraub even before the forces of the Provisional Revolutionary Government had liberated Da Nang. Since then they have swept through province after province with extraordinary speed.
“A rout beyond our wildest fears,” was how one “Western military analyst” in Saigon described the crumpling of the puppet troops in face of the advance of the liberation forces.
The disintegration and rolling hack of Thieu’s army – trained, equipped, and paid by the Pentagon – constitutes a massive defeat for imperialism. The defeat is irreversible. It marks the end of the road for Washington’s large-scale effort to gain a military beachhead on the Asian continent and to take over the French colonial holdings. It is Washington’s Dien Bien Phu.
The most stunning defeat for U.S. imperialism and its Saigon puppets in the history of the Indochina war is now taking place. In the space of a week a massive retreat by the Saigon army has relinquished more than two-thirds of South Vietnam to the liberation forces, and the consensus among most observers is that worse is yet to come.
Rumors that Lon Nol is about to appoint a successor and flee the country are flying thick and fast in Pnompenh. A dispatch in the March 23 New York Times said he had already bundled up his belongings and obtained passports for himself and his family. He is reported to have told aides that his departure “will depend on the situation.”
Most of the other rats in Pnompenh have already left or are getting ready to jump from the sinking ship.
After five years of war against the people of Cambodia, the Pentagon and its puppets in Pnompenh seem to be reaching the end of the road. But what will happen when Pnompenh falls? Who are the insurgents?
The White House says it doesn’t know. It bombed and shelled and napalmed them for five years. Now Ford and Kissinger claim they don’t know who to negotiate with. “It is not clear to me that if Lon Nol decided to surrender, he would know where to send the surrender offer,” said one State Department official quoted by the March 1 New York Times.
“The best that can be hoped for here is little more than a negotiated surrender in which the only subjects open for discussion would be details, humaneness and orderliness of the Communist-led insurgents’ take over.”
The Lon Nol regime is on the verge of collapse. A creation of Washington from the start, it has throughout its existence been totally dependent on U.S. military and economic aid. But it seems even that is not enough to save it now.
Reacting swiftly to a new political indictment of his dictatorship, Nguyen Van Thieu’s national police raided the offices of nine Saigon newspapers that were publishing the indictment February 2 and confiscated their press runs and printing plates. The statement had been drawn up by the opposition movement led by the Reverend Tran Huu Thanh.
During the next two days, mostly in predawn raids, the regime arrested twenty-four journalists and editors as “Communist agents.” Five newspapers were shut down.