From Bleak to Awful

On the eve of the third anniversary of the 1970 coup that exiled Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Phnom-Penh was rocked by new explosions and a new crisis. A Cambodian Air Force trainer stolen by a young officer swooped low over the Presidential Palace and dropped two 500-lb. bombs. The bombs missed the palace and slammed into a cluster of huts that housed presidential guards and their families. At least 38 people died, and about 50 were wounded.

The pilot, a flying-school reject named So Potra who also happened to be the lover of one of Sihanouk's 13 children, escaped by winging off to a landing field somewhere in Communist-held eastern Cambodia. U.S.-backed President Lon Nol went on the radio and denounced the attack as "a clear attempt to kill me." He decreed a state of emergency, fired his air force chief for negligence, rounded up scores of the usual suspects and placed about 20 of Sihanouk's relatives under house arrest. In Washington, officials gloomily described the situation in terms ranging from bleak and depressing to awful.

At one time, when the Viet Nam truce was being worked out, U.S. officials expected that a de facto ceasefire in neighboring Cambodia would emerge by the end of March. Now it appears that the fitful Cambodian war --and the bombing there by U.S. B-52s --could easily drag on through the year. One reason is that Hanoi does not control all of the antigovernment forces; they include sizable numbers of homegrown neutralists and Khmer Rouge Communists, as well as the estimated 36,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops who are supposed to be withdrawn eventually under the terms of the Paris Agreement.

The question now is whether the Cambodian regime can survive until the shooting is somehow stopped. Washington officials frankly worry about the similarity between Cambodia today and South Viet Nam in the early 1960s. Saigon was then ruled by the aloof and autocratic Ngo Dinh Diem and his ambitious younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu; they were toppled in a 1963 coup that had active U.S. encouragement. Cambodia has the somewhat mystical Lon Nol, paralyzed on his left side as the result of a 1971 stroke, and his younger brother Lon Non, a vain and ruthless army general. Lon Non is now the regime's strongman, having won a power struggle with a rival whom most U.S. officials still regard as the only effective administrator in Cambodia, Lieut. General Sisowath Sirik Matak.

The Lon Nol--Lon Non team has been ineffective both against the insurgents, who now control more than half of the countryside, and against corruption and inflation. The result is a spreading disaffection among students, intellectuals and government workers. Indeed, some 45,000 teachers and students have been on strike for the past month in protest against soaring living costs. Shortly before the bombing of the palace, army goons loyal to Lon Non invaded a student meeting and killed two youths with hand grenades.

U.S. officials, mindful of the chaotic series of regimes that followed the 1963 coup in Saigon, insist that they are not interested in promoting any sudden changes of government in Phnom-Penh. Even so, the President's brother took certain precautions last week. He placed an extra cordon of troops around Sirik Matak's Phnom-Penh villa--ostensibly for his old rival's protection.

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