Once More, Phnom-Penh Fights to Live

For the fifth year in a row, Khmer Rouge insurgents have mounted a dry-season offensive against the Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh, strangling the city and blocking its vital Mekong River supply line. Once again there are widespread predictions that Phnom-Penh is on the verge of collapse--and with it, the U.S.-backed government of ailing President Lon Nol. Whether or not it falls, there is no question that the situation is more desperate than ever before. The Cambodian forces have already exhausted the $275 million in U.S. military aid they were granted this year and have scant hope of getting the additional $222 million President Ford is asking Congress to authorize (see box next page). Meanwhile, as the threat of starvation increased throughout the capital, the U.S. stepped up a civilian airlift of ammunition and food into Phnom-Penh from neighboring Thailand and South Viet Nam.

Even though Phnom-Penh was subjected to daily rocket attacks last week, the Lon Nol government seemed blindly optimistic about holding out, apparently convinced that the U.S. will somehow pull it through. But there was little reason for confidence. Along the Mekong River, the government's position has steadily deteriorated. Instead of regaining some of the strategic river positions, as they had planned, loyalist troops have lost much of the ground they retook in late January and in the process have suffered heavy casualties. Some battalions were wiped out completely. Others returned with as few as a dozen men in good condition; the rest were killed, wounded or captured. Reports filtered into the capital of remnants of three battalions, totaling 400 or 500 men, who surrendered en masse to the Khmer Rouge. Their action raises the suggestion that if things get much worse, large numbers of government troops might be tempted to surrender, vanish or defect to the other side.

Smashing Chinese Faces. Part of the government's dilemma is that it lacks the troops to defend Phnom-Penh and at the same time reopen the Mekong, a critical problem that would not be solved by the receipt of more military-aid funds from the U.S. Cambodian forces around the capital are already spread dangerously thin, the result of the nearly total destruction of a division in that area during this year's fighting. The high command feels it should not risk taking any soldiers away from Phnom-Penh; yet the river must be reopened to convoys, or the capital will eventually be lost anyway.

In the remaining government-controlled zones of Cambodia, the morale of the civilian population has never been lower. At the provincial capital of Battambang, for instance, students protesting the rising price of rice rioted for two days against the Chinese population, which forms the bulk of the merchant class and is an easy scapegoat. When 20 of their number were then arrested in a military crackdown, the students seized an airport commander and held him until Premier Long Beret flew over from Phnom-Penh and worked out a mutual release. By week's end the anti-Chinese feeling seemed to be spreading to the capital, where crowds of students gathered on street corners--waiting, as one described it, "for a Chinese face to smash." The rebellious mood could turn against the government, which is detested by many students for its languor, inefficiency and corruption.

Last week, with Phnom-Penh cut off by land and water, the U.S. stepped up its airlift to the besieged city. For months the U.S. has been sending ammunition into Phnom-Penh through a private contractor, Bird Air of Seattle, which uses twelve C-130s leased from the U.S. Air Force. .By last week, through Bird Air and four additional firms, the U.S. was sending in 1,200 tons of food and supplies a day aboard 17 cargo planes that made a total of 30 daily flights from Thailand and South Viet Nam.

"The flying's the same when you have rice instead of ammo," said bearded A1 Wells, 52, of Miami's Airlift International, "but it makes you feel a little safer when you're on the ground." Ken Healy, a World War II Air Force pilot who now flies for World Airways of Oakland, Calif., told TIME Correspondent Peter Range: "The best time to go into Phnom-Penh is right after they've taken a few hits. We've figured out that if you haven't had another rocket for ten minutes, then you probably won't have any more for at least an hour." Healy, who ferried supplies to the Nationalist Chinese in the 1940s, said of the 130-mile hops to Phnom-Penh: "This is just like China 30 years ago."

The airlift is plainly a last-ditch emergency operation aimed at staving off imminent collapse and not a means by which Lon Nol might win the war. With the fighting going so badly for his government, the question is inevitably raised in Phnom-Penh these days as to what kind of government Cambodia might have if the ragged peasant Khmer Rouge soldiers should come marching some time soon into a capital city that most have never seen before. Would there be a bloodbath? The evidence to date is inconclusive. Recently, the insurgents slaughtered civilians in two remote provincial towns, possibly because they were thought to be government strongholds. But in other places, the Khmer Rouge have taken control quietly and without unnecessary loss of life.

Another recurring question is who would lead a Khmer Rouge government. Exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk remains the most popular man in Cambodia and the "Premier" of the Royal Government of National Union, the Khmer Rouge shadow government nominally based in Peking where he lives. He might return to Phnom-Penh as a figurehead leader, but his influence within the Khmer Rouge movement is limited. In late 1973 all but two of the cabinet posts in the shadow government were transferred from his supporters to "members of the internal resistance" operating inside Cambodia. Apparently accepting this decline in his fortunes, Sihanouk has promised to resign as Premier whenever such a step might be "desirable."

Real power seems to lie in the hands of Khieu Samphan, Deputy Premier of the shadow government and commander in chief of the 60,000-man Khmer Rouge armed forces. Once a member of Sihanouk's government, he is one of the three former ministers--sometimes known as the "three ghosts"--whom Sihanouk was supposed to have ordered killed in 1970. As it happens, the two other "ghosts" are also active in the shadow cabinet, Hu Nim as Information Minister and Hou Youn as Minister of the Interior.

The leading Communists in the movement are Saloth Sar, leng Sary and Son Sen, who helped found the Cambodian Communist Party in 1951 during their student days in Paris. Most Western observers assume that the Communist Party is the Khmer Rouge's driving force.

Cadre Shortage. If only because the Khmer Rouge has also suffered in recent fighting, the Lon Nol government could hold out until the rains return in May, thereby gaining several more months of power. On the other hand, the insurgents could decide to hold back in their attack on the capital, preferring to let the government cave in sooner or later from its own weight. In this way the Khmer Rouge could put off assuming the awesome burden of running --and feeding--a capital that is overflowing with thousands of hungry refugees and hundreds of wounded soldiers and civilians. The Khmer Rouge are woefully short of political and administrative cadres and if they should enter the city, they would probably be obliged to govern through the existing structure for a long time.

Lon Nol's prospects, in short, are bleaker than they have been at any time since he overthrew Sihanouk in 1970. Regardless of whether he receives more emergency U.S. aid, there is little he can do except try to hold out long enough to work out some sort of settlement with his enemies. "Time is running out," U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean fairly shouts to Western newsmen in Phnom-Penh these days, referring to prospects for U.S. aid. It is also running out for Phnom-Penh.

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