Asphyxiating the Capital

The first rocket of the day fell on the fruit market and killed seven people. The second fell 30 meters from the tennis courts at the Cercle Sportif and thereafter, for once, the courts remained unused. Four hours later the bombshell hit: a 107-mm. rocket slammed into a crowded street in front of the Monerom Hotel, killing eleven people instantly and maiming a dozen more; a flaming Honda was catapulted onto a pedicab whose lone occupant was already dead.

Despite such daily scenes of horror, the besieged Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh held out for another desperate week. The Khmer Rouge insurgents kept up their asphyxiating pressure on the city's Mekong River lifeline, thereby depriving the capital of crucial supplies and diverting large numbers of government troops from the city's defense. Sosthene Fernandez, the Vietnamese-Filipino commander in chief of government forces, stoutly insisted that "we can open the river," but the chief of naval operations, Admiral Vong Sarendy, conceded that the situation on the Mekong was "hopeless." Meanwhile, the capital's sole maintaining lifeline of emergency supplies was the Phnom-Penh airport. Insurgents, dug in less than five miles from the airport, last week were shelling it with as many as 60 rocket and 105-mm. artillery rounds per day. One U.S. cargo DC-8 carrying rice from Saigon was hit by rocket fire. But after a brief halt, the airlift of food and ammunition continued.

Verge of Collapse. Life within the surrounded capital sputtered on. A few street markets were still operating, and the city's electricity and water systems were working irregularly. Occasionally a widow could be seen traveling by pedicab to recover the body of her husband. Every morning, foreign visitors awoke to a bright blue sky and closed the shutters of their hotel rooms in the hope of deflecting shrapnel.

Despite signs that the city was on the verge of collapse, the Khmer Rouge army refrained from making a full-scale assault on the capital, whose population has been tripled in the last year alone by the presence of 1,400,000 refugees from the countryside. Instead the insurgents maintained their successful--and relatively inexpensive--campaign of attrition. "The Khmer Rouge are everywhere," reported TIME Correspondent Peter Range. "They do not concentrate their forces heavily, do not overextend themselves, do not shoot for the large objectives until they have taken several smaller ones first."

In a somewhat fainthearted response to the crisis, ailing, ineffectual President Lon Nol let it be known once again that his government was prepared to resign in exchange for peace talks --but nobody expected the Khmer Rouge to take up the offer. In Washington, Congress continued to debate the merits of an Administration request for increasing emergency aid to the Lon Nol regime (see following story), which has already received almost $2 billion in U.S. aid during the last five years. An equally serious problem, however, was the morale and fighting spirit of the government forces, as Correspondent Range discovered while on a military operation inside Cambodia last week.

The Cambodian 3rd Division had been ordered to rescue 100 government soldiers who were pinned down by the Khmer Rouge in a temple near Ang Snoul, 15 miles west of the capital. The 3rd Division had plenty of supplies; only a day earlier, when it picked up 30 truckloads from the airport, the division commander had declared, "For the first time during this dry season, we have enough ammunition." Nonetheless, the government also summoned elements of the 1st and 2nd Divisions to help with the rescue.

Then, reported Range, everything seemed to go wrong. "First, the acting 3rd Division commander, Colonel Seng Sunthan, discovered the unit from the 2nd Division going down the wrong road and had to turn them around. Then the lieutenant colonel commanding a contingent of the 1st Division refused to take orders from Sunthan, who barely outranked him. After that came an unseemly quarrel, replete with shouting and table banging, conducted within full view of foreign reporters and a military attache, as well as a number of Cambodian officers and enlisted men. When the operation finally began, it was supported by three dozen T-28 bombing sorties, dozens of gunship runs and endless 105-mm. howitzer rounds. It took 2 1/2 days to complete what, with overwhelming superiority in firepower, should have been a swift and devastating operation." The wastage of ammunition was almost beyond belief, Range noted, but the most critical problem was the lack of trained manpower. Of the government's 225,000 men in uniform, no more than 80,000 are front-line troops--or just about equal to what the insurgents field.

Final Stage. At the Government Palace in Phnom-Penh, Premier Long Boret talked of new mobilization to replace the 300 or so government troops that are being killed every day. U.S. officials, however, were distressed that the Premier still had no plans for changing the student deferment system, which allows thousands of prosperous young Cambodians to buy their way out of the draft. Did he regard the military situation as grave? "It is serious," he replied, "but with American aid we can prove to the other side that they cannot force a military solution on us."

What exactly were the insurgents' intentions? Two weeks ago, the clandestine Khmer Rouge radio commented that "the Cambodian revolution has reached its final stage of victory." In Peking last week, however, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, titular head of the insurgents' shadow government, implied that the Khmer Rouge would wait for the Lon Nol government to fall of its own weight, and that "victory is inevitable by the end of this year." Whether the victory would be specifically Sihanouk's is another question. The feisty prince who led his country to independence in 1953 is still the most popular man in Cambodia, but within the Communist-led Khmer Rouge movement he is little more than a figurehead.

In preparation for the possible evacuation of the 400 American civilians who are still in Cambodia, the U.S. carrier Okinawa was standing by off Cambodia, in the Gulf of Siam, with about 1,000 Marines aboard. By week's end enemy rockets were still falling on the airport, but the evacuation of foreigners seemed somewhat less imminent.

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