Cambodia: Before the Fall

Cambodia is a ruined fairyland, with a government to match. Even foreign diplomats who privately hope that the present regime can pull through have been exasperated by the indolence and unrealistic attitudes of President Lon Nol, who sometimes acts as if the war were taking place in another country. Last week, for example, rumors circulated in Phnom-Penh for several days that he might resign, which could possibly pave the way toward some kind of negotiations with the Khmer Rouge insurgents. Instead, Lon Nol staged a modest Cabinet reshuffling and fired his arrogant commander in chief, Lieut. General Sosthene Fernandez, who is hated both for his corruption (his army payroll is inflated with fake names) and for refusing to take orders from the National Assembly. At the presidential palace, Lon Nol threw a champagne party for Fernandez and his successor, Lieut. General Sak Sutsakhan. Fernandez wept and kissed the national flag as the green-and-red sash of the Grand Cross was placed over his shoulders.

Lon Nol also asked Long Boret, who has served as his reasonably capable Premier since December 1973, to form a new government. This task, however, did not go quite so smoothly as the long overdue sacking of Fernandez. The problem was that Lon Nol's younger brother, Lon Non, was back on the scene trying to regain a position in the government. Two years ago, under pressure from the U.S., Lon Nol sent his ruthless brother, who had become an extremely powerful palace figure, overseas as a roving good-will ambassador. The rivalry between Lon Non and Premier Boret was reportedly delaying formation of a new Cabinet last week. "Here it is, at one minute to midnight," snapped one disgusted Western diplomat, "and these guys are still haggling over who is going to be what in the new government."

The intrigues at the presidential palace had little effect on life in the besieged capital. In front of the huge, unfinished Cambodiana Hotel, which now serves as a camp for 5,000 homeless refugees, emaciated children chanted, "O.K., bye-bye," perhaps the only English words they knew, as enemy bombs fell on the opposite bank of the Mekong River. Inside, a line of hollow-eyed mothers clutching half-dead infants waited patiently to enter the World Vision clinic. One baby's head hung limply to the side, eyes closed and mouth agape, its body swaddled in a green-and-white T shirt that bore the words HELLO, DARLING. Said Clinic Director Carl B. Harris of Washington, D.C.: "It's not only the babies who are starving. Many of the mothers have hemoglobin levels below 60%."

In the central market, reported TIME Correspondent Roy Rowan, rockets had exploded and the stalls were empty. A soldier handed out tickets for half-price government rice but ran out of them before he reached the end of the line. Across the street in a sidewalk cafe, Cambodian men lolled over their afternoon coffee. Behind them, beggar boys stood poised with empty beer cans, ready to cadge the few drops of coffee left in every cup. Two blond young men --they could have been freelance pilots or maybe just drifters still hanging round Phnom-Penh for its "cheap ass and cheap grass"--occupied one of the tables. Cambodia still boasts a number of private one-or two-plane airlines, which fly between Phnom-Penh and provincial towns still in government hands. One American who flies a Convair for Angkor Wat Airlines takes his wife and adopted baby girl with him on flights to keep them out of range of the rockets in Phnom-Penh. His wife explains, "Nowadays we spend our nights in Battambang with the plane."

Even after the rocket attacks were stepped up to 50 or 60 a day, Air Cambodge was still able to land its champagne flights from Bangkok and Saigon at Phnom-Penh's Pochentong Airport. Relatively few passengers disembarked from the silver Caravelle, but the plane was full when it flew out.

All over town there are bunkers built from sandbags that bear the name of Connell Rice & Sugar Co., Crowley, La. The 100-lb. sacks, delivered by the DC-8 "rice birds" of the American airlift, are no sooner emptied of their contents than they are refilled with sand. So far, the fighting has not reached the city itself; infiltrators, if there are any, have stayed hidden. Lurid billboards adorning every main intersection portray scenes of what the Khmer Rouge will do once they arrive. Some murals show women with daggers in their chests, their dresses torn away and their legs pried open.

Last week Communist forces continued to nibble away at government positions around both Phnom-Penh and the ferry crossing and naval base at Neak Luong, 32 miles to the southeast. The most disturbing attacks were to the north of Phnom-Penh, where every night Khmer Rouge forces slipped past remnants of the government's 7th Division at the ruined village of Prek Phnou. Once past the division's posts, the enemy would then turn and attack the units from the south. Although the total collapse of the 7th Division would leave the northern sector of the city practically undefended, the government last week gave top priority to an effort to push the insurgents out of the "rocket belt," the region from which they were firing on the Pochentong Airport, but government troops made little progress. Late in the week a Khmer Rouge rocket hit an ammunition dump at the airport. Some 20 tons of explosives went up in flames, the windows of the control tower were blown out, and the U.S. airlift had to be suspended temporarily.

Put at Prek Phnou, which is only eight miles from Phnom-Penh, three T-28s dropped napalm on a paddyfield, causing orange flames to spurt across the open area. Three Cambodian youths in ragtag uniforms came trudging down a dirt road; one wore a purple bandanna around his head, another a Pathet Lao peaked cap from Laos, and the third had on a fatigue jacket and red bathing trunks. But all three carried M-79 grenade launchers slung across their slender shoulders.

In Cambodia, a soldier's family often follows him into the field. Troops wounded in the fighting at Prek Phnou are evacuated by Jeep or helicopter to a receiving hospital set up in the basketball stadium in what was once Sihanouk's Olympic City. Most of the wounded arrived with their wives and sometimes their children. A whole family often cowered silently in a corner of the operating room while surgeons cut a jagged 82-mm. mortar fragment from a soldier's chest.

Some government troops fought extremely well. Even foreign observers could see the difference in the 7th Division last week when it gained a new commander, Brigadier General Khy Hak. But the insurgents also fought well. TIME'S Stephen Heder reported the case of a rebel soldier, caught by machine gun fire that injured both his arms and legs, who lay wounded in a bunker for two days. On the third morning, Heder and three government soldiers found him. "Only when we came very close did we see his glaring face," said Heder. "His wounds had festered horribly, filling with squirming maggots. One of the soldiers leaned over and asked, 'What happened to you?' He snarled back, 'I don't have to tell you anything.' "Taken slightly aback, the government soldiers explained that they only wanted to take him to a hospital and that there was no reason to be afraid. Then they suggested to him that, when interrogated, he tell their officers he had been shot by his own comrades when he had refused to obey orders to move forward. Only then did the Khmer Rouge soldier allow himself to be taken to an aid station, where he became an object of great curiosity. One amazed government soldier remarked, 'If that had happened to any of us, we would have called for help the first day.' "

From his exile in Peking, Prince Sihanouk still insisted that the Khmer Rouge had no intention of making a direct assault on Phnom-Penh. He maintained that the city would fall before the end of the year and perhaps "much sooner." That is probably an accurate prediction. If U.S. ammunition and food are cut off, the Lon Nol government will be lucky to last until mid-April.

At week's end the Cambodian government was reported ready to cut down the trees lining Phnom-Penh's Democracy Boulevard so that the wide roadway can be turned into an emergency landing strip for DC-3s in case the airport is closed down by Khmer Rouge rocket attacks. Such a desperate ploy might extend the war for a few days, or even a week or two, but not for long. This week the city braced itself for the fifth anniversary of the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk, a date the insurgents have previously celebrated with heavy attacks.

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