Lethal lotus blossoms and belligerent bees
"Please give us orders, please give us orders. Should we attack?"
For two weeks that urgent radio message crackled from a redoubt deep in eastern Cambodia's Mondolkiri forest. The frustrated sender of the plea was the commander of two Khmer Rouge infantry companies. He had been cut off in the forest by Vietnamese troops who had invaded Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea). The broadcast was futile; Khmer commanders were too scattered and too harried to respond to the call. Like most other units in the estimated 73,000-man Communist Khmer Rouge force deployed to face the six-pronged Vietnamese attack, the isolated companies in the Mondolkiri forest had been outgunned and outmaneuvered.
The war, in short, was all but lost. In scattered areas of the country the fighting continued at a furious pace, most notably in Kompong Som (once Sihanoukville, named for Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was hospitalized in New York City with fatigue from participating in the U.N. debate on Hanoi's takeover). In Kompong Som the two sides were fighting street to street and hand to hand for control of Cambodia's sole deep-water port, 136 miles southwest of Phnom-Penh (see map). Vicious fighting continued in the Mondolkiri forest as well, and at Siem Reap and Kampot, where Khmers who had been chased out of the town retaliated by shelling it from surrounding mountains.
Early in the week, Cambodia's scant hope of political salvation was crushed by the Soviet Union, which is allied with Hanoi and supports the invasion. In New York City, the Soviets vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of "all foreign troops" from Cambodia. Even that resolution was mild, a sanitized substitute for Chinese wording that named the Vietnamese as "aggressor forces." To the embarrassment of the Soviets, the watered-down substitute was the work of seven nonaligned council members;* like others who listened to the debate preceding last week's vote, the seven rejected Soviet Ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky's disingenuous explanation that the invasion was "a true people's uprising" by dissident Kampucheans. It was a hypocritical effort: in earlier Security Council debates, the Soviets had been the fulsome champions of victimized Third World states. In 1974, for instance, they used their veto power to justify the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Earlier, Moscow had led a censure of Israel for attacking Lebanon and twice vetoed motions of condemnation of the Indian invasion of East Pakistan. In their 111th Security Council veto last week, they stood virtually alone against the will of their sometime friends.