Destroying Cambodia's Peace

The following is the excepted text of a speech delivered by Huot Sambath, member of the Cambodian National United Front's Central Committee on the fourth anniversary of the killing of four students at Kent State University. Huot Sambath made his remarks in Belgrade while serving as the UNF's ambassador to Yuguslovia. The speech was translated for The Crimson by Seth M. Kupferberg.

Four years ago, on May 4, 1970, the people and the youthful students of America organized great demonstrations to protest and condemn the armed aggression perpetrated by the Nixon administration against the government and people of Cambodia.

On April 30, 1970, in order to protect the band of traitors headed by Lon Nol and Sirik Matak which the Nixon administration had installed in Phnom Penh by a criminal coup, President Richard Nixon ordered U.S. and Saigongovernment soldiers to invade Cambodia. More than 110,000 American and Saigon soldiers with the most up-to-date means of destruction at their disposal and with the help of the U.S. Air Force penetrated into northeastern Cambodia, bringing with them death, destruction and ruin.

They reduced entire border villages to ashes, they killed civilians, the American air force and the Saigon troops completely razed the districts of Mimot and Snuol. On May 2, a first contingent of South Vietnamese mercenaries arrived in Phnom Penh to defend the Lon Nol group, which was about to be destroyed by the Cambodian people, risen in mass in response to the historic call of March 23 of Norodom Sihanouk, the legal chief of state of Cambodia and president of its United National Front.

Everywhere in the world, in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, governments raised their voices in protest, and lovers of peace, liberty and justice organized great protests to actively condemn this armed aggression and invasion ordered by President Richard Nixon against the Cambodian government and people.

If international public opinion, deceived by the Nixon administration's propaganda, began by reacting moderately to the criminal coup d'etat of March 18 which the CIA had fomented to destroy an independent, peaceful and neutral Cambodia, the armed invasion with its attendant grief and destruction gave the world the most flagrant proof of the true nature of American imperialism and its participation in the coup.

In the United States, during the great May 4 demonstrations organized by the American people and students to protest President Richard Nixon's armed aggression, the Nixon administration savagely repressed the protesters, not even hesitating to use arms against unarmed demonstrators. Four students at Kent State University were killed as a result, and many demonstrators were seriously wounded.

On the occasion of the remembrance organized this year by the Kent State Indochina Peace Campaign to protest the American war of aggression in Cambodia and South Vietnam and the crimes of the Nixon administration at Kent State and Jackson State--as well as at the Watergate--I would like once more to extend to the parents and friends of the four Kent State University students and to American people and students our militant solidarity, our muted and sorrowful condolences, and our profound and sincerest gratitude for their act of justice and support they gave the Cambodian people's just struggle for national salvation.

The Cambodian government and people love peace and have always wanted to live quietly. They would like to deal as friends and equals with all the peoples of the world. They believe in Buddhism, a religion fortified with pacifism and humanism, and they neither menace nor threaten anyone. But they will not tolerate aggression against them.

The aggressive and genocidal war the Nixon administration wages against the Cambodian government and people constitutes the most flagrant crime against humanity, and leaves them no choice but an armed war of resistance.

According to a United Press International report of June 21, 1973, from March 18, 1970, to January 27, 1973, the United States Air Force dropped 175,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia.

From January 27, 1973, to August 15, 1973, for six and a half months after the signing of the Paris peace agreement on Vietnam, American planes blew up, bombed, killed, massacred, razed, leveled, in a word undertook systematic genocide against the Cambodian people. The intensity of the bombing was carried further than ever before during the American war of aggression in Indochina or in the whole history of man.

But not even such intense and barbarous bombing, carried on for 195 days and nights, could stop the advance of the heroic Cambodian People's Army of National Liberation, which is now at Phnom Penh, the last refuge of Lon Nol's traitors. Some units are even fighting in the capital itself. More than 90 per cent of the national territory, with a population of more than 5.5 million people out of 7 million in the country, is already liberated.

The Nixon administration's announcement that the United States would stop bombing Cambodia after August 15, 1973, doesn't indicate the final end of American bombings, and still less of American aggression in Cambodia and the immeasurable sorrows of the Cambodian people. It only marks a new stage in the continuing American aggression.

After August 15, the Nixon administration intensified its military and economic aid to the traitorous Phnom Penh regime, and introduced 3500 military advisers and personnel to Cambodia. The Nixon administration plans to bring their number to 10,000 by the end of 1974.

Right now, it's these American military advisers and personnel who direct this traitorous "Khmer Republic" in its ministries, in the provinces still occupied by the traitors, and in its army. These American military advisers direct military operations and take part in combat.

As long as the Nixon administration continues its aggressive war and intervention in Cambodia to try to save its creature, the band of traitors in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian people and its heroic People's Army for National Liberation, under the direction of the National United Front of Cambodia and the Royal Government of the National Cambodian Union headed by Norodom Sihanouk, chief of state of the Kingdom of Cambodia, will have no other honorable alternative but to continue without compromise or hesitation their war of resistance till it ends in total victory.

The Cambodian problem created by the Nixon administration's war of aggression can't be resolved except through Sihanouk's five-point Solemn Declaration of March 23, 1970.