I have been criticised for giving various kinds of help to the North Vietnam and Vietcong in their fight against American imperialism. Lon Nol, Sirik Matak, Son Ngoc Thanh, and their followers sentenced me to death for it, claiming that the colonisation by the Americans was less serious than the Vietnamese threat.
As Cambodia's head of state, my objective in dealing with Vietnam was to keep my country safe. We have seen what kind of foul play Ho Chi Minh, Le Daun, Pham Van Dong, Vo Nguyen Giap, and the like indulged in between 1947 and 1954.
He set up a "shadow" cabinet of loyalist and moved to shore up what he considered his best advantage-his friendship with the Vietnamese communists. The Prince yielded to Hanoi's pressure and gave the Vietnamese communists rights of passage to Sihanoukville, the deep-sea port he had built on the gulf of Siamese to prevent the Americans from blocking his country through South Vietnam, which controlled the Mekong River and Phnom Penh's river port. The Vietnamese communists were allowed to ship arms to Sihanoukville and truck them overland to eastern Cambodia. By 1967 the North Vietnam already were preparing for the TET offensive the following year: if the promised "uprising" succeeded, Sihanouk's worries about an American intervention would be over. The communists would win and the war would end.
Later, he clearly believed that permitting Vietnamese troops to seek sanctuary in his country would appease their leaders and that, once they had won the war, Cambodia's 'hospitality' would be remembered.
In Phnom Penh Chinese officials were still trying to persuade Lon Nol that should accommodate the Vietcong in the border areas.
If Cambodia had remained a kingdom-since all the solemn pledged the Vietnamese made were to the Kingdom of Cambodia-or if at the very least Norodom Sihanouk had remained Kampuchea's head of state, would Hanoi really have kept all its promises?
Sdec Sihanouk clearly tells us victims in his fearful answers about Yuon land-hungry and hegemonic intentions towards Cambodia that he was blindly betrayed by Yuon Crocodile leaders, Yuon Emperors always made many terrible-secret phoney promises to Cambodian kings in the past, but Samdech Euv Sihanouk didn't, perhaps, learn a lesson from his ancestors who terribly made mistake passing down to him was King Chey Chettha II who was the worst mad king in Cambodian history. And 21 provinces of Cambodia in present South Vietnam have fallen into Yuon Crocodile leaders' iron grasps completely in 1975. This is crocodile's loyal-motivated promise to its master not to eat its master. This tragic past repeatedly falls up onto him with many Yuon secret-dirty phoney promises to him as a Khmer old saying: An evil heart but an angel's mouth. (=A wolf in a sheep's clothing.):
And, since walls have ears, the FUNK ministers' qualms were repeated to General Giap. Shortly thereafter, his face flushed with anger, he expressed his indignation to me in the following terms: "We North Vietnamese are genuine Communists, men of our word. We promised you solemnly and in writing that we would always respect your sovereignty, your national independence, you territory as is now it stands, including the coastal islands. We will never break our promises. The greatest proof of our loyalty to Kampuchea and its chief of state [myself, at that time] is the sacrifice of Vietnam's finest, hundreds of whom have already given their lives for your country. It is a serious insult for the FUNK ministers to lump us together, most unfairly, with the American imperialist aggressors of our three Indochinese countries. The anti-Vietnamese remarks, made here in Hanoi, hurt us deeply, since every day our soldiers, far from their dear homeland and their loved families, fight and die on the sacred soil of our Khmer brothers and sisters, side by side with them against our common enemies, to save and liberate your country, Kampuchea."
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