Southeastern Asia Fears Communism
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A fear permeating even to the top level here is that the whole of Southeast Asia—Laos, South Viet Nam, Thailand and Cambodia—will fall to Communist control within less than two years.
Written For UPI
The reference was to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Viet Nam, Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat of Thailand and finally to himself in the predicted order of their overthrow.
Cambodian Premier Prince Norodom Sihanouk put it to me this way:
"Diem first, Sarit second, Sihanouk third."
I returned to Cambodia this month at the invitation of Sihanouk, toured the provinces with him and now make this report at a strategic moment in history when power blocs are preparing for a showdown in Southeast Asia.
Sihanouk's ability to maintain political-economic neutrality is a major key to the fate of the whole Indo-China peninsula.
Communism could never tolerate Sihanouk's prodigious popularity among the people and Sihanouk knows it. That's what he means when he says, "I am ready to die for my country . . . that my country might live."
Without question, Sihanouk is personally strongly non-Communist.
Today, as he travels the razor's edge of political neutrality in history's moment of crisis between East and West, Sihanouk is more than a royal personage whose face might appear on a postage stamp or in a frame in a school classroom.
He is seldom out of sight of his million people, clustered mainly in the Mekong and Tonlo Sap River areas of the under-populated land.
The common bond of the country's progress via the people takes him continually through the provinces, inaugurating projects, opening buildings, industries, schools. Twenty-two per cent of the national budget is dedicated to education.
Sihanouk is here with the agricultural geneticists.
He is in the fields with the farmers showing them new grains.
He is mobbed by students at school, buildings he has built with his own money in Siemreap. In regularly scheduled sessions of manual labor, in T-shirt and work pants, he takes shovel and hoe to build a bed for a railroad that will connect his new harbor with projected coal and iron mines in the under-populated northern regions.
The people work with him by the tens of thousands of man hours of
donated labor. Cambodia is building not only its own country, but its national pride.
This is the new Cambodian way of life.
It has borrowed from the capitalist West via French and American tradition. It has taken up the ideal of pure democracy and cemented all these fragments into an exotic mosaic which has made Cambodia one of Asia's most dynamically progressive, politically harmonious, culturally strong, economically-up-swinging nations. The cities, villages and hamlets are clean, the people healthy.
"I hope," Sihanouk declared, "we will be allowed the time to complete our dream, that we will be able to escape from the occupation of the anti-Communist countries.
Conference halls, model villages, four-lane highways, infirmaries, schools of Khmer arts and crafts forestry, agriculture, music and theater are no longer dreams, but working realities.
"We are very close to China, but we are not close to Communism.
"Laos has chosen internal division and war.
"We have chosen peace and production.
"I prefer to have no more foreign aid rather than to have our policy dictated from the outside.
"When one is faced with life and death, dollars don't count. The way of non-alignment means freedom for my country, and I like freedom. I know the meaning of 'non-freedom.' I don't wish to be the protege of Chou En-Lai (Red Chinese Premier) or Khrushchev. I offer my life for my people."
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Thursday, Dec. 7, 1961 University Daily Kansan Page 7
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