Volume 50, Number 11 · July 3, 2003
The Cambodia Obsession
By James Fenton
The Gate
by François Bizot, translated from the French by Euan Cameron, with a foreword by John le Carré
Knopf, 278 pp., $24.00
In 1970, after the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk and the American invasion, Cambodia became fully involved in the war in Indochina. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) swiftly took over much of the countryside and enabled the Khmer Rouge movement, the Cambodian Communists, gradually to replace them. Phnom Penh, the capital, was in the hands of the pro-American president Lon Nol, as were most of the other cities. But by the time the Paris Peace Agreement was signed in 1973 (the agreement which led to American forces' withdrawal from the whole of Indochina), the provincial capitals were more or less all that Lon Nol controlled. Some of them still had airports, others could only be visited by helicopter, or one could land on a strip created out of the main road leading into town.
Review, 3630 words
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