Rumors that Lon Nol is about to appoint a successor and flee the country are flying thick and fast in Pnompenh. A dispatch in the March 23 New York Times said he had already bundled up his belongings and obtained passports for himself and his family. He is reported to have told aides that his departure “will depend on the situation.”
Most of the other rats in Pnompenh have already left or are getting ready to jump from the sinking ship.
“The best that can be hoped for here is little more than a negotiated surrender in which the only subjects open for discussion would be details, humaneness and orderliness of the Communist-led insurgents’ take over.”
The Lon Nol regime is on the verge of collapse. A creation of Washington from the start, it has throughout its existence been totally dependent on U.S. military and economic aid. But it seems even that is not enough to save it now.
Reacting swiftly to a new political indictment of his dictatorship, Nguyen Van Thieu’s national police raided the offices of nine Saigon newspapers that were publishing the indictment February 2 and confiscated their press runs and printing plates. The statement had been drawn up by the opposition movement led by the Reverend Tran Huu Thanh.
During the next two days, mostly in predawn raids, the regime arrested twenty-four journalists and editors as “Communist agents.” Five newspapers were shut down.
The Pentagon took another step toward open intervention once again in the Indochina war when it doubled its airlift of supplies to the Lon Nol regime February 15.
The Khmer Rouge insurgents have now virtually blockaded the Mekong River, Pnompenh’s main supply line. For the first time in the war, they have mined the river. They have also stepped up heavy artillery fire from the banks, which are almost totally under their control.
Using an attempted coup as the pretext, Bolivian President Hugo Banzer Suárez decreed a sweeping series of measures November 9 to clamp down hard on opposition to his shaky military regime.
As part of the “new order,” the general outlawed all political parties, labor unions, and student and business associations. Heavy penalties were set for any public or private institutions that engage in political activity.
In the weeks preceding President Ford’s visit to South Korea, scheduled for November 22, opponents of Park Chung Hee’s dictatorship intensified their protests.
Two thousand Catholic demonstrators, who assembled for a march from the suburb of Tan Sa Chau to the Supreme Court building in Saigon October 31, were beaten back by Thieu’s police and plainclothes goons. About seventy-five civilians were reported injured. Two opposition deputies were seriously hurt, and a Catholic priest was knocked to the ground and bloodied, the November 1 New York Times reported.
Protesting the corruption of the Thieu regime, several thousand Catholics marched through the northern city of Hue on Sunday, September 8. It was the first Catholic antigovernment demonstration to be held in the former imperial capital. Police attacked the demonstrators with tear gas and clubs, confiscating anticorruption banners and dispersing the march. Hundreds of demonstrators later regrouped in a Catholic church, where a document denouncing Thieu was read.
The South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee has exploited to the full the attempt on his life August 15 in which his wife was killed.
He has tried to blame the assassination attempt on the North Koreans, claiming that they masterminded the plot. He has pointed to the Japanese government, blaming it for allowing pro-North Korean political activity and for unwittingly issuing a passport to the assassin, who was identified by the Korean police as Mun Se Kwang, a Korean living in Osaka.