Corn & Peanuts

The advantages of being a Nehru-type "neutralist" were altogether too tempting for Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, 34, whose intentions sometimes exceed his experience. His fragment of fractured French Indo-China, a country the size of Kansas, was in line to receive economic aid from both West and East. As usual, the U.S. was first with the mostest ($88 million in two years). New hotels, cabarets and bungalows gave a festive air to Pnompenh, the capital, while under the mango trees, cruising Tampa-blue four-hole Buicks bore saffron-robed bonzes (Buddhist priests) to gilded pagodas. By an ingenious integration, American dredges were soon filling in ground for a Russian hospital, and U.S. farm machinery was being used to boost the corn and peanut crop for export to Red China.

But it was for neither corn nor peanuts that China's Chou En-lai paid a visit to Cambodia last November. Sihanouk gave him the royal bed, and Chou blanketed the country with Communist propaganda. Cambodian newspapers began charging the U.S. with setting up military bases in the country. The local Chinese colony, seeing the royal favor conferred on Chou, began shifting its allegiance to Peking. Communist agents delivered money and mortars to Mekong River pirates raiding the borders of neighboring Laos and South Viet Nam. But perhaps Sihanouk's biggest mistake was to permit, in his onetime 100% Sihanouk Parliament, an opposition of so-called "progressives."

Last week French businessmen who had come hopefully to Cambodia after the debacle of Hanoi were leaving. In the Mekong River valley 6,000 peasants, terrified by pirates, put their cooking pots on their backs and, driving their water buffaloes before them, moved toward South Viet Nam. For Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the unkindest cut of all was the charge of "corruption in government" by the progressive opposition, and the cry for a Cambodian Republic. Said Sihanouk, with an accent of surprise: "The opposition is planning to discredit the indispensable monarchy. Because of my foolish dreams, things are going the wrong way. By my own fault, confusion is now among our ranks. This is a great tristesse."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.