Cambodia Neutral: the Dictate of Necessity

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CERTAIN misconceptions have arisen from insufficient knowledge of the true situation in my country since it attained independence in November 1953. Although I am convinced that the leaders of the United States Government and the State Department's experts on Southeast Asia are fully conversant with Cambodian policy, I do not feel that the public has always been accurately informed about us. Americans will have learnt, from the type of magazine that serves up complex world problems in palatable and easily digested form, that Cambodia has more or less cast off its former friends in order to seek new ones further east, that it practises a "pro-Red neutralism," is "rotten" with Communist propaganda and constitutes a "breach" in the front of the "free nations." I have received a number of touchingly naïve letters from American citizens imploring me to end this state of affairs and warning me of the dangers that would face my country if it put its trust in a certain "bloc."

I would like our American friends to know how mistaken they are in such appraisals. I can think of no better way of convincing them than by giving a frank account of Cambodia's present situation, its difficulties and the way in which it is trying to overcome them.

Cambodia is a country of six million inhabitants, including 400,000 Vietnamese and 350,000 Chinese. Our army--and this is important to remember--numbers only 25,000 men. After Laos, which has a population of two million, we are the smallest state in the Indochinese Peninsula. But at least we are united. With our long-standing tradition of monarchy, we are drawn together by the Throne. As sincere democrats, we hate disorder, and as exponents of a purely national form of socialism, we can only be indifferent to foreign ideologies. We go our own national way, unswervingly...