ESTUDIOS IN VITRO DEL EFECTO DEL COMPUESTO GR-24 EN PASOS CLAVE DE LA ANGIOGÉNESIS

The pressure continued to mount after Sihanouk broke off with the United States. While domestic tension was intensifying, the communist Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Serei groups increased their armed insurgency across Cambodia. Meanwhile, suspension of U.S. aid and Sihanouk’s nationalization of banking and trade industries pushed the economy into a tailspin and created simmering anger among the populace (Pradhan 1987). On the foreign policy front, the Vietnam War forced 20,000 refugees into Cambodian territory by 1967, as South Vietnam and Thailand continued their military provocations along the borders.

Meanwhile, Sino-Cambodian relations ran into a crisis once the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution unraveled across the PRC in 1966. China shifted its foreign policy from Pancha Shila

to “Red Guard diplomacy,” which aimed to export revolution to foreign countries (Richardson 2010). After Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai asked Sihanouk to allow ethnic Chinese who lived in Cambodia to express their allegiance to Mao Zedong and communism, a move that broke off with the PRC’s traditional policy, Sihanouk felt that he had painted himself into a corner. After all, he had once thought that Beijing would stand behind him without trying to impose its ideology within Cambodia (Pradhan 1987; Richardson 2010).

In response to this looming crisis, Sihanouk extended the olive branch to the United States. He informed one U.S. Senator that he was ready to restore ties if the United States recognized Cambodia’s existing borders. Moreover, he accommodated the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1967 visit to Cambodia and went so far as to erect the J. F. Kennedy Boulevard to

honor her late husband for whose assassination in 1963 Sihanouk cheered.8 _{Politically, Sihanouk} promised to allow “limited American incursions” in Cambodia “under certain conditions,” a vague statement that Henry Kissinger later used to justify U.S. bombings of Cambodia (Clymer 2007). Although the U.S.-Cambodian détente led to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 1969, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler, and the Commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), General Creighton Abrams already advocated the plan for aerial bombardment against alleged Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia. On March 17, 1969, President Richard Nixon ordered the United States Air Force (USAF) to conduct a secret one-time bombing campaign known as “Operation Breakfast” to hit Viet Cong sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia (Shawcross 1979). However, Breakfast did not stand alone. The bombing campaign was expanded with subsequent operations such as Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper that lasted until May 26, 1970. Together, they constituted “Operation Menu,” which pushed the Viet Cong deeper into the Khmer9 _{territory and destabilized Cambodia.}

On March 18, 1970, while Norodom Sihanouk was in Moscow, his right-wing Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, General Lon Nol, capitalized on public resentment about the weak economy, U.S. bombings, and an alleged 50,000 Viet Cong guerillas encroaching upon Cambodian territory to orchestrate a coup against the prince (Sak 1978). This coup marked the beginning of a period of civil wars for the next two decades. Once in power, Lon Nol abolished Cambodia’s centuries-old monarchy to create a pro-U.S. military dictatorship called the “Khmer Republic.” From 1970 to 1975, Cambodia abandoned its alignment with China and became a

8 _{According to Clymer (1999), Sihanouk claimed that the deaths of Thai Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat, South}

Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy, with whom he shared difficult relations, were a “divine intervention to save Cambodia” and that the three leaders “died and went to hell.”

puppet of the United States. The country was dragged into the Vietnam War, a conflict that Sihanouk had tried to steer Cambodia away from over the past decade.

After the coup, Norodom Sihanouk fled to Beijing and sided with his archnemesis, the communist Khmer Rouge, to create a resistance movement called the Royal National Union Government of Kampuchea (GRUNK) with Beijing’s support. The Prince called on Cambodians at home to rise against Lon Nol’s regime. It was during this time that a young man named Hun Sen, who currently serves as Cambodia’s Prime Minister, joined the maquis. From that day on, the Khmer Rouge used Sihanouk’s name to recruit Cambodian peasants, many of whom had been devasted by U.S. bombings, into their ranks, and, as the Prince told one journalist in 1973, the Khmer Rouge would eventually spit him out like “a cherry pit” (Richardson 2010).

After the Menu campaign and the joint land invasion10 into Cambodia by South Vietnamese and U.S. troops failed to yield satisfying results, in May 1970, President Nixon ordered the USAF to conduct another air campaign, “Operation Freedom Deal,” which was more intensive and lasted until 1973. Its mission was to destroy Viet Cong sanctuaries and to provide air support for Lon Nol’s war against the Khmer Rouge. “I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?” Nixon lamented to his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger (Owen and Kiernan 2007). Despite, or perhaps because of, U.S. air raids, the Khmer Rouge’s army swelled from 1,000 men in 1969 to 150,000 strong by 1971 and 220,00 two years later (Kiernan 1989). From 1969 to 1973, the USAF dropped 539,129 tons of ordnance on Cambodia and killed between 50,000 and 150,000 people (Kiernan 1989; Kiernan and Owen 2015). During the entire period of the Vietnam

10 _{The U.S. invasion of Cambodia in early 1970 sparked a deadly anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State University}

War, the United States dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives, including 80,000 cluster bombs and 26 million submunitions, making Cambodia one of the most heavily bombed nations in the world (Martin et al. 2019). One-third of those bombs failed to explode and have contributed to 64,700 casualties, including 19,700 deaths, since 1979. Cambodia, as Shawcross (1979) posits, was used as a “sacrificial pawn” in the U.S.’s grand strategic design in Vietnam.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge toppled the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic regime of Lon Nol and took over Cambodia. Once in power, they renamed the country “Democratic Kampuchea” (DK) and marched it toward a horrific chapter of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. DK implemented radical Maoism and transformed the country into a utopian agricultural project, which imitated Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. Overnight, the fabric of a modern society such as money, markets, education, private property, culture, religion, and the arts were eradicated. The capital city Phnom Penh with two million residents was evacuated entirely, as people were marched at gunpoint to be relocated to provinces across the country. Public officials, monks, scholars, and students were taken away and exterminated, as were ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, and Muslim Cham minority groups. People lived and worked in labor camps without sufficient food and healthcare. Power was under the control of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) with Pol Pot (aka Saloth Sar) presiding over it as General Secretary. Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia cut off its ties with the rest of the world, except for China and a few other communist states. Without Chinese support, DK would not have survived for almost four years.11 Cambodia’s foreign policy dramatically realigned itself from a pro-U.S. to a pro-China.

From April 1975 to January 1979, nearly two million Cambodians – a quarter of the population at the time – died from persecution, starvation, and disease under the Khmer Rouge regime.