YouSaid · the spoken record

Samdech Norodom Sihanouk

lines on the record: 78
first: 1985-09-24
most recent: 1991-09-24
sittings or episodes: 2
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Other sources confirmed that driving from Phnom Penh north to Kompong Chhnang, Kompong Cham and Kompong Thorn had become a dangerous exercise because of guerrilla activities and that the authorities often prevented such travel, and if they did, movement was restricted to daylight hours. According to diplomatic and other sources, an official Mongolian delegation headed by Foreign Minister Mangalyn Dugersuren arrived in Phnom Penh in March, having been told that part of the visit would include a flight to the historic Angkor Wat temples. But when they arrived, the party was told the Angkor Wat trip had been canceled 'for their own safety'. Other reports speak of burned-out trucks strewn along some of the main highways in Cambodia and frequent disruption of rail services because of guerrilla sabotage attacks.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“One Australian international relief worker based in Phnom Penh gave an eye-witness confirmation of a Khmer [guerrilla] raid on the town of Oudong, 30 kilometers north-west of Phnom Penh, on 26 March, an attack which has since been confirmed to the Review by other independent sources, who also say the Khmer [guerrillas] successfully ambushed a squad of reinforcements rushed to the scene. He said the Khmer [guerrillas] claim that they killed 20 Vietnamese troops and destroyed military posts and other buildings was largely accurate. The relief worker said he and his colleagues in Phnom Penh were now 'severely restricted in traveling by land outside the capital'.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“The [guerrillas] have spearheaded a J resistance campaign to carry out almost daily attacks on Vietnamese troops, sabotaging lines of communication and hitting administrative centers... •After talking to dozens of Cambodians [refugees at the Thai border] from almost all the provinces, I am convinced that fighting is worse than it's ever been [since Vietnam's late 1978 invasion]', the source commented... "Independent sources tend to confirm that the [guerrillas] are indeed very active carrying out sabotage operations to within 10 kilometers of Phnom Penh.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Today the Vietnamese have won only a partial victory: they have expelled the civilian populations from the bases along the border, but they have failed to subdue the resistance. Quite the contrary, it appears as if they have contributed to strengthening the (Democratic Kampuchea tripartite] alliance... The Vietnamese diplomatic isolation has worsened... Hanoi... runs the risk of getting bogged down in a long and expensive conflict, (spoke in English) "Far Eastern Economic Review, 9 May 1985: 'The war continues. Hanoi has wiped out the key Khmer resistance bases, but the guerrillas are increasingly active inside the country', by Rodney Tasker. Excerpts: "Latest reports suggest that widespread fighting deeper inside Cambodia has reached a new level of intensity...”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“'They talk about the Vietnamese more and more'-, "Le Monde, 8 May 1985: The Vietnamese at grips with the guerrillas, by Philippe Pons. Excerpts: "The Vietnamese now have to cope with a type of war which - they know better than anyone else - war machines can hardly break down, namely, guerrilla warfare... As a substitute for the 'Maginot Line, this Vietnamese-style 'Berlin Wall', composed of ditches and slopes for the construction of which Hanoi has rounded up Cambodians from all over the country, actually appears relatively easy to get around. It seems that the Vietnamese no longer control strategic points, a fact that already necessitates a massive deployment of their forces... The Vietnamese and the regime in Phi saenh are far from being the masters of the country...”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“"One Cambodian barber in Phnom Penh told a visitor recently, for example, that he had been obliged to take on a Vietnamese partner to get back the shop he had been forced to abandon... "Another Cambodian shopkeeper told an Italian correspondent in a southern suburb of Phnom Penh that 20 to 30 Vietnamese a day were arriving in trucks to take up residence there. While they were talking, the reporter witnessed the arrival of one such truck. "A Western relief agency official who lived in Phnom Penh a few years ago said after a recent return trip that he was 'amazed' at the number of new Vietnamese settlers he saw. 'The traders of farm produce tend to be Vietnamese, nor Khmer anymore', he said. 'People are very angry about it said another recent visitor of the Cambodians he met.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“'The Vietnamese have gained a lot militarily in the border area, but the toll has been very heavy in terms of the health of Cambodians'. "An influx of settlers also has raised indignation and suspicion among some Cambodians that crowded Vietnam, with a population of 60 million to Cambodia's estimated 6 million, which has expansionist designs on its potentially bountiful neighbor. "Recent visitors to Cambodia have reported seeing Vietnamese settlers who clearly were newcomers and who spoke no Khmer, the name of the language and ethnic group of the Cambodian majority. "While many of the Vietnamese may cross into Cambodia on their own from southern Viet Nam in search of economic opportunities, some apparently benefit from government support.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“"Specifically, Cambodian peasants lately have especially resented being dragooned by the Vietnamese into forced-labor teams and sent to the Thai-Cambodian border to build a network of road and defensive barriers, according to Western relief workers in Cambodia. The network is aimed at improving Vietnamese logistics in the border area and preventing guerrilla infiltration. The Vietnamese have acknowledged mobilizing 'tens of thousands' of Cambodians for the construction work... "One side effect of the project, said one relief official, has been the spread of a resistant strain of malaria, common along the border, to workers from other provinces. 'The forced labor and the malaria have caused a lot of animosity towards the Vietnamese', the official said.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“"According to an investigation late last year by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, the People's Republic of Kampuchea now appears... as a human rights violator. 'The rule of law is not respected in any serious sense in the People's Republic of Kampuchea', the group concluded in a December 1984 report. 'For the hundreds or perhaps thousands of political prisoners who inhabit its jails, beatings are commonplace and more sophisticated forms of torture usual.'... There is a growing popular resentment of the presence of an estimated 160,000 to 180,000 Vietnamese troops and increasing numbers of Vietnamese settlers.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“"According to an Australian correspondent who recently visited Cambodia, one Khmer [guerrilla] attack during his stay occurred March 26 in the former capital of Oudong, about 25 miles north of Phnom Penh on Highway 5. He said about 100 guerrillas destroyed a Vietnamese motor pool in the center of town, blew up a bridge on the northern outskirts, ambushed a Vietnamese convoy of several trucks and killed about 15 Vietnamese troops. "The guerrillas also entered the town market... they called the town's people to a political meeting before evacuating, he reported. "Throughout the attack, he said, a post occupied by Cambodian soldiers of the Heng Samrin government was left alone, and the troops made no attempt to interfere. "According to Western diplomats in Bangkok, similar attacks are not unusual in other parts of Cambodia these days...”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“'The level of guerrilla activity inside Cambodia right now is as high as it has ever been' since the Vietnamese invasion, said a senior Western diplomat in Bangkok... Since the Vietnamese dry-season offensive forced them out of their strongholds near the Thai-Cambodian border earlier this year, 'the [guerrillas] have done what they said they were going to do', the diplomat said. Taking advantage of a vacuum in the interior that developed when the Vietnamese were concentrating on the border, 'the [guerrillas] have been hitting district capitals and provincial seats practically all over the country', he said, but particularly in the western provinces of Battambang and Siemreap. 'Clearly the [guerrillas] are giving the Vietnamese a great deal of difficulty', the diplomat said.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“the Vietnamese invasion and continued occupation of Cambodia represent a violation of international law that cannot be tolerated... The guerrillas are proving hard to eradicate and the 'Vietnam War' analogies persist. "Despite a successful offensive against the guerrillas along the Thai-Cambodian border starting in November, there are indications that security generally has deteriorated lately amid mounting guerrilla activity in the Cambodian interior. "Correspondents who have visited Cambodia this month have confirmed guerrilla attacks within 20 miles of the capital, and Cambodian refugees arriving at the border with Thailand have reported an upsurge of incidents in various districts of the interior in the past two months.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Anh in December [1984] in the [Vietnamese] Army theoretical journal. Anh, who is reportedly in charge of military operations in Cambodia, laid surprising emphasis on the need to improve security in the interior [of Cambodia]. He wrote that ... Cambodian guerrillas had 'set up logistical bases ... for guerrilla and sabotage activities, seizing lands, controlling the population, building counterrevolutionary forces and so forth'. Ultimately, Anh ... cautioned that 'the struggle is still long and complicated...' The [North] Vietnamese are locked in another war with no light at the end of the tunnel... "United Nations recognition of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, which is supported by the United States, is based on the principle that...”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“In this connection, I shall quote not unilateral military communiques that would give rise to suspicion but the testimony of independent, unbiased Western journalists, all the more reliable in that they do not come from the supporters of our Coalition Government. With the Assembly's permission, I shall quote in chronological order. The Washington Post, Thursday, April 25, 1985: "William Branigin: 'The Cambodian Quagmire - Vietnam's Vietnam?' Excerpts: 'Instead of the Americans, the Vietnamese are now the foreign troops fighting dedicated guerrillas... Gen. Tran Cong Man, the editor of the [Vietnamese] Army newspaper Quan Doi Nhan Dan said: 'There are some complicated problems in Cambodia that must be settled...' That the Vietnamese are having problems can be discerned between the lines of statements such as the article by Gen.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“While waiting for a solution to be envisaged, if not found, which would lead us out of this tragic impasse that brings more ruin and devastation to our country every year, every month and almost every day, thus increasing the suffering of our people and the loss of life, our resistance against the occupiers has not been seriously weakened - as claimed by Hanoi and Phnom Penh - by the so-called big victories of the Vietnamese offensive during the dry season of December 1984 to March 1985. The tactics that we have carried out ever since then in the form of many daring commando actions deep into the interior of the zones occupied by the enemy and up to the approaches to Phnom Penh have caused the most serious concern to the occupiers and their Khmer proteges.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Today, as can be seen from many statements made from this rostrum by representatives of States Members of the Organization, the international community continues to hold firmly to this just position and to call earnestly for Viet Nam to put an end to its aggression against Kampuchea. Today more than ever before countries which love peace and justice are well aware that Viet Nam's objective is to absorb Kampuchea into the "Indo-China Federation" under Hanoi domination. The fact is that, being unable to impose its fait accompli in Kampuchea by force of arms, Viet Nam is trying to do so through diplomatic maneuvers, the cynicism and effrontery of which consist in arrogating to itself the right to speak and act as a master in the name of the so-called Indo-China.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Viet Nam is now making a lot of fuss about what it calls the progress achieved in the process of a political settlement of the question of South-East Asia and the problem of Kampuchea and is apparently asking the international community not to thwart this process. But this is just a new false maneuver designed to extricate it from the growing isolation in which it finds itself and avoid being condemned yet again by our Assembly, which since 1979 has never ceased to call for the total and unconditional withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea so that our people can freely decide their own destiny.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Quite recently, our friends from the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) - whose great goodwill I salute here - with the support of our Coalition Government, proposed to the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam the holding of proximity talks, with the possibility of the Khmer authorities in Phnom Penh being represented in the Hanoi delegation. Our proposals and those of our ASEAN friends met with a flat refusal. Viet Nam and its proteges in Phnom Penh, backed by the Soviet Union, have rejected all our proposals for peace, conciliation and guarantees put forward, in particular, in my statements at the United Nations in 1983 and 1984.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“This constitutes for the Khmer people - the most unfortunate of all - the last recourse in the ocean of suffering and humiliation on which it has tossed for so many years. The Socialist Republic of Viet Nam and the USSR, which supports it against our people, must agree to prove themselves worthy of membership in the United Nations and respect its resolutions and its Charter. If they were not to do so, what would be the future of my people and other peoples victims of injustice and what would be the prospects for world peace, which is the greatest ambition of all peoples? We Khmers have never concealed our eager desire to seek an equitable and honorable political solution to the differences which pit us against our Vietnamese neighbors and their Khmer proteges in Phnom Penh.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“1) Lastly, a decision adopted on 11 April 1935 by the Preparatory Committee for the Fortieth Anniversary of the United Nations stated: "The general debate should be held as usual for a three-week period, from 23 September to 11 October, on the clear and explicit understanding that statements made by Heads of State or Government and special envoys during that period will also be considered as part of the commemoration." (A/40/49, p. 11) The United Nations aim for the present session is therefore that all Governments and peoples should make this anniversary an occasion for reaffirming their faith in the goals and principles of the Charter. On 24 October, 1986 will be declared the "International Year of Peace".”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“In a resolution of 17 December 1984 the General Assembly took the following decision: "that the theme of the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations shall be 'United Nations for a better world' and expresses the hope and desire that the year 1985 will mark the beginning of an era of durable and global peace and justice, social and economic development and progress and independence of all peoples." (resolution 39/161 A, para.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“This would be the way of transforming an anniversary into a celebration. "I refer here above all to the frightening course taken by the arms race, as well as to several protracted unresolved conflict's." (Press Release SG/SM-3563, pp. 1, 3) We hope that the wishes expressed by the Secretary-General will be fulfilled in this memorable year. For its part, my delegation will spare no effort to help in this and sincerely hopes that our adversary from the Bast will show the same sense of responsibility and desire for harmony and peace.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“The United Nations, which had 51 Members when it was founded in 1945, had 159 Members last year - a figure that will surely be exceeded in the years to come. We can thus rightly speak of the universality of our Organization - and I shall just recall that Cambodia has been a member since 1955, and Viet Nam since 1977. On 31 May last year, the Secretary-General made the following statement: "To me, the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations provides a further occasion ... to encourage a rededication by Member States to the principles and purposes of the Charter... " ... Last, but not least, may I express the fervent hope that every effort will be made to have the year 1985 stand out laudably as a year of peace, conflict resolution, restraint, international co-operation and friendship among nations.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“The United Nations is a prestigious Forum in which there are always those ready to uphold justice. Resolutions adopted by it, even when it does not have the material means of implementing them, have almost world-wide moral significance which nobody would challenge lightly, witness the more or less honorable or subtle maneuvers carried out by the antagonists in an attempt to save face. The United Nations remains the ultimate hope of oppressed peoples. More than once, by dint of patience, perseverance and wisdom, it has changed the course of history. It goes without saying that we whole-heartedly desire it to succeed in the case of our unfortunate Kampuchea, attacked, invaded and more than half-colonized by a much more powerful imperialist neighbor.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“His annual reports and the talks which I have had the pleasure of holding with him have all been a source of encouragement for me. Our Secretary-General is a credit to the United Nations for his personal commitment in the search for international peace and security, co-operation and understanding between all the peoples of the world. Lastly, I should like to pay a ringing tribute to our Organization as it nears the glorious day of its fortieth anniversary. The United Nations is irreplaceable, for it is the conscience of the civilized world. It is the only gathering in the world where all Powers, whatever their size, can sit as full Members, air their views freely, make suggestions, lodge complaints and voice fears to the international community and appeal to it whenever they deem their freedom, or even their existence, to be threatened.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Paul Lusaka, who conducted our work at the previous session with wisdom and distinction and prepared the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations. I wish also to reaffirm our deep esteem and great appreciation for our Secretary-General, Mr. Javier Perez de Cuellar, for his outstanding activities and initiatives in order to bring about the United Nations contribution to easing tensions and maintaining peace and security in the world. His visit to South-Bast Asia earlier this year in order to explore ways and means of bringing about the implementation of the just United Nations resolutions testifies to his steady efforts, his impartiality and his courage in discharging his lofty responsibilities.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“The choice made by all our colleagues is a tribute to your outstanding personality, which commands general respect, and to the sustained activities of Spain, its Sovereign and its people on behalf of peace, justice and democracy. While recalling with pleasure that Cambodia and Spain became Members of the United Nations the same year, 1955, we are confident that, thanks to your long experience, wisdom and skill and to your well-known commitment to our world Organization and its Charter, our session, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, will give a positive response to the hopes of the international community and hasten solutions to the vital issues of peace, security and justice facing our world. On behalf of my delegation, I wish to pay a warm tribute to Mr.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“May I be permitted, on behalf of the Khmer people and the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, and on my own behalf, to express my most cordial salutations and heartfelt thanks to the heads of delegations and the representatives who honor this session with their presence, and thus give evidence of their faith in the most noble ideals of the United Nations: the ideals of justice, peace, freedom and support for oppressed peoples and victims of injustice. Mr. President, it is with great satisfaction that my delegation welcomes your unanimous election to the presidency of the fortieth session of our General Assembly.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)