Don Noel
- 1966
Fellowship Title:
- Attitudes Toward the Cold War in Cambodia and Romania
Fellowship Year:
- 1966
CAMBODIA: Missing Mekong Member
Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh, Cambodia 8 February 1967 Mr. Noel Is an Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from the Hartford (Conn.) Times. Permission to publish these articles may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. Cooperation and Competition VENTIANE, LAOS — The four-nation Mekong Coordination Committee moved into its tenth year this month on a note of crisis: a boycott by Cambodia threatened the life of the organization. It was, in a sense, an artificial crisis. Cambodia’s plans for a major multi-purpose dam were set back last fall when the U.S. Congress barred American participation in the project. Prince Norodom Sihano” was — it was hoped — just making sure his Mekong partners did their very best to remedy the deficit This diplomatic blackmail was accepted with remarkably good grace here in Vientiane. South Vietnam and Thailand, who have no diplomatic relations with Cambodia, and Laos, whose relations have chilled to the chargé d’affaires level, did everything they could, both in public and in private, to
Cambodian Politics II: The Man to Get
Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh 25 January 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965-66 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from the Hartford Times. Permission to publish this article may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH — The office was furnished with chairs, rugs and drapes in solid reds and blues. Original oils, both Western and Cambodian, graced the walls. The taste was excellent. The wide, handsome desk was busy-looking, but not cluttered. Two telephones stood on a side-table, and a switch for a speakerphone. In the window an air-conditioner — forbidden, under austerity rules, save where foreign guests are received — whirred quietly. As our interview neared an end, Chau Seng fingered a buzzer under the desk, and a man appeared. Wordlessly, he took my host’s immaculate blue suit jacket from a silent-valet stand, handed it to his master, and left the room again. Chau Seng is more like a top U.S. executive than anyone I have met here. Crisply efficient, he keeps a battery
CAMBODIA: The Co-ops and the Commerçants
Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh February 1, 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965-66 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from The Hartford Times. Permission to publish these articles may be had from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH—This neutral nation is at war with the Chinese. It is a war fought not with guns, but with money. The enemy are neither Nationalist nor Communist Chinese, but Cambodian: thousands of small commerçants, or middlemen. They have at their disposal most of the nation’s free private capital, generations of experience, and the debt-obligations of a majority of peasants. The government is armed with about 500 producers’ co-operatives, inexperienced, with little capital and a hesitant clientele. The prize is rice. In three years’ battling, the government has made slow, uphill progress. But its progress is impeded — more, perhaps, this year than ever before -by a nearby market which the government itself, for a variety of reasons, cannot touch. Vietnam — both sides of the current struggle — is a rice-hungry land,
Cambodian Politics I: Gently to the Right?
DON -4 Bungalow 10 Hotel leRoyal Phnom Penh 15 January 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965-66 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from The Hartford Times. Permission to publish these articles may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH — Early in January, Prince Norodom Sihanouk boarded a plane for France for a month’s long-postponed medical and dietary treatment. He left behind him a new government, described here as “center-right.” It has weathered four months of crisis, and has emerged strong enough to move gingerly in directions of its own choosing. But the Prince also left behind two forces, representing varying shades of leftist sentiment, which will serve as public watchdogs. One is a unique “Counter-Government” of moderate views. The other is a personal aide to the Prince, more radical in his views, named Chau Seng. “Center-right” government here for the next four years — if the government lasts — will have a meaning of its own: It will not mean “pro-American,” and would not even if
GANEFO: The Politics of Sport
DON-5 Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh, Cambodia 21 January 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from the Hartford Times. Permission to publish this article may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH – A gracefully nimble Chinese athlete came within a centimeter of the world high jump record here early in December. It was the sort of event sportswriters love. Gradually leaving his competitors behind, Ni Chih Chin kept clearing the bar on his first jump. It got up to 2.27 meters, just below the world mark now held by a Russian. He cleared it effortlessly; witnesses and photographs alike testify that he had room to spare He missed the next jump, a try for a 2.29-meter record. The moment had passed; he had been delayed by an intervening track event, and by a discussion among officials of the soggy jumping track. Guy LaGorce of the French sports daily “L’Equipe,” one of the few Western newsmen present, seized on