Rebel Troops Backed by Vietnamese Take Over Government in Cambodia

BANGKOK, Thailand--Cambodian rebels have seized the entire country and established a provisional government in Phnom Penh, the revolutionary National United Front for National Salvation said yesterday.

Radio Hanoi said, however, that Cambodian government troops continued to defend some areas against Vietnamese forces and the pro-Hanoi Cambodian rebels.

Deposed Premier Pol Pot, who fled the capital on Sunday, is trying to organize a line of resistance near Siem Reap in north-western Cambodia, reliable analysts reported. The rebel news agency said revolutionary forces control that area, about 320 miles northwest of Phnom Penh.

An eight-member "People's Revolutionary Council" led by Heng Samrim, a defector from the Pol Pot government, has been established, the rebel news bureau reported.

The revolutionaries promise to restore democratic rights, to reinstate traditional practices, including the Buddhist religion, and to move Cambodia toward "peace, freedom, nonalignment and socialism," the agency added.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, former Cambodian head of state, told a news conference in Peking yesterday that leaders of the deposed regime were alive and prepared to fight a protracted "people's war."

China, the fallen government's only ally, is in radio contact with Pol Pot and will provide his forces with weapons and financial aid but no troops, Sihanouk added.

The ousted regime has sent Sihanouk to the United Nations to charge Vietnam with aggression against Cambodia.

Rebel leaders told the U.N. Security Council yesterday that any hearing granted to the overthrown government would be "flagrant intervention" in Cambodia's internal affairs.

Vietnam's violation of Cambodian territory rights raises the danger of a wider war, U.S. State Department spokesman Hodding Carter III said yesterday in Washington.