Word: battambang
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Whoever rules Cambodia in the foreseeable future will reign over a devastated land. According to refugees who have escaped into Thailand, the once lush province of Battambang in Western Cambodia is bare of all fruit and bereft of most of its people. In eerily deserted villages, papaya trees stand like bean poles, their fruit, then their leaves, having been torn off by starving peasants. According to the British Foreign Office study, since 1975 an estimated 2 million Cambodians have died of starvation and disease as a result of a campaign to drive city dwellers into the countryside, where there...
...twelve and strictly segregated by sex. Single youths are required to chop trees, dig irrigation ditches and clear stumps. Since they work harder than others in a cooperative, they receive more food. But even they do not always get enough. At Pronet Phrac, a work camp west of Battambang, only ten youths are assigned to catch fish for 8,000 residents. Result: four or five people die of exhaustion every...
There are reports that in the countryside all movement across provincial boundaries in prohibited and that in some provinces possession of the old Cambodian currency, the rien, is punishable by death. According to the New York Times, one high ranking official administering the province of Battambang recently said that "the law now is the law of the soldier...
...their attacks throughout the country. After withstanding a prolonged seige, the government last week finally abandoned the city of Kompong Seila, 70 miles southwest of Phnom-Penh, and airlifted 2,000 civilians and troops out of the city. The Khmer Rouge advanced within mortar range of the airport at Battambang, the country's second largest city (pop. 200,000), temporarily halting the ammunition and supply flights on which that city depends for survival...
Elsewhere in Cambodia, the story is just as grim. Several towns on the Mekong River are still under pressure, while even Battambang city, 160 miles northwest of Phnom-Penh in the heart of what was once Cambodia's rice granary, might soon fall. Each night the Communists overrun another tiny outpost protecting the city. An inspection of Battambang's defenses, says a recent visitor, turned up "empty holes and no soldiers to fill them...