Word: cambodians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rouge under Pol Pot took over and instituted a bloodbath in the name of one of the most insane ideologies to come to the face of the earth. And their bloody rule gave way in 1978 to that of the Vietnamese, who are determined to fight "to the last Cambodian" to realize their long-sought aim of dominion over all of Indochina. The continual fighting has given rise to one of the most acute famines of modern times, has created a permanent presence of hundreds of thousands of refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border, and has sent a veritable diaspora...
Events of the winter have conspired once again to bring the plight of the Cambodians to Western attention. Here at home, a new movie. "The Killing Fields," tells the harrowing story of the friendship between New York Times correspondent Sidney Schanberg and his Cambodian assistant, Dith Pran, who was separated from his friend when the country fell in 1975 and who through his wits and luck survived through the three bloody years of Khmer Rouge rule that ensued...
Despite the Vietnamese onslaught, though, signs of an end to the fighting are nowhere to be seen, as the Cambodian people remain caught in a complex web of ages-old feuding and geopolitical intrigue. Inside the country, the fighting is at a standstill, analysts believe, as the leading non-communist group, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (now at about 15,000 guerrillas) gains in strength, while the reviled Khmer Rouge, with its 30,000 fighters, continues to harass the Vietnamese occupiers...
This is the backdrop that provides the Cambodian people, and the world community, with a plethora of paradoxes. The two most important goals--getting rid of the Vietnamese and destroying the Khmer Rouge, militarily the strongest of the resistance groups--are mutually incompatible. There is not much any outside observer can do to help out the situation, but the United States refuses to do what little is possible to ameliorate things...
Joffe would also have been better off to let the movie speak for itself, rather than imposing a sappily obvious soundtrack. As Pran escapes through a Cambodian countryside literally littered with bodies, the gloomy music almost turns the horror into self-parody. Puccinni and John Lennon do not belong in the same movie, ever...