Word: cambodias
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After the Vietnamese army ousted the Pol Pot regime in January 1979, Seng gathered up his family. He joined with the family of a recently widowed woman named Ol Sam, whom he would later marry, plus the orphaned daughter of a mutual friend, and set out to escape from Cambodia. Largely on foot, with occasional hitched rides on oxcarts and trucks, the group made its way to the northwest, a distance of some 250 miles. Along the way, Seng's wife died. Finally, in May -- more than four years after he got his first close look at a Khmer Rouge...
Eventually, Seng and his family were sent to a rice-producing commune in the Kampong Cham area of eastern Cambodia. There, father and sons labored twelve hours a day and more in the paddies, although Seng's wife was too weak to work. At that, they were lucky: in the same commune, perhaps a third of the 3,000 workers died of disease, starvation and overwork, or were executed by their Khmer Rouge overlords...
...Rouge were rounding up "traitors" (those who had served in the previous government) and "collaborators" (professionals, people who spoke foreign languages, teachers and the like). Most were summarily executed or tortured to death. By the next morning, the Communist government had begun the complete evacuation of the cities, which Cambodia's new rulers regarded as cesspools of bourgeois corruption. Nearly all Cambodians -- men, women and children -- would be herded into slave-labor communes...
...family's saga does not end there. Not long ago, Seng received news from Cambodia about his daughters: in 1975 they had been sent to a work camp in the western province of Battambang and assigned to dig irrigation ditches. Seng Ly died of malaria and malnutrition. She was ten years old. But Theary somehow survived. Married and the mother of three small children, she was reunited last month in Phnom Penh with her brother Neang. There were tears at the reunion -- and many overdue smiles...
...spacious and sunny Washington office, an anonymous senior Administration official sits and discusses U.S. options in Indochina. "The simplest approach in Cambodia," he theorizes, "is to let the military situation play itself...