Word: cambodias
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...backed Lon Nol regime had lost control of the whole countryside, so it depended completely on American food shipments. These were inadequate; the U.S. was continuing a policy described by the Government Accounting Office in 1971: "Not to become involved in the problem of civilian war victims in Cambodia." While the U.S. stinted on food, it provided Lon Nol's regime with 95 per cent of its total revenue--for guns, to keep the Reds out of the capital. So the food shortage worsened. Rations were only sixty per cent of normal human requirements. Prices soared and black marketeers prospered...
...press treatment of Cambodia since the fall of the Lon Nol regime last April is a prime example of news distortion. An editorial last summer in The New York Times, titled "Cambodia's Crime," summed up the official view of events there. It spoke of millions of people from Phnom Penh and other cities "forced by the Communists at gunpoint to walk into the countryside without organized provision for food, shelter, physical security, or medical care." It concluded that Cambodia "resembles a giant prison camp with the urban supporters of the former regime now being worked to death on thin...
This lurid interpretation of events in Cambodia seems designed to shock readers and increase their fear of socialism. But the Times editorial version of events is based on liberal amounts of prejudice and half-truths--they even forgot to read some of their own news coverage of Cambodia. Also, the Indochina Resource Center, a U.S. group, recently released an exhaustively-documented report, The Politics of Food: Starvation and Agricultural Revolution in Cambodia, which sheds more light on events in that country...
...evacuation itself does not deserve the Times' anathema of "death march," either. Most residents of Phnom Pehn had left rural homes because of the war; the Communists had planned for their return. Several U.S. reporters saw the march in progress as they traveled out of Cambodia in May, and said there was sufficient food for those on the road. Most evacuees walked, covering roughly 2.5 miles per day and many of the old and sick went by car or truck. People did die on the road, but not by the thousands as U.S. government sources said; most deaths were from...
...Proof of alleged executions usually comes from refugees in Thailand, who "knew" of such killings without having seen them. Many actively backed the Lon Nol government, and the Thais restrict access to refugee camps to some U.S. officials, who may steer journalists toward handpicked refugees. Until more foreigners enter Cambodia and bring back independent reports, events there will remain cloudy...