Word: cambodias
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...curtain of silence that has concealed Cambodia from Western eyes ever since the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom-Penh on April 17 opened briefly last week, revealing a shocking portrait of a nation in torturous upheaval. Eyewitness reports by the few Western journalists who stayed on in the Cambodian capital after the closing down of the American embassy indicated that the country's new Communist masters have proved to be far more ruthless, if not more cruel and sadistic in their exercise of power than most Western experts had expected...
Phnom-Penh has become a ghost city, forcibly and quickly emptied of most of its 2 million inhabitants. Perhaps as many as half of Cambodia's 7.6 million people have become victims of a massive dislocation, a forced march of city dwellers who have been ordered by the Khmer Rouge government to take to the roads and paths and become rice growers in the countryside. Even hospitals have been evacuated, and doctors stopped in mid-surgery, so that the patients, some limping, some crawling, could take their part in the newly proclaimed "peasant revolution...
...Cambodia's new leaders were apparently driven by a xenophobic determination to rid the country of foreign influence, not just the taint of "Americans and other imperialist lackeys" but also the influence of even the Chinese and North Vietnamese. Moscow, which had maintained diplomatic relations with the former Lon Nol government almost to the end, was rejected utterly: the second floor of the Soviet embassy was strafed with machine-gunfire, and the seven Russian diplomats there ordered to go to the French embassy compound to be evacuated with the other foreigners. From that precarious vantage point, they saw hundreds...
Terrible Regret. The first group of about 580 foreigners was evacuated two weeks ago, but journalists who left Cambodia at that time agreed to withhold their stories until the second group of 550 arrived safely in Thailand last week. Apparently because they did not want to accept foreign help, the Khmer Rouge refused an offer by France to provide an evacuation plane. They insisted that all the foreigners, including the aged and sick, endure a 250-mile truck ride to the Cambodian border. Instead of using a direct route, the evacuees rode along winding dirt roads that had served...
...does anyone know to what extent the new rulers will carry out vengeful reprisals. The foreign evacuees saw a few bodies on the roads and highways last week, but these could have been "accidental" victims of the forced march to the countryside. What seems certain is that Cambodia's period of zealous self-imposed isolation will continue. Radio Phnom-Penh reported last week that the nation's new leaders were busy campaigning to "clear the country of the filth and garbage left behind by the war of aggression." Though it also spoke of rebuilding the country...