Word: deathly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even more striking than the Khmer indifference toward life was their seeming indifference toward death. "When a family member dies, they take little notice," said a nurse. "They see death every day. They're very tough." One young man made no move to inform camp authorities when his wife died of cerebral malaria. As her body lay beside him beneath a blanket, he stared tearlessly into space. A Khmer Rouge soldier explained that the Angka never allowed them to cry. "We were not even allowed to say we would miss the people who died...
Working in a medical ward at Sakaew is the wife of a Phnom-Penh doctor who had watched helplessly while her husband and two of their children were beaten to death shortly after the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. The crime of the doctor and his children: they belonged to the intellectual class. Said the widow: "I didn't cry, for to have done so would have meant death for me and, more important, for my only surviving child. To cry would have meant that I disapproved of the Angka 's decision to kill...
Perhaps the most shocking method that the Khmer Rouge used to enforce discipline was cannibalism. One refugee told a group of assembled Cambodians at Sakaew of an incident he had observed when adultery was considered a crime punishable by death. A married man and a pregnant woman wed to another man had been caught making love. The man was beaten to death. Then members of the local work team were forced to watch the woman's execution. Recalled the witness...
When this story was told to the refugees, they began to laugh. One result of the brutalization of the Khmer Rouge is their sometimes perverse response to death and disease in the camp...
...Churches: "He is talking about applying an inhuman system more humanely. Things are changing, but there has been no fundamental change." Black leaders and even the country's white legal Establishment were shocked last week when a judge in the sleepy Natal town of Pietermaritzburg handed down a death sentence to James Mange, a militant, charged with plotting an attack on a police station. Mange was only the second person convicted of treason in South Africa since 1914; he was the first to be condemned in a case in which there was no loss of life...