Word: kampuchean
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...beating babies to death against trees. By late 1978, when Viet Nam invaded Kampuchea, as many as 3 million of the country's 7 million people were dead. Yet those who survived reportedly had worse in store for them. In one episode, soldiers from neighboring Thailand pushed 826 Kampuchean refugees over a cliff; in another, they forced 43,000 to walk home in the dark down treacherous mountain paths surrounded by minefields...
...Khmer Rouge atrocities, claims Shawcross, most Westerners remained either ignorant or downright skeptical of refugee reports of mass slaughter, but as soon as Viet Nam invaded and permitted a few foreigners to inspect the ghostly nation, the West responded vigorously. The press reported a "holocaust"; Washington increased aid to Kampuchean refugees by a factor of ten (to $69 million); five international relief agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Children's Fund, 60 private volunteer bodies and the interests of 60 governments converged upon the broken land. In their eagerness to help, some...
...international relief agencies were, much of the time, rendered powerless both by their apolitical status and by the recalcitrance of the regime that Viet Nam had installed. Even their successes, says Shawcross, sometimes proved tragically double-edged. Within two years of the Kampuchean government's 1979 announcement that a famine had pushed more than 2 million people to the brink of starvation, the West poured in more than $600 million worth of supplies. Up to four-fifths of the shipments never reached the hollow-eyed, malarial civilians who needed them most. Some of the rice remained stockpiled in warehouses...
...mile border. More important, the cross-border incidents were part of a Chinese effort to intimidate Viet Nam at a time when the Hanoi government was stepping up its offensive against the rebels who oppose Viet Nam's occupation of neighboring Kampuchea. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former Kampuchean ruler who now heads the anti-Vietnamese resistance movement, acknowledged as much when he declared at a Peking news conference, "The more China intervenes against Viet Nam, the more we are satisfied...
...February and March 1979. At that time, China had justified its brief invasion of Viet Nam as a "lesson" designed to discourage the Vietnamese from engaging in any more troublemaking along the border. But for the past several weeks, the Chinese have been upset about Vietnamese attacks on Kampuchean refugee camps located along the border between Kampuchea and Thailand. The Chinese were particularly alarmed when the Vietnamese carried their war right into Thailand, shelling Kampuchean refugee camps and also hitting Thai villages...