Word: khmer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lanes of Southeast Asia. Piracy has become an all too real contemporary scourge for fishing and commerce across an expanse of ocean stretching from the Malay peninsula to the Philippines. Sumatran pirates constantly harass coastal freighters and fishermen in the Straits of Malacca. Privateers from Malaysia and Khmer Rouge hijackers from Cambodia prey on Vietnamese refugee boats drifting across the Gulf of Thailand. One Japanese cargo line considers southern Philippine waters so dangerous that it has ordered its ships bound for Indonesia to detour westward into the South China Sea. Pleasure boats headed toward Bali from Hong Kong and Thailand...
...morning of April 17, 1975, advance units of Cambodia's Communist insurgents, who had been actively fighting the defeated Western-backed government of Marshal Lon Nol for nearly five years, began entering the capital of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge looted things, such as watches and cameras, but they did not go on a rampage. They seemed disciplined. And at first, there was general jubilation among the city's terrified, exhausted and bewildered inhabitants. After all, the civil war seemed finally over, the Americans had gone, and order, everyone seemed to assume, would soon be graciously restored...
With almost no preparations for so enormous an exodus -how could there have been with a war on?-thousands died along the route, the wounded from loss of blood, the weak from exhaustion, and others by execution, usually because they had not been quick enough to obey a Khmer Rouge order. Phnom Penh was not alone: the entire urban population of Cambodia, some 4 million people, set out on a similar grotesque pilgrimage. It was one of the greatest transfers of human beings in modern history...
...work for frantic 16-or 17-hour days, planting rice and building an enormous new irrigation system. Many died from dysentery or malaria, others from malnutrition, having been forced to survive on a condensed-milk can of rice every two days. Still others were taken away at night by Khmer Rouge guards to be shot or bludgeoned to death. The lowest estimate of the bloodbath to date -by execution, starvation and disease-is in the hundreds of thousands. The highest exceeds 1 million, and that in a country that once numbered no more than 7 million. Moreover, the killing continues...
Currently stationed in West Berlin as TIME'S Eastern European bureau chief, Aikman was the magazine's last staff correspondent to leave Cambodia, a few days before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge...