Word: khmer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cambodia is a haunted land full of wrenching memories for Marsh Clark, chief of TIME's Hong Kong bureau. As Saigon bureau chief from 1968 to 1970, and on numerous later assignments, Clark watched the inexorable advance of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army as it seized power in 1975 and began systematically to erase Cambodian civilization. Painfully he remembers when Sean Flynn, son of Movie Star Errol Flynn, headed for the front on a photographic assignment for TIME in 1970, where he was captured by Khmer forces and, like 21 other missing colleagues, never heard from again...
...There is no serious question," says Clark, "that the Khmer Rouge in attempting to establish a new Cambodia-without family ties, without mail, telephones or even money-committed a form of genocide unknown to mankind since the Holocaust. Yet, one cannot look at the condition of these people today without a sense of anguish. A starving baby minutes away from death has no responsibility or knowledge of Cambodian politics. What human cruelties and failings, one wonders, have reduced tens of thousands of people to the state of dumb, brute animals...
With assistance from Thai officials anxious to bring world attention to the tragedy on their border, Clark found his way to the rude camps where Cambodian refugees have huddled. He watched as the tattered forces of the once mighty Khmer Rouge staggered across the border. Together with TIME Stringer John Burgess, he managed to cross into Cambodia itself...
...restricted the importation of emergency food and medicine. It permits a daily airlift of such supplies into Phnom-Penh and allows an occasional shipborne cargo to reach the port of Kompong Som. But it has refused to permit trucks to arrive from Bangkok lest the vehicles be hijacked by Khmer Rouge troops concentrated along the Thai border. Experts from the International Red Cross and UNICEF Starving child are convinced that Cambodia must use such overland convoys if it is to receive the massive quantities of grain that it needs. The primary reason the three Senators visited Cambodia, in fact...
Whatever food does manage to reach Cambodia will not arrive a moment too soon. In a brief excursion across the Thai border, TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark discovered that food is so scarce that even Khmer Rouge soldiers are going hungry. ''We crossed a narrow stream that marks the border by walking across a narrow log bridge,'' reported Clark. ''Then we moved cautiously into the village of Ban Rai Kluay, where 5,800 soldiers and civilians once camped. We found only 25 people. Most of them were soldiers too ill to move...