Word: khmer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nearly four years the Khmer Rouge tore through their homeland, smashing temples, slitting throats, nailing old women to the walls of their houses, 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...
...tragedy in The Quality of Mercy (Simon & Schuster; 464 pages) by British Journalist William Shawcross. In his 1979 work, Sideshow, the author argued that through secret bombings the Nixon Administration had almost casually devastated Kampuchea (then called Cambodia), thereby facilitating the murderous rise of the Communist guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge. Here Shawcross investigates the horrors that came after the bloodbath. Drawing extensively from official reports, international-relief-organization memos, firsthand experiences and interviews with protagonists from all sides, he has put together an assiduously detailed account of how, as one senior Red Cross official put it, "humanitarianism was used...
Throughout the years of the 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...
...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, some was simply lost. Most was intercepted by Thai soldiers, appropriated by the Kampuchean government or seized by the warlords (often Khmer Rouge toughs) who tyrannized many of the border camps. Ultimately, Shawcross contends, the famine was nothing but a false alarm put about by the Vietnamese to exploit the overanxious conscience of the West...
...same spirit, the Vietnamese actually redesigned the main Khmer Rouge torture camp in order to encourage Nazi comparisons. Meanwhile, Hanoi's arch enemy, China, continued to finance the Khmer Rouge in secret. The same urbane and often brilliant Khmer Rouge leaders whom the West had accused of genocide one year earlier found themselves basking in the support of many Western govern ments, who reasoned, dubiously, that their enemy's enemy must be their friend...