Word: khmer
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TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark last week visited the Sakaew refugee camp in Thailand, 40 miles from the Cambodian border, where many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers and civilians are concentrated. Cambodians are normally a voluble people; Clark was struck by the fact that the Khmer Rouge refugees said almost nothing. Terror, as much as exhaustion or illness, appeared to be the principal cause of their muteness. The ferocious and deeply feared Angka (literally, organization), represented by top-ranking Khmer Rouge cadres, had followed the civilians into exile. Under Pol Pot civilians were constantly warned not to make...
...Sakaew there are dozens of orphans, testifying to how brutally family ties were shattered under the Pol Pot regime. Most are children who were assigned to mobile work teams after their parents' murder by the Khmer Rouge. When questioned by refugee caseworkers, many said they did not miss their parents. Similarly, parents in the camp showed little or no interest in the children they brought with them to Thailand. In a makeshift maternity ward at Sakaew, a Red Cross volunteer, Midwife Judith Greenberg of Oakland, Calif, told Clark that the mothers appeared not to care whether their babies were...
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...