Word: khmer
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...press usually describes the evacuation of Phnom Penh as a vengeful, irrational act by the Khmer Rouge, designed mainly to subdue and redirect the population. But less biased observers say that, in fact, if the Communists had not evacuated Phnom Penh in April, many thousands would have died of cholera, plague and starvation. The city's pre-1970 peacetime population had been 600,000; by last April, it had been swelled by 3 million refugees from the war. The U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime had lost control of the whole countryside, so it depended completely on American food shipments. These...
...walk into the countryside without organized provision for food, shelter, physical security, or medical care." It concluded that Cambodia "resembles a giant prison camp with the urban supporters of the former regime now being worked to death on thin gruel and hard labor...the barbarous cruelty of the Khmer Rouge can be compared to Soviet extermination of the Kulaks or with the Gulag Archipalego." William Shawcross's article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books is more restrained, saying, "The Cambodians are suffering horribly under their new rulers. They have suffered every day of the last...
...areas were under heavy U.S. bombing. There was enough extra food in the country for city residents, but the only way they could get it was to go where the food grew; there were too few trucks to carry the food into the capital. Other considerations, such as the Khmer Rouge's fear that the U.S. would bomb Phnom Penh off the map, only added to the urgency of the evacuation...
...evacuation of the hospitals is more difficult to explain. Phnom Penh's hospitals had become grossly over-crowded pest-houses by mid-April; after the evacuation, the Communists did clean them and resume their operation with Cambodian doctors. The Khmer Rouge had developed a system of rudimentary clinics and hospitals in the countryside; evacuees may have gone to these. Whether or not the Khmer Rouge had won in April or not, the sick would have had a hard time, due to the general shortage of medicine and supplies for both sides in the civil...
There has been no evidence of the massive bloodbath that many Americans predicted would follow the collapse of the Thieu regime, and no tales to match the stories of mass executions being brought out of Cambodia by refugees from the Khmer Rouge in Phnom-Penh. Nonetheless, the new Communist government has taken some tough measures to discourage resistance. A few wealthy Chinese-traditional scapegoats of the Vietnamese-have been executed. Summary executions of petty criminals and looters have served as warnings that disorder will not be tolerated, though thievery and muggings still take place. Attacks on North Vietnamese troops continued...