Word: khmer
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...scene within the compound, where about 1,300 foreigners and Cambodians sought shelter, was one of deprivation, acrimony and tedium. There was no running water, and food was limited. Though the Khmer Rouge guards stole a few watches and other valuables, they generally treated the foreigners correctly if sternly. As the days passed, one baby was born, another died. When the seven Russian diplomats arrived from their abandoned embassy, they were loaded down with huge supplies of tinned meat and vodka. They refused to share the goods with the other inmates, thereby becoming the bitter tar gets of Westerners...
...most heartbreaking moment, the journalists reported, came when the Khmer Rouge ordered the 500 Cambodians in the group to leave the compound and join the peasant revolution. Wives were separated from husbands, husbands from families. About 150 Montagnards, the mountain tribesmen from Viet Nam, also had to leave. One of them told American Businessman Douglas Sapper that since he had fought with them in Viet Nam, he was their blood brother. A Montagnard officer's wife pressed the American to take her five-day-old baby, asking him to raise it. "They asked me for help I couldn...
...Regret. The first group of about 580 foreigners was evacuated two weeks ago, but journalists who left Cambodia at that time agreed to withhold their stories until the second group of 550 arrived safely in Thailand last week. Apparently because they did not want to accept foreign help, the Khmer Rouge refused an offer by France to provide an evacuation plane. They insisted that all the foreigners, including the aged and sick, endure a 250-mile truck ride to the Cambodian border. Instead of using a direct route, the evacuees rode along winding dirt roads that had served...
...will not come out well." At the moment, indeed, the fate of the Cambodian people that he and other foreigners left behind is an agonizingly unanswerable question. The makeup of the new government is not yet clear, and the danger of factional fighting appears great. A fortnight ago, the Khmer Rouge leadership reportedly held a "national congress" in Phnom-Penh, with Khieu Samphan, the military commander and Deputy Premier, in attendance. Few Khmer Rouge leaders have publicly mentioned Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Though he remains the titular head of the new government, it is hard to imagine the temperamental but still...
Schanberg, 41, learned the extent of the personal risk he had taken on the very first day of the Communist takeover. When he and some other journalists went to observe the grisly conditions at the city's largest civilian hospital, they were stopped by Khmer Rouge troops. "They put guns to our heads and, shouting angrily, threatened us with execution," Schanberg reported. "We thought we were finished." Luckily Dith Pran, a Cambodian employee of the Times, was able to talk the troops into freeing them. Schanberg got back to the Hotel Le Phnom just as it was being invaded...