Word: khmers
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...major goal of the Khmer Rouge was to destroy the intelligentsia. People who wore glasses were killed, on the suspicion that they knew how to read or write. Of the 500 physicians in Cambodia in 1975, only 57 survived the Khmer Rouge purge. People suspected of lagging on the job were punished by death, rendered by a hatchet blow on the back of the neck, or, as many refugees have reported, by evisceration. Groups of children who were found guilty of being the offspring of "undesirables" were reportedly chained together, then buried alive in bomb craters under dirt that...
...Khmer Rouge excesses were condemned almost everywhere except in China, which had long favored an independent Cambodia, one that would be outside North Viet Nam's sphere of influence. Peking propped up the Pol Pot regime with vast amounts of military and economic aid. The North Vietnamese, meanwhile, never gave up their dream of taking all of Indochina. In early 1978 Hanoi used the excuse of some Khmer Rouge raids on Vietnamese border villages to invade Cambodia. Ostensibly, the Vietnamese soldiers involved were "volunteers" assisting a "National Salvation Front" headed by Heng Samrin and other obscure Khmer Rouge defectors. Last...
Cambodia's years of genocide were over, but the hunger problem was made worse, if possible, by the Vietnamese conquest. Hanoi's forces, numbering about 180,000, found themselves locked in a war with 20,000 to 30,000 dogged Khmer Rouge guerrillas, who still control much of the countryside. As a result of the continuing war, food has become a weapon on both sides. The Khmer Rouge routinely ravage the new paddyfields planted under the Vietnamese occupation. Not only are the Cambodians starving, but even the Vietnamese troops are said to be on short rations. Many of the Khmer...
...Cambodians hate their Vietnamese conquerors, but they live in deathly fear of the Khmer Rouge, who have not abandoned their politics of terror. Though it is not known for sure whether Pol Pot survived his ouster by the Vietnamese last January, he is widely believed to command his guerrilla forces from hideouts in the Cardamom Mountains of southwest Cambodia. Other known areas of Khmer Rouge strength are in the heavily forested northeast and the mountainous west...
From these strongholds the guerrillas fan out across the country for swift strikes against Vietnamese army outposts and supply routes. One broadcast by a clandestine Khmer Rouge radio station ?probably located in China's Yunnan province?claimed that several Cuban and Soviet advisers had been killed in a Phnom-Penh airport ambush...