Word: nw
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...additional 175,000 refugees still languish in camps in Thailand. Because so many of them lack the skills deemed essential for resettlement elsewhere, they have come to be known in official jargon as "residuals," or people with "no guarantee of movement onward." The worst of these refugee camps is NW 82, a tropical purgatory 16 miles north of Aranyaprathet, a town on the Thai-Cambodian border. United Nations officials are not allowed to have a permanent presence in the heavily guarded enclosure. TIME Bangkok Bureau Chief David DeVoss was the first foreign correspondent permitted by Thai authorities to look inside...
...NW 82 looks more like a concentration camp than a refugee sanctuary. A barren mud flat smaller than a football field, it was originally designed to hold 800 people. Today it is home to more than 1,900 listless Vietnamese "land people," who singly or in family groups bribed their way across Cambodia, which is still occupied by 160,000 Vietnamese troops. Jumbled together inside 27 tents, the refugees each have a coffin-size sliver of space, 6 ft. by 3 ft., in which to rest and sleep. Living conditions for new arrivals are even more crowded: they are housed...
Though it is surrounded by hostile anti-Vietnamese Khmer guerrillas and is within range of Vietnamese artillery inside Cambodia, NW 82 is not guarded by the Thai army. That task falls to the local militia, a sparsely equipped organization composed of former peasants, who are ill-disposed toward their Vietnamese charges. Several refugee women claim to have been raped, and men say that beatings are common. What is certain is that refugees who "misbehave" wind up spending the night in a red bamboo "tiger cage" 3 yds. long, 2 yds. wide and 1 yd. high...
...responsible for living conditions at NW 82? Thailand's supreme command insists, somewhat disingenuously, that it is the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.). The Red Cross vehemently denies any responsibility, other than medical, for the camp. Nearly a dozen Western embassies in Bangkok have joined the I.C.R.C. in asking the Thai government to move NW 82 away from the dangerous, malaria-infested border. But all the legations began to backpedal when the Thais said they would comply if the countries represented by the embassies agreed to resettle all 1,900 refugees within 45 days...
...beat a hasty path to the circular file--was ruminating the other day about the nation's leadership change, in particular about the effectiveness of the Reagan transition effort. For four months, a government-in-exile rapidly deployed itself in Washington, seizing an office complex at 1726 Massachusetts Ave. NW, spending money, filling memos and churning gossip at a frightening pace, appointments filtering out somewhat less frequently. Yet when January 20 rolled around, with all the frenzy of freed hostages and an inauguration, only a few of the hundreds of succabinet posts in various government departments had been parceled...