Word: penh
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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...
...treatment of Cambodia since the fall of the Lon Nol regime last April is a prime example of news distortion. An editorial last summer in The New York Times, titled "Cambodia's Crime," summed up the official view of events there. It spoke of millions of people from Phnom Penh and other cities "forced by the Communists at gunpoint to 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...
...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...
...road. Most evacuees walked, covering roughly 2.5 miles per day and many of the old and sick went by car or truck. People did die on the road, but not by the thousands as U.S. government sources said; most deaths were from cholera caught while in Phnom Penh...
These warnings are reminiscent of Administration pleas in early 1975 for last-ditch aid to failing anti-Communist governments in Saigon and Phnom-Penh. In the Wall Street Journal last week, Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., charged the Administration with unnecessary hyperbole and suspect logic. "I strongly doubt," he argued, "that anyone in the Soviet Union is concluding today that . . . the Senate's action on Angola gives Moscow a blank check for foreign adventures...