Word: phnom-penh
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Fighting from the jungle redoubts against the Lon Nol government in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge insurgents were shrouded in mystery. If anything, the mystery intensified last week as the rebels dropped what might be called a Khmer curtain over the country they had just conquered. As of week's end, ten days after the fall of Phnom-Penh, very little was known about the composition of the new regime, how it was running the war-torn state or what had become of the defeated leaders who were unable to escape. With normal lines of communication severed...
...rare public statements by a Khmer Rouge leader came from Khieu Samphan, commander of the rebel army and one of the insurgents' top political leaders. In a broadcast carried by Phnom-Penh radio, Samphan warned that the country was "still facing a big menace." He did not elaborate, but an earlier broadcast indicated that troops loyal to the former government were holding out in remote provinces...
Samphan also may have been referring to the problem of feeding an estimated 1.3 million refugees who were still believed to be crowding the capital. Asked an expert in Bangkok: "How can the 60,000 Khmer Rouge troops handle the 2 million people packed into Phnom-Penh...
...French embassy compound in Phnom-Penh, staffed only by a vice consul and a cipher clerk, was jammed with about 400 French citizens, some 400 Cambodians who claim French blood and about two dozen foreign journalists and representatives of international organizations. According to officials in Paris, sanitary conditions within the refuge were poor, intestinal disease was rife and there were serious shortages of food, water and medicine...
...Communists, along with several hundred lower-level officials who first found refuge in the French embassy compound but were later forced to leave. Some of these may already be dead; a radio broadcast from inside Cambodia told of beheadings, but could not be confirmed. Political trials in Phnom-Penh were said to be beginning...