Word: phnom-penh
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During the lazy decades before the war in Viet Nam spread to Cambodia, now called Kampuchea, mornings in Phnom-Penh began when Buddhist bonzes filed slowly out from their wats (monasteries) in search of food. They proceeded along tree-lined boulevards, past colonial mansions and temples glistening with gold leaf, begging until their silver bowls were filled with rice and fresh mangoes. That usually did not take very long...
...march of the mendicants still begins at dawn as the hollow clap of the temple bell calls Phnom-Penh's faithful to alms. But the city through which the saffron-robed monks walk is now littered with rubble. There is far less food. The silver bowls have been replaced by plastic ones, bought on the black market. Yet the ritual is more important than ever. "People have asked to revive this dawn rite so they can share the little they have in order to make merit," explains Tep Vong, the senior Buddhist monk in Kampuchea. "We are rebuilding...
...Muslim mosques destroyed. The greatest indignities, however, were reserved for Buddhists, who constituted 90% of Kampuchea's population. Insurgents fresh from the jungle looted the country's 2,800 temples. "Buddhas were thrown into rivers or used as firewood," recalls Oum Soum, 62, deputy director of Phnom-Penh's Buddhist Institute. "Wats not destroyed became fertilizer warehouses." Bonzes were denounced as "parasites." The lucky ones were merely driven from their temples and into the fields. Of 80,000 Cambodian monks, 50,000 were murdered-often beaten to death-during the three years...
...regime. Many of the estimated 600,000 Cambodians who have fled to Thailand or border camps over the past two years have been sympathetic to either the Khmer Rouge or non-Communist groups known collectively as the Khmer Serei. All oppose the Hanoi-installed regime of Heng Samrin in Phnom-Penh. By midweek virtually all of the Vietnamese had withdrawn. But the action appeared to have slowed, if not halted, a United Nations program to repatriate to Cambodia any refugees volunteering to go. Moreover, with some 10,000 of their troops still poised along the border area, the Vietnamese remained...
...assistance to Viet Nam dates back to the 1960s, and has multiplied ever since. Annual aid to Hanoi now totals tens of millions. East German assistance has also extended to Hanoi's client regime in Cambodia. Last month President Heng Samrin flew to East Berlin from Phnom-Penh to sign a 25-year friendship treaty...