Word: phnom
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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...
...press 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...
...extra 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...
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...
There has been no evidence of the massive bloodbath that many Americans predicted would follow the collapse of the Thieu regime, and no tales to match the stories of mass executions being brought out of Cambodia by refugees from the Khmer Rouge in Phnom-Penh. Nonetheless, the new Communist government has taken some tough measures to discourage resistance. A few wealthy Chinese-traditional scapegoats of the Vietnamese-have been executed. Summary executions of petty criminals and looters have served as warnings that disorder will not be tolerated, though thievery and muggings still take place. Attacks on North Vietnamese troops continued...