CAMBODIA: Long March from Phnom-Penh

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The most heartbreaking moment, the journalists reported, came when the Khmer Rouge ordered the 500 Cambodians in the group to leave the compound and join the peasant revolution. Wives were separated from husbands, husbands from families. About 150 Montagnards, the mountain tribesmen from Viet Nam, also had to leave. One of them told American Businessman Douglas Sapper that since he had fought with them in Viet Nam, he was their blood brother. A Montagnard officer's wife pressed the American to take her five-day-old baby, asking him to raise it. "They asked me for help I couldn't give," Sapper said last week. "I've never felt so completely powerless. I don't ever in my life want to go through that again."

Terrible Regret. The first group of about 580 foreigners was evacuated two weeks ago, but journalists who left Cambodia at that time agreed to withhold their stories until the second group of 550 arrived safely in Thailand last week. Apparently because they did not want to accept foreign help, the Khmer Rouge refused an offer by France to provide an evacuation plane. They insisted that all the foreigners, including the aged and sick, endure a 250-mile truck ride to the Cambodian border. Instead of using a direct route, the evacuees rode along winding dirt roads that had served as the guerrillas' supply routes during years of fighting. To Correspondent Schanberg, it appeared that "these areas had been developed and organized over a long period and had remained untouched sanctuaries throughout the war." He gained the impression that "the countryside organization was much stronger than anyone on the other side had imagined."

When the first convoy of 25 trucks reached its destination, said Sapper, there was "an indescribable happiness walking across that bridge into Thailand," but also a terrible regret because "I left behind too many people who I know will not come out well." At the moment, indeed, the fate of the Cambodian people that he and other foreigners left behind is an agonizingly unanswerable question. The makeup of the new government is not yet clear, and the danger of factional fighting appears great. A fortnight ago, the Khmer Rouge leadership reportedly held a "national congress" in Phnom-Penh, with Khieu Samphan, the military commander and Deputy Premier, in attendance. Few Khmer Rouge leaders have publicly mentioned Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Though he remains the titular head of the new government, it is hard to imagine the temperamental but still popular prince fitting easily into the present company in Phnom-Penh.