Deathwatch: Cambodia

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Efforts to mount a vast international relief campaign gathered force last week as visitors to refugee camps in Thailand and to the interior of Cambodia returned with searing eyewitness accounts of mass starvation. Three U.S. Senators, the first American officials to visit the Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh since the fall of Lon Nol, testified before Edward Kennedy's Senate Judiciary Committee that famine and disease threatened to extinguish the entire Cambodian people. Republican John Danforth of Missouri said he and his colleagues had visited camps in Thailand that were simply "ground with people strewn over it." Danforth argued that "hundreds of thousands of people [are] at death's door. We saw people who couldn't walk 100 yards." Said Democrat James Sasser of Tennessee: "The human suffering we found was so deep and pervasive that I don't have the words to adequately describe it."

In Phnom-Penh, officials of the Heng Samrin regime reluctantly conceded to the Senators that at least 2.25 million Cambodians faced extreme "hunger" and that 165,000 tons of rice were needed in the next six months. Nonetheless, the government turned down the Senators' proposal to open a truck route from Thailand that would greatly increase deliveries of famine relief supplies by the International Red Cross, UNICEF and other agencies. Phnom-Penh officials were obviously more concerned about preventing food from falling into the hands of the Khmer Rouge insurgents than they were with saving hundreds of thousands of Cambodians from starvation and death. Condemning the obstructionist tactics that have thus far limited relief supplies to a fraction of the need, Danforth observed: "If a government is determined to murder its own people, I don't know how to stop it."

At a press conference, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance pleaded with "those who control the territory and the population" of Cambodia to put "humanitarian concerns ahead of political or military advantage" and allow food and medical supplies to be brought into the starving country by land, sea and air. Vance said that he would represent the U.S. this week at a special U.N. conference on the Cambodian catastrophe; he also reaffirmed President Carter's pledge of $69 million to the international relief effort. Said Vance: "I can think of no issue now before the world community and before every single nation that can lay greater claim to our concern and to our action."