(4 of 10)
Responding angrily to the worldwide clamor, the Heng Samrin government has condemned the international aid offers as a "maneuver by the imperialists and international reactionaries" to assist the Khmer Rouge insurgents. Justifying its refusal to allow relief supplies to be brought in by truck, the government claimed that the port of Kompong Som and the airport of Phnom-Penh were "perfectly adequate" for the purpose. But according to on-the-scene investigations by the three U.S. Senators, only 12,000 tons of food and medicine can be brought in by air and ship each month, whereas 30,000 tons can be delivered by trucks alone. Docks at Kompong Som have been destroyed. One particularly poignant obstacle to deliveries by ship was discovered by Oxfam officials. They found that dock workers at Kompong Som are so enfeebled by malnutrition that they cannot unload heavy shipments of food from deep-draught freighters. According to UNICEF Executive Director Henry Labouisse, Phnom-Penh officials have instructed the U.N. agency not to send anything that weighs more than 50 kilos (110 Ibs.) "because people are too weak to carry anything heavier."
Despite the best efforts of the Thais and international relief agencies, the aid being provided to the 80,000 Cambodian refugees who have reached Thailand is makeshift and inadequate. TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark last week visited a camp that had been hastily set up to care for 30,000 refugees at Sakaew, 40 miles west of the Cambodian frontier. Most of the refugees had taken shelter from blinding rainstorms in huts constructed of poles and plastic sheets; small blue tents had been set up for dozens of orphans. Field kitchens were preparing high-protein rice gruel for the starving, while field hospitals tended to the sick, some of whom were laid out on mats on the muddy ground. Women were bathing their babies in mud puddles. Though latrines had been dug, most of the refugees were too ill or too weary to use them. "They defecate where they stand or where they sleep," said one UNICEF official.
Reported Clark: "In a single one-hour period, I saw four dead bodies in the Sakaew camp. One was lying in the muddy track that runs down the middle of the camp, covered by a blanket. Nobody paid any attention to it. Another was that of a woman who was already in rigor mortis, her feet sticking stiffly out from the end of a yellow cloth her husband had thrown over her. The husband sat in a daze while people in the adjoining makeshift shelters not more than four feet away were going about their business of cooking, eating and sleeping as if the dead woman were not there. 'I've got a body here,' I heard one young volunteer shout to an official. 'What do I do with it?' The official shrugged. Throw it out back with the others,' he said. The bodies collected in the rear of the camp are then gathered up, placed on ox carts, and taken to a nearby Buddhist temple for burial.