Help is on the way, but will it be enough and in time?
They came by the thousands, eyes downcast, silently edging through the high grass near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. Men without legs, hobbling on crutches. Women in rags, staggering beneath the weight of wooden poles hung with pots and pans, clothing and bedrolls, hatchets and rubber sandals. Children, some covered with sores, many of them naked, stumbling along at the heels of their parents.
"It was like a parade of zombies," TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark reported from Bangkok last week. "For those who witnessed the macabre march into Thailand, it was an unforgettable reminder that a nation is in its death throes. All of the refugees were clad in black, appropriately, for they are the walking dead. There was no imagining what horrors they had witnessed and survived, or perhaps even committed, since some of them are cadres of the ruthless and decimated Khmer Rouge army. After a few days of rest and replenishment in Thailand, they will probably have to return, lame and sick and malnourished, to their dreaded homeland: Cambodia."
In the 4½ years since Phnom-Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, more than a third of the population of Cambodia, once estimated at 8 million, has perished from war, disease and the genocidal policies of the murderous Pol Pot regime. Last week, as the Vietnamese prepared for a final onslaught on sanctuaries near the Thai border used by the Pol Pot forces, Cambodia faced yet another horror: a famine. At least 2 million people are believed to be on the verge of death by starvation or disease. Many have been reduced to eating the leaves off trees, peeling the bark and boiling it, digging for tubers and roots. Malaria is commonplace, as is a severe form of bleeding dysentery. Several French doctors who visited the country believe an outbreak of bubonic plague may be imminent.
Says Farouk Abdel Nabi, an Egyptian with the World Food Program, a United Nations agency operating in Bangkok: "I can tell you after what I have seen I am willing to kill myself to get food for these people." Says a diplomat in Thailand: "The Khmers are teetering on the brink of being extinguished as a race. They will perish unless something is done right now and very fast."
International relief agencies, along with the European Community, Japan, Australia, Britain and the U.S. are mounting a substantial rescue operation expected to cost $110 million over the next six months. State Department officials in Washington said last week that the U.S. will give $7 million in emergency food and money as an initial contribution. Two bills are pending in the House of Representatives, one authorizing $20 million in Cambodian relief for fiscal 1980, the other providing for $30 million. Says Republican Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois, co-sponsor of the latter measure: "If we fail to mobilize the resources of the world, we will be guilty of the crime of silence as we stand by and watch the condemned people of Cambodia march through what has been termed the Auschwitz of Asia on the road to death."