Brainwashed refugees from a brutal regime
Fleeing from famine and war, an estimated 560,000 homeless Cambodians are massed along their country's ill-defined western border with Thailand. Last week the Thai military command announced that the country would move most of the refugees from insecure frontier areas and establish huge camps to hold them. Thai officials contend that many of the Cambodians are actually inside their country already; even so, the 560,000 may be only part of an exodus even larger than the tragic flight of more than 700,000 refugees from Viet Nam.
At Khao I Dang in Thailand, seven miles from the frontier, international aid officials last week were hastily constructing a transit camp to hold 200,000 people; the camp will be able to provide rudimentary care for the sick and starving. While Thai workers with bulldozers and excavators were preparing 1.6 square miles of rolling grassland for the campsite and building latrines, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was trucking in food, medical supplies and relief personnel from Bangkok. As soon as the camp is fully staffed, the plan calls for bringing 10,000 refugees each day from the frontier, walking in groups of 200 at 15-min. intervals. At week's end, however, the plan had to be scrapped, when it was discovered that the first 5,000 refugees were too exhausted or too ill to walk the seven miles to the camp. Thai soldiers escorted the Cambodians half a mile to a red-clay highway, where buses and trucks, equipped with mattresses for the sick, were waiting to take them to Khao I Dang.
The most traumatized of all the refugees in Thailand are the Khmer Rouge soldiers, and the civilians who were forced to follow them into hideouts in border areas under pressure by the Vietnamese army that occupied Cambodia last January. These refugees, about 30,000 in all, are dramatic evidence of the human damage wrought by the murderous regime of ousted Premier Pol Pot.
Aid officials and physicians have been astounded by the apathetic behavior of the Khmer Rouge refugees. Though no trained psychiatrists have examined them, they appear to be suffering the effects of drastic brainwashing, combined with extreme physical hardship and unrelieved fear. In an effort to create a radically new kind of human being, Pol Pot's Communist fanatics turned their subjects into zombie-like creatures whose will and capacity for human feeling seem all but extinguished.