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TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark last week visited the Sakaew refugee camp in Thailand, 40 miles from the Cambodian border, where many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers and civilians are concentrated. Cambodians are normally a voluble people; Clark was struck by the fact that the Khmer Rouge refugees said almost nothing. Terror, as much as exhaustion or illness, appeared to be the principal cause of their muteness. The ferocious and deeply feared Angka (literally, organization), represented by top-ranking Khmer Rouge cadres, had followed the civilians into exile. Under Pol Pot civilians were constantly warned not to make idle conversation; small children were trained to eavesdrop on their elders and report all conversations to Angka cadres. In a camp near Sakaew, refugees are being watched by Khmer officers who try to make sure they give ideologically correct answers to foreigners' queries. One refugee who talked freely with her brother, a longtime émigré in Thailand, was shot in the hand as punishment by Angka representatives in the camp.
At Sakaew there are dozens of orphans, testifying to how brutally family ties were shattered under the Pol Pot regime. Most are children who were assigned to mobile work teams after their parents' murder by the Khmer Rouge. When questioned by refugee caseworkers, many said they did not miss their parents. Similarly, parents in the camp showed little or no interest in the children they brought with them to Thailand. In a makeshift maternity ward at Sakaew, a Red Cross volunteer, Midwife Judith Greenberg of Oakland, Calif, told Clark that the mothers appeared not to care whether their babies were born dead or alive. "Many of the exhausted and sick mothers don't hold their babies or even look at them. Yet they continue to procreate even under the difficult conditions they've been through."
Even more striking than the Khmer indifference toward life was their seeming indifference toward death. "When a family member dies, they take little notice," said a nurse. "They see death every day. They're very tough." One young man made no move to inform camp authorities when his wife died of cerebral malaria. As her body lay beside him beneath a blanket, he stared tearlessly into space. A Khmer Rouge soldier explained that the Angka never allowed them to cry. "We were not even allowed to say we would miss the people who died."
Working in a medical ward at Sakaew is the wife of a Phnom-Penh doctor who had watched helplessly while her husband and two of their children were beaten to death shortly after the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. The crime of the doctor and his children: they belonged to the intellectual class. Said the widow: "I didn't cry, for to have done so would have meant death for me and, more important, for my only surviving child. To cry would have meant that I disapproved of the Angka 's decision to kill my husband and two children."