Word: relief
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
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...