81

Pravda, January 11, 1979

Evidence from the American press

p Material from the American press testifies to the monstrous and evil deeds perpetrated by the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime imposed on Kampuchea from outside. The newspapers, illustrated journals, magazines and weeklies have published a multitude of articles, photographs and documentary evidence of the bloody crimes of the clique against the Kampuchean people, with respect to whom the Peking puppets pursued a policy of overt genocide for over three years.

p E. Backer of The Washington Post and R. Dadman of the Saint Louis Post Dispatch travelled to Kampuchea and talked to the Kampuchean refugees in Thailand. They write of the sinister period of tyranny established in the country by the regime following the Chinese model of political structure. The authors testify that, in Kampuchea, representatives of the most diverse strata of the population were systematically executed.

p During his time in the country, Backer was constantly searching for people deported from Pnom Penh straight after the war, when hundreds of thousands of people were banished from the capital, and herded like cattle into remote agricultural 82 areas, many of them dying on the way. He was only allowed to speak to two previous inhabitants of Pnom Penh, however.

p The Pol Pot regime, notes The New York Times, considered that anyone who had any connection with urban life, intellectual, business or technical activities needed to be cleansed by being sent to do heavy work in the countryside, or to be eliminated completely.

p The New York Times published an account by one refugee who managed to find his way secretly out of Kampuchea. He himself witnessed how government soldiers murdered 108 women and children. He says this took place not far from the village of Chbale. A few soldiers led off the seized women and children beyond the settlement and then, after dividing them into groups of ten, began to methodically beat them on the head with heavy sticks. Some small children were thrown into the air and caught on bayonets, others grasped by the legs and bashed against the ground.

p A considerable amount of material and eye-witness accounts collected by the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the UN Commission on Human Rights and published in the American press also testifies to the true genocide practices by the Kampuchean government, which turned the country into a virtual prison.

p During the discussion in Geneva in September 1978, the members of the Subcommission, including experts from 17 countries, were acquainted with documents presented by Canada, Norway, Britain and the USA. These were compiled from eye-witness testimonies, mostly from Kampuchean refugees, and give some idea of what the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique was really up to.

p According to the eye-witnesses, the people of Kampuchea were executed at the slighest excuse. The Subcommission’s documents show that they were killed with wooden sticks, hoes and axes, which were used to dismember the victims’ bodies.

p Sem Damavong recounted how, in his village, people were deprived of food for the slightest misdemeanour. Anyone who committed such “errors” three times was executed, beaten to death with sticks. On more than a dozen occasions he saw corpses thrown into the market place to frighten the villagers, 83 and there were usually five or six bodies lying around there, which they were later ordered to take into the fields and use as fertiliser.

p Yim Sot Ronnachit, 16 years of age, told how, after the Pol Pot regime came to power, he and the other inhabitants of Siem Reap were sent to do forced labour. Once his family was brought to a place where there were already 12 people, including only one man, one old man, and the rest women and children. “I saw many bodies,” Ronnachit testifies, “ including that of my own father. The soldiers pointed their guns at us and said ’You are going to be killed.’ They told us to sit on the ground, and then started to beat us with sticks and hoes. They killed five or six before they got to me. They hit me on the neck and on the back. I lost consciousness and they apparently thought I was dead.”

p Even the White House had to admit that genocide was being practised in Kampuchea. In a statement on April 21, 1978, President Carter spoke of executions without trial or inquest. The President called the Pol Pot regime the most malicious violater of human rights in the world.

p That the US Government “persistently and in detail announced cases of mass violations of human rights in Kampuchea" is also written in a letter from J. Leonard, temporary Us representative to the UN, to the Chairman of the Security Council.

All the more reason for perplexity over the fact that, now that the Kampuchean people have risen against the odious regime and overthrown the criminal Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique, some people in Washington, those who are playing up to Peking, are inclined to defend these Chinese puppets.