p Nothing so provoked the wrath and cruelty of Angka Loeu as an escape attempt. Escapees seldom received any quarter.

p Once triumphant, Angka Loeu began sealing off the entire border with Thailand—a 449-mile frontier that curves through mountains and jungles, across rivers. Villages and settlements were evacuated to create a no-man’s-land about three miles wide all along the border. The crossings, their approaches and jungle trails were seeded with mines and boobytraps. . . .

p . . .Throughout the border region, Angka Loeu patrols roamed the jungles and mountains hunting escapees. Keo Kim Taun, a former government soldier, was one of 37 people who tried to escape from the village of Soeur. A patrol spotted them tooking rice in a jungle clearing and opened fire with AK-47 machine guns, killing 21, the youngest of whom was five years old. Keo and the other 15 survivors reached Thailand 12 days later. En route, they saw innumerable corpses of people slaughtered by such patrols. . . .

p . . .Ouk Phon, who escaped from Phum To Tea in the Samrong district, reports: “In one spot I saw about 50 corpses tied together with rope, and elsewhere under a tree, the skeleton of a child, its hands still tied. On the way to the border, I suppose I passed 5,000 bodies. . . .”

Yet despite all the dangers, the will to be free of Angka Loeu was so inextinguishable that each month thousands tried to escape. Although the first waves contained a disproportionate number of students, intellectuals, formerly prosperous tradesmen, civil servants and military personnel, by autumn of 1975, the overwhelming proportion was made 98 up of “humble country folk recognizable by the heavy tattoing of their bodies, dark skins and coarse hands and feet—the people one would think best suited for the rigors of peasant revolution”. . . .