‘Everyone achingly weary in Cambodia’

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33819, 16 April 1975, Page 21

‘Everyone achingly weary in Cambodia’

(By i

SYDNEY SCHANBERG,

of the "New York Times," through N.Z.P.A.)

PHNOM PENH.

There is usually a sense of excitement in covering a war — the excitement of any good story. But if there ever was any excitement covering the war in Cambodia, it’s gone now.

Everyone is achingly weary here. The Cambodians. The foreign diplomats. Even us manic reporters, who are supposed to be able to turn on for any headline holocaust. The reporters are weary because the electric power is off most of the time now and without air conditioning you have to work in your underwear or sarong or towel with sweat inching down your back and at night you have to work by candlelight or by the light of a batterypowered lamp that runs out of juice every time on your third take, and you can’t, sleep much because you have to leave the windows open and burn anti-mosquito incense and be startled awake when rockets crash down nearby at 2.30 a.m. and again at 5.30, and then it’s morning and the hotel’s out of orange juice for breakfast and without electricity and there’s no toast. And after that the dozen daily cables from the foreign desk arrive with new ideas. Joy.

WTiy weary But every time 1 start feeling sorry for myself I think of why the Cambodians are weary. It’s because they’re in a hospital having a mangled arm or leg amputated. and when they emerge they will join the army of maimed beggars here—on crutches, in wheelchairs and sometimes pulling themselves like insects across the sidewalks. It’s because they are foot soldiers forced to fight without rest and without even boots to protect their feet in the jungles while their corrupt commanding generals return to Phnom Penh from the front every night to dine in fancy restaurants, sleep in their air conditioned villas and partake of other sybaritic pleasures.' And it’s because they haven’t had enough to eat for five vears and now the adults are very weak and the children are slipping into starvation and dying by the dozens. In the clinics I go to the clinics when I’m up to it and I literally watch infants dying, and I have to go outside and turn my back because I don’t want the Cambodians to see that I’ve lost control of my face. I think every time of my own two little girls and how well they are and how doomed these children are—and I don’t have any control any more.

“Times Talk” pieces are supposed to. be about reporters’ evperiences and all the odd and amusing things that happen to them—but I’m going to tell you about Cam-

tbodian experiences instead. I know it’s depressing but maybe I think everybody ought to be as depressed as I am. In Neak Luong, a river town about 40 miles southeast of Phnom Penh that is encircled and being bombarded to death, the shells are falling so heavily that no-one can come out of the bunkers to cremate the dead according to Buddhist tradition. The bodies just lie where thev fall, or get stacked in piles, if someone’s! brave enough to slip out for! a few minutes to gather and pile them.

Asking to be killed

l talked to a woman in the hospital with shrapnel in the back of her head, who came out of Neak Luong on a helicopter, and she said that there were so many gravely ! wounded in the town for whom there was no room on the few available choppers that some were asking to be killed quickly rather than be allowed to lie there and die slowly in pain. The other day, a few miles north of Phnom Penh a shelling attack killed several people in a market place. One was a four-year-old boy whose mother had gone to the next town and left him with his grandmother. The grandmother sat keening over the broken body. She was in hysterics. Her husband came along and, though shattered and weeping himself, tried to calm her. He asked where the mother, their daughter, was. The grandmother said that she was due back soon. The grandfather began to look for her and ask questions of people nearby. He grew worried.

Finally, shaking, he slowly began to examine the bodies of the other shelling victims i wrapped in straw mats in a row alongside his grandson. The third mat he turned back revealed his daughter. Man loses foot Sometimes shells and rockets fall on the airport. IA week ago, in one of these i barrages, shrapnel sheared off the foot of a man sitting on the back of a truck on the tarmac. Another Cambodian jumped out of his car parked nearby and ran to help him. The chicken he had in his car for supper leapt out too and went skittering down the ! tarmac. Chickens are a prize I here, for they are extremely [costly, so an airport guard gave chase. He caught the chicken and his face lit up. Then a rocket fell at his feet and blew him and the chicken to nothingness. This morning our stringer, Dith Pran, was just leaving his house for work when a rocket crashed into the house of a neighbour. A child, a [little six-year-old girl, was [ severely wounded. Her [stomach was hanging out. [Pran raced her to the hospiItal in his car. with her mother screaming and sobbing all

the way. The child did not survive.

My mind keeps coming back to the children. They simply don’t go to school anymore. At least only the children of the elite got to school. The rest — to survive — beg and steal and crouch alongside sidewalk restaurants, waiting for a morsel to be left on someone’s plate, whereupon they leap up and [snatch it and push it in their mouths quickly before another child can snatch it away from them. They still smile sometimes, the famous Cam-! bodian smile. All children smile. But then, while they; are smiling, rockets fall on! their shacks, and those who! are not killed or maimed run: shrieking in terror in all dir-j ections, and with some children it is days before the frightened look fades from their eyes and they stop whimpering and can talk normally again. To the villages There are a million and a half people who have fled to Phnom Penh who just want to go back to their villages. But almost none of tneir villages exist any more — they were long ago reduced to rubble and ash in the lighting. But these refugees want to go back and rebuild and start planting their rice fields again. That’s all they want. They don’t talk politics and they don’t think ideology. They have seen both sides — the Cambodian insurgents who sometimes burned their villages and the Phnom Penh Government whose corruption keeps rice from their tables and makes them sick with hunger — and they just want to go back to their villages. One out of every seven Cambodians has been killed or wounded in the war — that would work out to 30 million Americans if this were happening in the United States. Half the population of seven million have been turned into refugees — that would be 100 million in America. Refugees seen A few weeks ago I was driving on a dirt road and some refugees escaping from a battle up the road were coming toward me. They were carrying their wretched sacks of belongings on their heads, under their arms, over their bent shoulders. Dust swirled around them and the bright sun played tricks with it, flashing designs in the motes. Suddenly, for a few brief moments, the people looked to me as if they had holes in them, like Swiss cheese. People living and walking, but with holes

in them. People who were not all there. People whom you could see through in places. Maybe the holes were in my mind or in my weariness, or rnaybe I was oeing poetic or melodramatic, but th me they had holes in them. And then I shook my head to clear it, and there were no holes, and ■ Dith Pran asked me what was ;the matter and I told him [and he did not think it was [peculiar. Poor get drafted [ Only the poor get drafted’ [here. The rich buy their way [out. You could look through [Arm" ranks for days and not I find a man from a well-to-do [family. Sometimes when the [ Governmnet is trying to [round up more of the poor for cannon fodder the rickshaw drivers and other abject souls stay out of sight [and off the streets until the round-up is over. But I always come back to the children. There are a lot of children in the army — 10, 11, 12 years old. Nearly all volunteers, which seems curious. Sometimes they join to be with their fathers. But mostly they join because it is the only way they can get paid and fed. It’s better, these little boys feel, than begging in some foul gutter [in Phnom Penh. [ Of course, some of them end up begging anyway — [after they get wounded and [wind up on crutches or [simply with stumps slithering along the sidewalks.