Cambodia says massacre ‘internal affair’

Press, 18 February 1977, Page 5

Cambodia says massacre ‘internal affair’

NZPA-Reuter Bangkok Cambodia has admitted that it massacred 30 people in villages along the border between Thailand and Cambodia. But it has dismissed the incident as an internal affair. The admission of the slaughter of the civilians, most of them women and children, was the closest Cambodia has come to an official statement that its forces have murdered citizens as a matter of policy since it took control of the country on April 17, 1975. It was contained in a nine-page diplomatic note to the Thai Government, dated February 7, and meant as a reply to a Thai protest over the massacre on January 28 in three tiny villages near the Cambodian frontier 285 km east of Bangkok. In the attack, more than a half dozen children had their throats slit, and women were shot at close quarters by Khmer Rouge soldiers. Cambodia rejected the Thai protest, claiming that the villages were within Cambodian territory. It de-

manded an apology from Bangkok for the deaths of several Khmer Rouge troops during the one-sided fight. “The government of democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia’s official name) was arranging its internal affairs in these three villages,” the straightforward diplomatic Note said. Diplomats and other observers in Bangkok were stunned by the matter-of-fact admission that Cambodian forces had conducted I the massacre. Most had expected a denial of the in- 1 cident. Most professional observers in Thailand believe that more than one million people have been killed or have died because of Khmer Rouge brutality during the less than two years the Communists have held power in Phnom Penh. In recent months, some diplomatic sources have estimated that as many as 3.5 million of the 7 million Cambodians have been slaughtered brutally or have died as a direct result of the Communist take-over.