‘Phnom Penh rice crop lost, many hungry’

Press, 27 August 1979, Page 8

‘Phnom Penh rice crop lost, many hungry’

NZPA-Reuter Bangkok Kampuchea's faminethreatened capital of Phnom Penh has lost 90 per cent of its rice crop and already many in the city are going hungry, according to a mission just back from the country. On top of the food shortage, the city’s only three hospitals are desperately short of medicine, according to the four-man team of the Singapore-based Christian Conference of Asia. The hospitals “have become more a place for dying than for healing,” one doctor was quoted as saying. Many Kampucheans entering the capital were undernourished and, owing to floods and marauders, barely 10 per cent of the normal rice crop in the Mekong Valley had been planted, the team said. The four, who returned to Bangkok two days ago, said they would recommend that the World Council of Churches launch an immediate appeal for the Kampuchean Red Cross. Meanwhile, an official dispatch from Vietnam has said that some soliders of the ousted Kampuchean Prime

Minister, Pol Pot, have resorted to cannibalism. The Vietnam News Agency quoted a 17-year-old Kampuchean girl as saying a Pol Pot solider had beheaded her brother, carved the flesh from his bones, and then wrapped it up in leaves. The report could not be confirmed but a non-com-rnunist journalist who recently visited Kampuchea said he talked to several different Vietnamese soldiers who told him of cannibalism by Pol Pot troops. The soldiers told of dead Pol Pot troops who had been carrying dried human flesh and one Pol Pot camp where human flesh had been cooked. The V.N.A. dispatch said the Kampuchean girl, Say Ny, and her family were accosted by Pol Pot soldiers in the western province of Pursat about three months ago and one of them had killed her brother. Later the girl’s mother had also been killed and her liver was removed, the agency said. The dispatch was not clear on whether the alleged cannibalism was for food or revenge. Ritual cannibalism — the removal and eating of anopponent’s liver — was

practised by both sides during the 1970-75 Kampuchean war. The agency said the girl’s stoiy was told on July 9 during an inquiry by the Ministry of Internal Affairs which preceded a tribunal in Phnom Penh during which the toppled regime was tried for “genocidal crimes.” The tribunal sentenced Pol Pot and his Deputy Prime Minister, leng Sary, to death in absentia for being "the authors of the deaths of three million Kampucheans.” From Tokyo, Reuters reports a witness at the tribunal alleged that Pol Pot soldiers had killed 13 children by throwing them into a crocodile-raising pond. The agency said a Japanese lawyer, Susumu Ozaki, had told it in a telephone interview that this was among allegations of massmurders described by witnesses at the tribunal, held under the presidency of the Vietnamese-backed Administration’s Information Minister (Mr Keo Chanda) from August 15 to 19. Mr Ozaki, who is also president of the Japan-Cam-bodia Society, returned to Tokyo on Thursday after attending by invitation the tribunal.