Food ‘not reaching starving people'

Press, 3 December 1979, Page 8

Food ‘not reaching starving people'

NZPA-Reuter Bangkok

The international relief effort for famine-stricken Kampuchea is going very badly, according to relief agency and diplomatic sources in Thailand.

They said that thousands of tonnes of foodsent to Kampuchea by air and ship were piled up in warehouses in Phnom Penh and in Kompong Soin, the country’s only deep-water port. According to one State Department official in Washington who asked not to be named, as much as 10,000 tonnes of aid from some 13,000 tonnes sent in over the last two months may still be in the warehouses. The media of the Vietn a m-backed Administration in Phnom Penh regularly reports the distribution of food in various parts of the country. But relief agency sources said they could not confirm these reports because international officials in the Kampuchean capital had only extremely limited opportunities to make spot checks. The strongest evidence that food was not being distributed in any significant quantities was the daily arrival of thousands of Kampucheans on the Thai border. An estimated 600,000700,000 people are now crammed into sprawling shanty towns of grass and bamboo huts in a small sector of the border north of the Thai frontier town of Aranyaprathet, 270 km east of Bangkok. Diplomats said they had talked to recent arrivals from every province of Kampuchea. They and the relief-agency sources predicted there could soon be a million people or more to be fed in the vast encampments, up to onequarter of the surviving population.

The sources said they believed the Vietnameseled forces could halt the drift of hungry people westwards by distributing food.

Why the Phnom Penh Administration was not doing so was partly explained by the difficulties of organisation and transportation in the devasted country, they said.