Fighting; wives to second refugee camp

Press, 8 January 1980, Page 6

Fighting; wives to second refugee camp

NZPA-Reuter . Bangkok Fighting that forced more than 200,000 Kampuchean refugees tp abandon one of two huge encampments on Thailand’s eastern frontier last Friday has spread to the other. • Doctors at a hospital in Camp Rehou, run by the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at least 10 people had been killed, and 40 seriously wounded, in the fighting. Who was responsible for the attack was still not clear, but the leaders, members of a faction of the nonCommunist Khmer Serei guerrillas, blamed Communist soldiers loyal to the Khmer Rouge government driven from Phnom Penh by Vietnamese-led forces one year ago. They said the Khmer Rouge were also responsible for last Friday’s attack on a sprawling shanty refugee town opposite the Thai border village of Nong Samet in which several people were killed and about SO wounded.

The Nong Samet camp, about 280 km east of Bangkok, was virtually empty yesterday, only a handful of people moving through its abandoned straw and bamboo huts. The. roofs and walls of many have been stripped bare leaving only the bamboo skeletons standing in the thin, dusty forest.

Most of its population, estimated at more' than 200,000, appeared to have fled to Camp Rehou a few kilometres to the south. F '

The' hospital doctors said they had been pent panicking into the night when the fighting broke out. The camp leaders said the attack was Khmer Rouge revenge for help given to the Nong Samet group of Khmer Serei, by soldiers from Camp Rehou.

Refugees .said they had seen two Khmer Rouge said to have been captured in the fight' led away with their hands tied behind them. The leaders said last Friday’s fighting was the result of an attempt by about 300 Khmer Rouge guerrillas to free 16 comrades' arrested in Nong Samet as infiltrators. Some independent eye-wit-nesses to the Nong Samet fighting said they had seen Khmer Rouge firing Chinesemade AK47 rifles at Khmer Serei? But others said they had seen fighting only between the two groups of hon-Communists.

Some well-informed sources suggested it was possible that the fighting was the result of an attempt by the Camp Rehou Khmer Serei to empty Nong Samet, a better-organised camp, and concentrate hero the combined population of; about 500,000 people to expand their power base.