The United Nations. the nonaligned nations summit meeting in New Delhi. and the ASEANEEC (Association of South East Asian NationsEuropean Economic Community) meeting all called for the complete withdrawal of all foreign forcesmeaning Vietnamese and Sovietfrom Kampuchea. and for U.N.-supervised elections to restore Cambodia as a neutral. independent state with the right to selfdetermination. Yet today. as in the Cambodian legend. the Khmer people are trapped between the Vietnamese tiger and the Khmer Rouge crocodile. The United States. still traumatized by the Vietnam experience. has done nothing to strengthen Sihanouk and Son Sann. and has remained noncommittal except for support for Thailand and some aid to the refugees. This spring in Washington. as the cherry trees began to blossom and rallies for survivors of the European Holocaust were being prepared on the Mall. all hell broke loose on the ThaKampuchean border. I was traveling on that border. visiting with Western relief workers. Buddhist monks. Thai officials (both civilian and military) who are allpowerful in these regions. Laotian and Cambodian refugees. rice farmers. and groups of Son Sanns fighters. When the attacks on the refugee camps began. I was accompanying a Thai friend who had been initiated into the fighting the day before when a Vietnamese rocket exploded a few meters from his car as he was driving near a district capital. Aranyaprathet. ten kilometers inside Thailand. It was around noon on the second day when we came upon what resembled a procession of the living dead. driven by the crack of gunshots and the thump of artillery. The twenty thousand Cambodian refugeesmostly women. children. and old peoplewere stretched across three kilometers of the flat. barren fields of Thab Siam. pushed by Thai border guards in green baseball caps to keep moving away from the fire. I will never forget those desperate faces. In the confusion. children were separated from their families.
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refugee refugeesmostly refugees