Help for the Auschwitz of Asia

Responding to the tragedy of a dying people

"I can say with a full sense of responsibility that no one is starving in our country.'' With those words, delivered in a Moscow interview last week, the Defense Minister of the Vietnamese-sponsored government of Cambodia blandly dismissed President Carter's pledge to provide $69 million in relief assistance to avert a ''tragedy of genocidal proportion'' taking place in what was once one of Southeast Asia's more peaceful and prosperous nations. Even as Pen Sovan spoke, his claim was being contradicted by eyewitnesses who were driven to tears by the sight of famished Cambodian refugees trudging wearily across the border to the precarious safety of refugee camps in Thailand. Battered by war, famine and disease, the refugees' faces reflected the plight of a country that has become the Auschwitz of Asia.

Also witnesses to the tragedy were three American Senators--Democrats James Sasser of Tennessee and Max Baucus of Montana and Republican John Danforth of Missouri--who last week became the first U.S. officials to visit Phnom-Penh since the fall of the Lon Nol government in 1975. Cambodian officials reluctantly admitted to the Senators that ''people are going hungry.''

But as the Senators told Carter upon returning to Washington, that was a gross understatement. ''We saw people in a makeshift hospital, lying under plastic sheets held up by poles,'' said Sasser at a press conference. ''The living, the dying and the dead were all together. The only noise to be heard was the cough of children with tuberculosis. There were emaciated people in the final stages of malnutrition." Danforth added that the plight of refugees at the Thai-Cambodian border "defies the imagination. What struck me was to spend hour after hour and see only starving children: babies so wrinkled they looked like wizened old men. There is no reason on earth why this dreadful situation must continue."

During the four years that the Khmer Rouge cadres of ousted Premier Pol Pot ruled Cambodia, perhaps half the country's 8 million people died as a result of war, disease or starvation. That enormous death toll has grown since the Vietnamese invasion eleven months ago, which imposed Heng Samrin as Cambodia's new leader. Either because crops had not been planted, or because rice fields were destroyed in the fighting, Cambodia's next rice harvest will be sufficient for only 1.75 million people. The remaining 2.25 million Cambodians face death from starvation or related diseases unless 165,000 tons of rice and 6,400 tons of cooking oil are imported in the next six months. Already, large numbers of the country's children five years or younger have perished, and according to officials of international relief agencies in Phnom-Penh, thousands of Cambodians are dying daily.

So far, the Cambodian government has rigidly restricted the importation of emergency food and medicine. It permits a daily airlift of such supplies into Phnom-Penh and allows an occasional shipborne cargo to reach the port of Kompong Som. But it has refused to permit trucks to arrive from Bangkok lest the vehicles be hijacked by Khmer Rouge troops concentrated along the Thai border. Experts from the International Red Cross and UNICEF Starving child are convinced that Cambodia must use such overland convoys if it is to receive the massive quantities of grain that it needs. The primary reason the three Senators visited Cambodia, in fact, was to try to persuade the Phnom-Penh regime to do just that. But at week's end the ruling People's Revolutionary Council rejected the idea, thereby ensuring that the flow of emergency supplies would remain inadequate.

Whatever food does manage to reach Cambodia will not arrive a moment too soon. In a brief excursion across the Thai border, TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark discovered that food is so scarce that even Khmer Rouge soldiers are going hungry. ''We crossed a narrow stream that marks the border by walking across a narrow log bridge,'' reported Clark. ''Then we moved cautiously into the village of Ban Rai Kluay, where 5,800 soldiers and civilians once camped. We found only 25 people. Most of them were soldiers too ill to move across the border into Thailand. Their situation underscores the sad state of Pol Pot's army, which in the area we visited, at least, is reduced to a few men too sick to move. If this is the fate of the troops, who presumably got priority in terms of food and medical treatment, imagine the plight of civilians who had to share the meager resources that were leftover.''

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