80,000 driven out

Press, 26 April 1979, Page 1

80,000 driven out

NZPA-Reuter Aranyaprathet, Thai lane About 80,000 Kampucheans, most of them civilians who fled into Thailand to escape a Vietnamese-led military campaign, were yesterday moved back into their own country by the Thai Army. The officials said many Khmer Rouge soldiers, with some civilians, were still inside the curved 30km long enclave, behind strong defence lines. They were apparently awaiting final assault by their opponents. The refugees, and the hundreds of Khmer Rouge soldiers who accompanied them on the trek south through Thailand, are to be sent back into heavily jungled hills which the

Vietnamese-led forces do aot yet appear to control. The vast column took two days to trek up to 30kms to the Kao Loeng Mountains near Aranyaprathet. They came from a small enclave where up to 100,000 people were trapped by the Vietnamese campaign, with no escape route but Thailand. Local officials said three Vietnamese-led divisions — about 20,000 men — had taken part in the campaign. It was the most dramatic part of a sweep through western Kampuchea by the forces of the new Soviet-backed

administration in Phnom Penh and was apparently designed to clear the rich

rice-growing area of Khmer Rouge guerrillas loyal to the former Kampuchean leader, Pol Pot.

Some of the marchers are expected to join Pol Pot. He is believed to be in the Cardomom Mountains of southwest Kampuchea, about 150 km further south. Bullock-drawn carts, a long, seemingly unending line of them, ’carried the meagre posse.,-ions of the thin, ragged marchers who filed along the dirt track back into Kampuchea.