First Published: The Atlanta Journal, October 27, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The American press’s horror stories about life in Cambodia are not true, according to a journalist who led the first delegation to that country since its liberation.
Dan Burstein, editor of the Call, a Communist Party publication, and three other reporters from the same newspaper, said Friday that he saw no signs of starvation, forced labor at gunpoint, religious intolerance or forced evacuation from cities during his trip to Cambodia in April.
“I saw a country, a people and a society diametrically opposed to the image which has been conveyed by articles in the U.S. press,” Burstein said.
He said he saw a country where the common people have become masters of their own society, ’’rather than the feudal lords and foreign interests of the old days.”
Burstein, a Chicagoan who is in Atlanta to speak at 7 p.m. Sunday in a Communist Party-sponsored lecture at the Phoenix Fellowship Unitarian Church, 4790 Candler Park Drive, said the people have enough to eat and have reduced their rate of illiteracy from 80 percent to 20 percent.
He commented that “they have built dams, canals and irrigation ditches on an unprecedented scale and developed two-crop rice fanning, all in a period of three years.”
Burstein said his group spent four days in Phnom Penh and four in the countryside, traveling more than 700 miles and talking with people.
Burstein insisted that what they saw and heard could not possibly have been staged for them since they stopped spontaneously many times along the roads and went into the fields to talk with people.
“We did not see forced labor, which is supposed to be going on at gunpoint, according to news reports,” Burstein said. “We saw work sites ranging from small groups in rice fields to 3,500 working on construction of a dam, and there was not a single sign of coercion.”
There was no sign of malnutrition or ill health, Burstein said.
“Granted they are subsisting largely on a rice diet,” he said, “but the situation is vastly improved compared to pre-liberation.”
Burstein said freedom of religion is guaranteed in the constitution and he saw groups of Buddhists worshipping at shrines.
Burstein admitted that an eight-day visit to the country did not make him an expert, but he said he believes he can distinguish fact from fiction.
And he criticized another “slanderous charge” by the press that the people are xenophobic” which is fear or hatred toward strangers.
“This is a lie,” he said, adding that the people harbored no ill feelings toward Americans.
Burstein said, “They knew well that the majority of Americans opposed the aggression carried out by the U.S. government in their country.”