Word: cambodia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...never met Pol Pot, but I saw examples of his handiwork. In 1982, writing a story called "Children of War" for TIME, I visited the Khao I Dang refugee camp in southeast Thailand, across the border from Cambodia. There 40,000 Cambodians who had fled Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge awaited resettlement. They had made the camp into a village consisting of straw-roofed huts, gardens and wats...
...struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" (Milan Kundera), which is why it is necessary not to let the brief glimpse the world had of Pol Pot be the last, and why the West, America especially, ought to call for another Nuremberg. By bombing Cambodia in 1970 we destabilized the country and were largely responsible for Pol Pot's rise; we could use some memory jogging...
...National Gallery in Washington has a marvelous show this summer--"Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia: Millennium of Glory." It is by no means a rerun of a familiar subject. Most of the world's major sculptural traditions are abundantly represented in American museums--Egyptian, ancient Greek, Gothic, Italian Renaissance, Indian and Maya. Cambodian sculpture is the exception. Yet there is no doubt that in the small Southeast Asian kingdom between the 6th century and 16th century A.D., some of the greatest stone carving and bronze work in human history was made...
...Cambodian proverb says: If you are strong, make yourself feared; if you are weak, make yourself pitied. Cambodians are deeply insecure, aware that the proud temple-building empire of Angkor, which covered much of Southeast Asia in the 12th century, has shrunk to the small area of today's Cambodia. This insecurity has prompted much irrational aggression. In 1978 Pol Pot launched attacks on Vietnam, bragging that one Cambodian soldier could kill eight Vietnamese. It is a behavior pattern that is deeply rooted in the national psyche: to hold power one must show the utmost ferocity and single-mindedness...
Terry McCarthy is a freelance writer who has covered Southeast Asia for 10 years and has just returned from Cambodia...