Word: cambodia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years now, Tuol Sleng has been a notorious memorial to the Khmer Rouge killers who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Bump down a broken back street in the capital of Phnom Penh, and you come upon a former girls' school, bare except for the rusted beds on which Pol Pot's men interrogated victims, and the U.S. munitions cans they used as toilets. Display cases are littered with the hoes and shovels and iron staves they used to brain people to death; along the walls, hundreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed...
...still bleeding, often broken country in which every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself lost in a lightless labyrinth of sorts, in which every path leads to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. Last year Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in for a while to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large...
...such places Cambodia has the air of a society with no laws, where some protective coating, some layer of civilization, keeping Darwin's jungle remote, has been torn away. The local paper reads as if it had been written by a Jacobean playwright with a taste for black irony. A motorist crashes into the Independence Monument, it says, the seventh such fatality this year. More than 12,000 "ghost soldiers"--nonexistent employees--have been found on the Ministry of Defense payrolls. A Frenchman here to help Cambodia is charged with running a brothel full of underage boys...
...happened. But though the government has, for the time being, acceded to the demands of the world, and the U.N., to hold a partly international tribunal of the Khmer Rouge leaders, almost everyone agrees that terms like justice and democracy are virtual luxuries in a country as desperate as Cambodia, where politics can often look like a Swiss bank account under a false name...
Burying the past, though, will not come easily in a country where roughly 50% of children are stunted and urchins in wheelchairs swivel around in front of cybercafes crying, "No have mother!" On the map given to visitors who go to the local tourist center, the text boasts of Cambodia's "wonderful history" and its status as a "land of tolerance and of plenty." Visit the "Choeung Ek Genocidal Center," it urges brightly of the rural equivalent to Tuol Sleng, where executioners once beat babies' heads against trees, adding that Cambodia will be "an inexhaustible source of memories to each...