Word: cambodia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ever fathom the evil that men do. We stand disbelieving before genocide, when women's throats are slit with sharp palm leaves, when children's heads are smashed against tree trunks, when men are slaughtered with the crack of a hoe. These things happened every day in Cambodia for 3 1/2 terrible years, and when the world learned of it, people could only respond with dumb horror...
...never regretting the countless executions, the million more dead of starvation and overwork, the living population maimed in body or mind, the entire country reduced to Stone Age survival. Nineteen years after the hated Vietnamese drove him back into the jungle, the evil that he did lives on in Cambodia's traumatized society, poisoned politics, governmental misrule and pitiful piles of bleached-white skulls. When Pol Pot died last week, alone in a small, thatched hut, his passing left only outrage that this man had cheated earthly justice...
...April 1975, he vowed to turn back the clock to "Year Zero." In the name of a bizarre blend of peasant romanticism and radical Maoism, the Khmer Rouge conducted a reign of terror intended to give birth to an agrarian utopia. At the point of their guns, they emptied Cambodia's cities, abolished money and markets, shut down schools and Buddhist monasteries and forced the entire country to wear black pajamas as a sign of "instant communism." Inspired by China's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot carried its practices to the extreme. Anyone who questioned the system, anyone who spoke...
...jungle in 1963, the French-educated son of prosperous landowners, born Saloth Sar, taught school in Phnom Penh, and his former students remember him as a soft-spoken, even-tempered man who loved to recite his favorite poet, Verlaine. Francois Ponchaud, a French priest who first moved to Cambodia in 1965, says that when he heard the leader who called himself Pol Pot give a speech on the radio in 1977, "I remember saying to myself, this man knows how to speak. Not angry shouting, but with a gentle, well-modulated voice...
Asked why Howes was killed, Panna said, "That was Pol Pot's rule. He didn't want any foreigners involved in our society." It was of course this hostility to outsiders that kept the Khmer Rouge stuck in the jungle while the rest of Cambodia benefited from rapid economic development fueled in part by foreign investment. And it was resentment at missing out on this progress that prompted the latest, final rebellion in the Khmer Rouge ranks...