Word: cambodia
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...tears, Prince Norodom Sihanouk was bursting with both. An Air China jetliner from Beijing had just brought him home to Phnom Penh after a tortuous personal odyssey of nearly 13 years. For all the flag waving and jasmine petals that greeted him, though, the return last week of Cambodia's exiled former head of state brought no certain end to his homeland's generation-long nightmare. The Sino-Soviet rivalry that had helped drive Cambodia's civil war may be history. U.N. troops and officials may have arrived to help restore peace. But the seeds of further ordeals remained strewn...
Under the auspices of a U.N.-brokered settlement, the Prince has returned to lead a transitional Supreme National Council composed of Cambodia's four warring factions. It includes, by necessity, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, whose Maoist-inspired ideology had devastated the country from 1975 to 1979 and resulted in more than 1 million deaths. Sihanouk on his return called for an international trial of Khmer Rouge leaders on charges of genocide -- which poses a stern test for even his powers of adaptability, since those same leaders will sit on the council he is to head...
...middle-aged man had fled Cambodia to save his family from the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Now, as he stalked furiously back and forth across the grimy patio behind a cramped bungalow in the Little Phnom Penh section of Long Beach, he saw a very different threat materializing -- within his own family. His 14-year-old son, gang-named Flipper, and another homeboy, Slicc, 18, were bragging to a stranger about a shoot...
Many Cambodian gang members became hardened to violence during their escape from the killing fields of Southeast Asia. "I remember walking and walking," recalls Little Devil, 16, describing his family's trek out of Cambodia when he was five. "If we didn't keep up, we'd be lost." Perhaps because of their past globe trotting, Cambodian gang members can be astonishingly mobile. When Long Beach cops saturated the "Anaheim corridor" this summer after a burst of shoot-outs, the Cambodian gangs vanished. "They took off for Stockton and Modesto -- maybe farther," says Mike Nen, an ethnic-Cambodian cop. Adds...
That vision of a democratic Cambodia, alas, is fraught with peril. Chief fear is that the Khmer Rouge, the rebel faction that ruled the country with a brutal hand in the mid-1970s, may try once again to seize power...