Word: khmer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...daughter of parents who fled Cambodia to escape the Khmer, I am disheartened to tell people where I am from and have them ask if Cambodia is in Africa. I know what the Cambodian people have suffered and what they will continue to suffer, in Cambodia and even here in the U.S. and wherever else Cambodian refugees have relocated. I hope people will read your article and will want to learn more about how Cambodia is still being pressured by the U.S. and other countries. Cambodia is one of the forgotten countries with a long, hard past and a long...
...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...
Like many of his Khmer Rouge comrades, Duch, now 56 and in detention, had been a teacher (educated, it seems, in schools funded by U.S. foreign aid); unlike them, though, he admitted that he had "done very bad things in my life." More recently, he claimed, he had been working for international relief organizations, helping out in local camps. "He was our best worker," said a refugee official when told that the man who had tried to protect children from typhoid was the notorious torturer who had once written "Kill them all" over lists of nine-year-olds...
...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, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as the Butcher, was captured in March and now awaits trial. For the first time...
...hope now is that Duch--perhaps the last Khmer Rouge leader to leave the city when the country's longtime enemies, the Vietnamese, took over in January 1979--may shed some light on what 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...