Word: khmer
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When French-Khmer graphic artist Ing Phouséra - or Séra, to use his pen name - first started drawing comics about life under the Khmer Rouge, he didn't have a lot to go on. He had fled Cambodia as a teen in April 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot's forces, and had lived in Paris his whole adult life. Visual arts - except in the service of propaganda - were banned during the four years of Khmer Rouge oppression, leaving scant images of a period in which nearly 20% of Séra's compatriots died...
...Growing up in Phnom Penh between the worlds of his French mother and Khmer father, Séra routinely escaped into the pages of French comics, and again as a young refugee in Paris. Now the author of a dozen graphic novels - three of which have been about Cambodia's war years - he is working to rekindle Cambodia's interest in the art form. Since his debut showing in Phnom Penh, he has been regularly returning to the city of his boyhood to hold workshops for aspiring illustrators. "It's important to try to approach the reality of our times...
...killing fields" is how Cambodian-born photojournalist Dith Pran described the grim heaps of human remains strewn across his homeland by the Khmer Rouge--a name later given to the 1984 Academy Award--winning film that depicted his 4 1/2 year struggle to survive as a prisoner of the brutal communist regime. A photographer and an interpreter for New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose work was the basis for the film, Dith was captured after staying in Phnom Penh to help document the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. When he escaped in 1979, he moved to New York City...
Convicted of the 1994 kidnapping and murder of three backpackers in Cambodia, the former Khmer Rouge commander Sam Bith was sentenced to life in prison in 2002. David Wilson of Australia, Mark Slater of the U.K. and Jean-Michel Braquet of France were on a train when it was ambushed by Khmer Rouge fighters. The rebels had been waging a guerrilla war in the jungle after the violent four-year reign of their leader, Pol Pot, ended in 1979. Several Cambodians were killed in the 1994 attack. The three travelers were held for three months, then executed when ransom negotiations...
...Thirty years have passed. But what happened then remains alive for me.' SIN KHOR, Cambodian whose husband and two brothers were killed under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, speaking at the first public session of a U.N.-backed genocide tribunal to try the country's former leaders in Phnom Penh...