Word: khmer
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STILL DEAD, THOUGH Pol Pot died of an overdose, not a heart attack as Cambodian officials claimed last April, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review. The late dictator swallowed tranquilizers and antimalarial pills upon discovering that a Khmer Rouge comrade, Ta Mok, planned to turn him over to the U.S. for trial. Ta Mok offered to make Pol Pot available in March, the article by journalist Nate Thayer claimed. But U.S. officials declined, saying they needed more time to prepare to arrest...
...hand him over to Western justice in exchange for some kind of amnesty for themselves. Two weeks ago the Clinton Administration began drawing up plans for Pol Pot's capture and trial in an international court. Many who had trafficked with him--the Chinese, the Thais, the former Khmer Rouge cadres now running the government in Phnom Penh--had good reason to prefer his death to a revealing trial. But the 73-year-old's health had been failing. A stroke in 1995 paralyzed much of his left side, he was taking medicine for a heart complaint, and he suffered...
When the communist guerrilla, then known only as Brother No. 1, took power in 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...
...ignored the disaster he was inflicting on his people. Living in a deserted Phnom Penh, he was obsessed with his own safety, regularly changing houses in paranoid addiction to secrecy. He trusted very few comrades for long: he had 16,000 Khmer Rouge cadres tortured to death in the infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation center--"strings of traitors," as he saw them, who had to be "burned out." Yet when confronted with this by Thayer, Pol Pot claimed he had never heard of Tuol Sleng and showed no sign of remorse. "I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill...
...defies analysis. When writing his biography, Brother Number One, historian David Chandler says he often had the uneasy feeling that Pol Pot "was just outside my line of vision observing me." The dictator's legacy is equally disturbing, says Chandler, pointing to the bloody coup staged by one-time Khmer Rouge lieutenant Hun Sen last year and the continuing political assassinations as the country prepares for elections in July that Hun Sen hopes will legitimize his regime. "In Cambodia you simply get rid of people...