Word: khmer
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Elusive and mysterious throughout his life, Pol Pot slipped just as stealthily into death, guarding his secrets to the end. The teenage guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge who had kept him under "house arrest" since a show trial last year blandly informed reporters that one of the world's most notorious mass murderers had died peacefully Wednesday night of a heart attack, discovered when his wife came to tuck in his mosquito...
...show trial of Pol Pot, but he was replaced by Ta Mok, another hard-liner impervious to change. Mok, a one-legged man known widely as "the Butcher," resisted the March 24 mutiny, and by last week he had clawed back some territory in Anlong Veng. But with the Khmer Rouge's having lost so many civilians, observers say, it is just a matter of time before its final rump--estimated at 500 to 1,000 soldiers--is dissolved. "Ta Mok has painted himself into a corner," says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia scholar at London's School of Oriental...
Last week two more people were added to the list of Pol Pot's victims. In March 1996, British mine clearer Christopher Howes and his interpreter, Houn Hourth, were abducted by Khmer Rouge guerrillas near the famous Angkor temples. Their fate had been a mystery, with reported live sightings as recently as last June, plus ransom hoaxes and all the usual false leads attached to a Westerner's missing in Indochina. But Ke Pauk and Yim Panna, two senior Khmer Rouge leaders who had been instrumental in organizing the Anlong Veng mutiny, told TIME in separate interviews that both...
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...
...time now to end the war--we need to open to the outside world," said Panna. "The Khmer Rouge policy has killed itself." After it killed so many others, its own demise is most welcome...