Word: khmer
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...another ward of the same hospital lies a civilian woodcutter named Top Sakhan, 44. He is the father of a boy, 10, and a girl, 7. A week before, Khmer Rouge guerrillas jumped him in a nearby forest. For no particular reason, they shot him in both legs with an AK-47 and left him lying there. "I called after them, 'Why don't you just kill me?' " Top Sakhan says. "But they didn't answer." Doctors saved his right leg and amputated the left. "His life is finished," whispers the hospital administrator...
...have not always been kind. While diplomats negotiated their shameful and shameless deals, Cambodians were paying a fearful price: hundreds of thousands died between 1970 and 1975, when Cambodia became a theater of the Vietnam War, a million or more (out of a population of 7 million) in the Khmer Rouge's ensuing four-year reign of terror...
...Vietnamese occupation of Phnom Penh in 1979 forced the Khmer Rouge from power and replaced them with a pro-Hanoi and pro-Soviet government currently headed by Prime Minister Hun Sen, 39, a poorly educated but extraordinarily bright former Khmer Rouge officer who lost an eye during the 1970-75 Cambodian war. Since that government took office, the toll in the country has been markedly lower: a few dozen or so limbs and lives lost each week as the deposed Khmer Rouge and other Cambodian factions -- each representing combinations of outside support -- fight to regain power. Vietnam ostensibly withdrew...
...fairly plentiful again in the large central market, as are Heineken beer, gold jewelry and Casio calculators. Prices tend to fluctuate with rumors of peace. But, says Le Hor, a proprietor at one of the market's stalls, "here we are relatively safe and don't think the Khmer Rouge are dangerous." Then he adds, "I'm not sure they feel so confident in the ((western)) border areas...
...northwest of Phnom Penh, reminders of the never ending war are abundant. Not long ago, a handful of adventuresome American tourists at the fabled Angkor Wat ruins in the northwest were startled to see an army truck speed by, carrying wounded from the front in Oddar Meanchey province, a Khmer Rouge stronghold only about 35 miles away...