Word: khmers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...photographer. He stayed seven weeks until he ran out of money, but that was long enough to get hooked. Cambodia?its war, its people, its tragedy?became an obsession. After a year of mandatory military service back home in France, he returned to Cambodia in 1975, just as the Khmer Rouge swept to power and plunged the country into the abyss. For the next 25 years Neveu would return to photograph whenever he could...
...Those of us who worked in Cambodia in the early 1970s as the noose tightened around Phnom Penh knew little of the Khmer Rouge. They were not like the North Vietnamese communists who held press receptions in Paris. When a few of our colleagues ventured into the forest on the promise of friendly contact with the Khmer Rouge, they never returned...
...Neveu was one of the few Western journalists who stayed behind as Phnom Penh fell. It's a revelation to look into the faces of these Khmer Rouge soldiers as they secured the broad boulevards of the capital and confiscated the weapons of the defeated army. Some are the faces of peasant children. Others, classically Khmer, are weathered and determined, like the busts on the walls of Angkor Wat. The body language of a few, clearly the bosses, is menacing. No need to read the captions: the atmosphere in these pictures portends the forced evacuation of the city...
...contrast, few good words can be found for the decade of Chinese, Western and Thai support for the Khmer Rouge following Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia. Compared with Pol Pot's regime, the Taliban is a model of humanitarianism. And at the start of a global war on terrorism, the U.S. won't want to remember its sponsorship of the contras in Nicaragua; or, as it's courting support from the most populous Muslim country on the planet, Indonesia, to be reminded of its 1958 support for the rebellion against Indonesia's infuriatingly nonaligned President Sukarno...
...Most moving of all is Solomon's portrayal of the pain of others in different cultures and classes. In Cambodia, he is "humbled to the ground" by the story of Phaly Nuon, forced to watch as her 12-year-old daughter was gang-raped and murdered by the Khmer Rouge. She came through the darkness by "forgetting, loving, working" and now helps others do the same. He visits Greenland, where depression affects as much as 80% of the population. Yet the Inuits' taboo against "being a cloud in the sky for other people" prevents them from seeking help. Solomon...