Word: khmers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979, spreading like a virus from the jungles until they controlled the entire country, only to systematically dismantle and destroy it in the name of a Communist agrarian ideal. Today, more than 30 years after Vietnamese soldiers removed the Khmer Rouge from power, the first genocide trials will start - a bittersweet note of progress in an impoverished nation still struggling to rehabilitate its crippled economic and human resources...
...Khmer Rouge took root in Cambodia's northeastern jungles as early as the 1960s, a guerrilla group driven by communist ideals that nipped the periphery of government-controlled areas. The flash point came when Cambodia's leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was deposed in a military coup in 1970 and leaned on the Khmer Rouge for support. The prince's imprimatur lent the movement legitimacy, although while he would nominally serve as head of state, he spent much of the Khmer Rouge's rule under house arrest. As the country descended into civil war, the Khmer Rouge presented themselves...
...pacifist talk belied a sinister agenda, one that would remain hidden to the outside world for years. When the Khmer Rouge succeeded in capturing the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in 1975, they evacuated the entire population of the city - more than 2.5 million people - to camps in the countryside. Similar evacuations took place every time the Khmer Rouge took over a new city...
...Thai Foreign Ministry has said it may airlift out Thai nationals, should they have trouble exiting Cambodia. For his part, Hun Sen has already vowed to make the Preah Vihar region a "death zone" if the Thai army doesn't back down. Given the historic enmities between the Khmer and Siamese empires, threats of violence aren't easily ignored. After all, the modern-day town near the ancient Angkor Wat temple complex is called Siem Reap, which in Khmer means "Siam defeated...
...Instead, the rebels released everyone except for Howes and Houn. Both men were killed a few days later on the orders of the ruthless Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok. It took two years for British detectives to positively confirm that Howes had been executed and his body cremated on a makeshift pyre of wood and gasoline...