Word: khmers
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...left my mobile team to go find food for myself. I was very hungry. I met two boys, and together we came upon a mass grave of 30 bodies. The Khmer Rouge soldiers found me. I told them that I had gone for firewood. But they punished me. They bound my hands to a bamboo stick behind my back. I was tied up without food for several days...
...first, these unorthodox interpretations of revenge seem less personal than traditional-an attitude inherited from an agrarian people accustomed to gentleness and passivity. To be sure, there was a long time, between the 9th and 15th centuries, when Khmer culture sustained a golden age-the period of Angkor Wat with its five peaked towers and massive stone gods. But fundamentally, Cambodia has remained a village nation, and the values of Pol Pot, not to mention his horrors, must have seemed as shocking as they were terrifying. The children in Khao I Dang have simple values. They have been taught...
These simple abstractions have a meaning for Cambodian children that is clearly disturbing to them. It is not as if the Khmer Rouge are an invading horde from a distant nation; the Khmer Rouge are their neighbors, their friends, themselves-which may account for the fact that so many of the children have nightmares in which they assume the roles of Pol Pot's soldiers. They have, in fact, known children who were Pol Pot's soldiers. The atrocities of the Khmer Rouge are thus acutely shocking. No, they say; the good spirit and the bad spirit cannot...
...takes it in her hands, and studies what she drew: three children gathering rice in a field. A Khmer Rouge soldier has a rifle trained on them, "to keep them working." Off to the left of he picture is the device. It looks like a wheel with a hollow hub and spokes leading out to the rim. Or perhaps it is a doughnut with lines on it. Three extra lines extend from the outer rim at he bottom, giving the thing the appearance of an insect. At the top there is yet another line sticking out at an angle...
...this respect, their situation is not terribly different from the Cambodian children at Khao I Dang?except that their hopes of resettlement are justifiably higher. But in temperament the Vietnamese children seem quite different from the Khmer. Generally they are wilder and more independent, either because of their greater freedom in the camps or because of something characteristic. Argyle 4 used to be a storage depot for Hong Kong's armed forces. Now it looks like a teen-age canteen, the kids loitering under the fluorescent lights like teen-agers in any poor city neighborhood, their self-possession equally dopey...