Word: khmers
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...years now, Tuol Sleng has been a notorious memorial to the Khmer Rouge killers who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Bump down a broken back street in the capital of Phnom Penh, and you come upon a former girls' school, bare except for the rusted beds on which Pol Pot's men interrogated victims, and the U.S. munitions cans they used as toilets. Display cases are littered with the hoes and shovels and iron staves they used to brain people to death; along the walls, hundreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed...
Like many of his Khmer Rouge comrades, Duch, now 56 and in detention, had been a teacher (educated, it seems, in schools funded by U.S. foreign aid); unlike them, though, he admitted that he had "done very bad things in my life." More recently, he claimed, he had been working for international relief organizations, helping out in local camps. "He was our best worker," said a refugee official when told that the man who had tried to protect children from typhoid was the notorious torturer who had once written "Kill them all" over lists of nine-year-olds...
...lightless labyrinth of sorts, in which every path leads to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. Last year Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in for a while to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as the Butcher, was captured in March and now awaits trial. For the first time...
...company commander in the Khmer Rouge with a pistol strapped to his hip, fighting the U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol. He survived the war although he lost his left eye, and he then fled to Vietnam to escape bitter purges by an increasingly paranoid Pol Pot. Many colleagues who fell afoul of Pol Pot were tortured to death in the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. "I lost my first child during Pol Pot's time," Hun Sen says. "One of my in-laws was killed and many of my uncles and nephews." He returned to Cambodia...
...outlasted Pol Pot. The remaining Khmer Rouge leaders are decrepit, living in a small backwater town, their forces depleted. But the Khmer Rouge taught Hun Sen fear, and they taught it well. In the end, it is fear that stands between Hun Sen and the trials. "If we just kill these people, will we have peace?" he asks. But if he waits too long, fear will become his epitaph. Cambodia cannot wait forever for justice. "This is the only chance we have to set up a system so people will respect the law," says Youk Chhang, head of the Documentation...