Word: khmers
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...really on his kind of politics. There are no political opponents, only enemies to be eliminated; no debate, only plots to survive. "If you lead with your big pieces, you put them in danger." He knows about danger. He followed and abandoned the genocidal dictator Pol Pot, survived the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and civil war to become master of a country haunted by 1.7 million unavenged ghosts. For Hun Sen, power means survival, and it has only two settings: all or nothing...
...living in a prison without walls," he tells TIME. Within the compound, he often works till 1 a.m. or 2 a.m, and last week he was busily pitting his instinct to survive against the U.S. State Department's preferred way of dealing with the Khmer Rouge's bloody legacy. His only relaxation is chess. Grinning, he says, "I usually...
...huge video screen to 5,000 guests at tables spread around his house in the Tiger's Den. Hun Sen was doubly happy, he said in his speech, not only because of his daughter's marriage but also because that very day his troops had arrested Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge leader also known as "the Butcher," the last of the rebel commanders still at large since the death of the fugitive Pol Pot in the jungle last year. But diplomats at the feast were less than pleased. Hun Sen said Ta Mok was to be tried in a Cambodian...
Only two years ago, Hun Sen requested U.N. assistance in setting up an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for some of the worst crimes against humanity this century has seen. Last month three independent U.N. jurists presented him with a report on how 20 to 30 top Khmer Rouge leaders could be put on trial in another Asian country. But after two decades of denouncing the "genocidal regime of Pol Pot," Hun Sen is balking. "We have no confidence in an international court of law," he says...
...Prime Minister begins talking about himself in the third person. "Hun Sen has nothing to lose by a trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders--only to gain," he says. "The problem is not the Khmer Rouge, but their relations with others. If we didn't need national reconciliation, I would not be scared of a trial. We have to be cautious to avoid any panic among leaders of the Khmer Rouge." Hun Sen fears that a large-scale trial would disturb the balance he has achieved, one that has rabid guerrillas, royalists and former communists from his own party...