Word: khmers
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Additional elements included a rehabilitation center where artificial limbs lay stacked for those whose hands, arms and legs had been hacked off by the Khmer Rouge, and classrooms where children who had escaped from mobile work units drew pictures of their experiences: soldiers plunging bayonets into pregnant women tied to trees, or plucking out a captive's liver with a specially devised hook...
...drawing was of some children in a jungle clearing. A Khmer Rouge soldier had his rifle trained on them. Off to the side of the drawing was a large circle with four lines extending from the outer rim to the center, where there was a hole like a wheel's hub. Leading away from one part of the outer rim were three lines, and from another part a single line with a small ring...
...have no idea where Peov is today. Seng was adopted by a family in Massachusetts, and the last I heard from him he was studying math in a university. If the two of them saw the televised pictures of Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge show trial, I cannot imagine what they thought...
...show is a dignified call for help as well as an assertion of past cultural achievement. After 30 years of civil war and the genocidal madness of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot, Cambodia's very name reeks of slaughter. The West needs to be reminded of its immense cultural heritage, and of the struggle--against all odds--to preserve it. Only a handful of Western historians and curators, mainly in France and America, are experts in ancient Cambodian art, and its fate within Cambodia for the past few decades has skirted catastrophe. Much of it has been looted...
...civil war all but destroyed Cambodia's frail, poorly funded cultural infrastructure; French-trained Khmer curators were murdered; the National Museum was reduced to a bat-infested wreck, its roof caving in, and abandoned for four years after 1975. (It has since been partially repaired by the Australian government, but, as one of the contributors to the show's excellent catalog bluntly observes, "The museum staff lacks the expertise and resources to repair and conserve the sculpture, or to catalogue the collection. [This] can only be rectified with international help.") As if this weren't enough, a major problem around...