Word: khmers
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...never met Pol Pot, but I saw examples of his handiwork. In 1982, writing a story called "Children of War" for TIME, I visited the Khao I Dang refugee camp in southeast Thailand, across the border from Cambodia. There 40,000 Cambodians who had fled Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge awaited resettlement. They had made the camp into a village consisting of straw-roofed huts, gardens and wats...
...left them open to educational reform. In Cambodia, by contrast, Buddhism encouraged a belief in the ineluctability of karma and the idea that evil suffered is evil deserved. "The idea of karma goes very deep in this society, and I think that was part of the mentality of the Khmer Rouge when they were massacring people," said Francois Ponchaud, a priest who first went to Cambodia in 1965. "They believed their victims had made errors, political errors, and that killing them would allow them to be reborn as better people in their next lives." Pol Pot has admitted to some...
...arresting Pol Pot and staging the subsequent trial, the Khmer Rouge were hoping to sanitize themselves so they can move from their futile armed resistance into the political game. In the past two years, a steady stream of people, tired of the deprivations of life in jungle villages like Kdep Tmar, have been defecting from Khmer Rouge control. Pol Pot may even have tacitly approved his trial for the sake of the survival of his movement...
...late 1970s, had not been seen by anyone from outside his country in twenty years; persistent and conflicting rumors this year have said either that he was dead, or that one or another splinter group had him in custody. Turns out, according to Thayer, that Pol Pot's former Khmer Rouge comrades have held him prisoner since June, when a violent split in the group developed as it negotiated peace terms with Cambodia's government. On Saturday, his alleged captors said via their clandestine radio station that Pol Pot had been sentenced to life for his crimes against the Cambodian...
...Khmer Rouge forces started trickling into Phnom Penh, Hun Sen, who had defected from the Maoist group in the late 1970s, became worried, and skirmishes broke out between the rival armies. "I did not want to leave," Prince Ranariddh later told a French reporter, "but my generals came to me and said, 'Hun Sen is going to attack, sire.'" The prince fled to Paris two weeks ago, and Hun Sen's troops fanned out through Phnom Penh. By early last week, they had control of the city. Two of Ranariddh's top aides were arrested and executed; others have gone...