Word: kon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That wasn't the Tahiti we wanted to see. We were looking for the Tahiti of Kon Tiki, of South Pacific, of Mutiny on the Bounty. One with lei-bearing natives, grass-thatched huts and cute little pigs running wild among the palm trees. And with miles and miles of pristine white sand beaches...
...other side of the globe, in a military ward of a hospital in the Cambodian town of Kampong Spoe, 25 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, a soldier named Neh Kon, 30, lies on a wooden pallet. He has lost both legs -- one just above the knee, the other just below. The stumps are wrapped in flyspecked, blood-soaked bandages. Neh Kon's wife sits beside him, holding their young child. Two weeks earlier, on patrol in Khmer Rouge territory, Neh Kon stepped on a mine. "By the time we get peace," he says, "a lot of people won't have...
This is what is meant by letting the military situation "play itself out." Such cool foreign-policy analysis rarely takes into account the suffering of people like Neh Kon and Top Sakhan. Nowhere is this truer than in Cambodia, whose modern misfortune has been to act as buffer and bargaining chip to nations more powerful than itself. Like Blanche DuBois, modern Cambodia has always depended for its survival on the kindness of strangers -- and the strangers have not always been kind. While diplomats negotiated their shameful and shameless deals, Cambodians were paying a fearful price: hundreds of thousands died between...