Word: penh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Museum of Genocidal Crime, as the road signs call it, has long been one of the principal tourist sites in Phnom Penh, long enough for locals to have stubbed out scores of cigarettes in the eyes of Pol Pot in one photograph. But this spring the monument to the past came into the news again when the man who had overseen the torture for four years, Kang Khek Ieu, generally known as Duch, was suddenly discovered, by foreign journalists, in a western Cambodian village. He was running a crushed-ice stall in the countryside and had certificates of baptism...
...potholes extend psychically too, of course: almost every Cambodian you talk to has huge gaps in his life story, long silences. Since Pol Pot eliminated all those with education or knowledge of the outside world, Phnom Penh became a city of country people, as well as a city of orphans, and you still cannot find doctors or teachers or lawyers of a certain age. No one knows what his neighbors suffered, or how exactly they survived. To survive today, school-age girls still sell themselves for $2 a visit--ignoring what may be the fastest-rising AIDS-infection rate...
...physically, has been so overpowering that every decision he makes--from a car journey to the appointment of a general--is a function of "Will this make me safer?" He started with nothing. The villagers in his native Peam Koh Sna, four hours up the Mekong River from Phnom Penh, remember him as a clever, quiet boy. He displayed "a talent to persuade people by speaking," according to Chin Tho, 58, who farms tobacco along the river. But Hun Sen's family was poorer than average, and he never finished school. To this day, he is more at ease campaigning...
...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 as part of the Vietnamese-backed government after Hanoi's 1979 invasion sent Pol Pot and his forces into the jungle. From those...