Word: penh
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...lives in the Tiger's Den, a fortified five-acre compound half an hour's drive from the capital, Phnom Penh. There, during the sporadic outbursts of fighting that threaten his rule, he retreats to his emergency war room, a small building with dark glass windows and aerials on the roof. Inside is a small bedroom. "You see this?" he asks, pointing to a closet with a mirror on the front. "Inside, there is a secret trapdoor into the basement. When you are a soldier, you have to know the ways of escape." He regrets he cannot go to restaurants...
...have come to nothing. He may not have personally ordered the killings, but some of his lieutenants are widely feared: victims have been found with eyes gouged out or hands cut off, clearly tortured before they were killed. Says Christophe Peschoux of the U.N. Human Rights office in Phnom Penh: "It is the chronic problem of Cambodia. They cannot manage conflict. Either they use intermediaries, or they reach for the gun. They cannot sit down and discuss differences...
...some kind of amnesty for themselves. Two weeks ago the Clinton Administration began drawing up plans for Pol Pot's capture and trial in an international court. Many who had trafficked with him--the Chinese, the Thais, the former Khmer Rouge cadres now running the government in Phnom Penh--had good reason to prefer his death to a revealing trial. But the 73-year-old's health had been failing. A stroke in 1995 paralyzed much of his left side, he was taking medicine for a heart complaint, and he suffered from chronic malaria. For the past three weeks...
...ignored the disaster he was inflicting on his people. Living in a deserted Phnom Penh, he was obsessed with his own safety, regularly changing houses in paranoid addiction to secrecy. He trusted very few comrades for long: he had 16,000 Khmer Rouge cadres tortured to death in the infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation center--"strings of traitors," as he saw them, who had to be "burned out." Yet when confronted with this by Thayer, Pol Pot claimed he had never heard of Tuol Sleng and showed no sign of remorse. "I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill...
...conundrum of the man is that he did not seem savage at all. Before fleeing into the jungle in 1963, the French-educated son of prosperous landowners, born Saloth Sar, taught school in Phnom Penh, and his former students remember him as a soft-spoken, even-tempered man who loved to recite his favorite poet, Verlaine. Francois Ponchaud, a French priest who first moved to Cambodia in 1965, says that when he heard the leader who called himself Pol Pot give a speech on the radio in 1977, "I remember saying to myself, this man knows how to speak...