Word: pol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pol Pot is visibly weak now, suffering from recurrent bouts of malaria and, reportedly, a bad heart condition. But even so, there was something unreal about the televised jungle trial. When the rehearsed ranting of his accusers was finished, young soldiers respectfully guided the vilified leader to a waiting vehicle, which took him to a house in the jungle, possibly the last time the outside world will ever see him. Gone too was any likelihood that he will ever be brought to real justice for instigating some of this century's most unspeakable crimes...
When the Vietnamese communists took Saigon in 1975, they put their "class enemies" into re-education camps. In neighboring Cambodia, Pol Pot built extermination camps. Teachers, doctors, people who could speak a foreign language, even people who wore glasses, were purged as he sought to reduce all of Cambodia to the level of the peasant class. The Vietnamese could be cruel captors, but their Confucian heritage 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...
...weak, make yourself pitied. Cambodians are deeply insecure, aware that the proud temple-building empire of Angkor, which covered much of Southeast Asia in the 12th century, has shrunk to the small area of today's Cambodia. This insecurity has prompted much irrational aggression. In 1978 Pol Pot launched attacks on Vietnam, bragging that one Cambodian soldier could kill eight Vietnamese. It is a behavior pattern that is deeply rooted in the national psyche: to hold power one must show the utmost ferocity and single-mindedness and never reveal weakness...
...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...
...Pol Pot did not kill 1 million people on his own, and few Cambodians cheered as the man once called Brother No. 1 was carted out of view...