Word: pol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Wearing a white polo shirt and with his graying hair neatly combed, the rail-thin 65-year-old appeared relaxed as he rose, pressed his palms together and addressed the United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal on Tuesday at the first public hearing of a former member of Pol Pot's brutal regime...
...female intellectuals, Ponnary and Thirith were sent to study in Paris in the 1950s where they met and later married two other Cambodian students - creating a foursome that went on to form the nucleus of one of the world's most brutal regimes. The elder Khieu sister, Ponnary, married Pol Pot, leader of the fanatical Khmer Rouge movement which fought its way to bloody victory in Cambodia in 1975 and then established a regime under which an estimated 1.7 million people died by 1979. Her younger sister, Thirith, wedded Pol Pot's confidant and Khmer Rouge foreign minister, Ieng Sary...
...Monday marked one of the last chapters in this dark family history as Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith were arrested on charges of crimes against humanity, to be brought before a U.N.-backed tribunal set up to try the surviving leaders of Pol Pot's regime. Gendarmes and police special forces sealed off the area around the couple's large villa down a leafy side street in Phnom Penh, where they had lived as macabre local celebrities since striking surrender deals with the Cambodian government...
...Neither Ponnary nor Pol Pot lived long enough to see the tribunal established; Ponnary was bedridden and suffering from insanity when she passed away peacefully in 2003 at the age of 83. She had lived out her final years in the Iengs' villa, with its manicured lawns and small ornamental pond, oblivious of the fact that Pol Pot had remarried many years earlier. Pol Pot himself died in 1998, denounced by his own followers, in a jungle shack near the Thai border...
...some 30 years since the Khmer Rouge regime committed its crimes, the arrest of the elderly pair - Sary is 82 and Thirith is 75 - was little consolation. "Why are you only coming to ask questions now?" she asks, noting that there seemed to be more media attention on Pol Pot's terrifying reign now than there was when he was actually in power. "[The regime] was a long time ago already...