Word: pol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...never met Pol Pot, but I saw examples of his handiwork. In 1982, writing a story called "Children of War" for TIME, I visited the Khao I Dang refugee camp in southeast Thailand, across the border from Cambodia. There 40,000 Cambodians who had fled Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge awaited resettlement. They had made the camp into a village consisting of straw-roofed huts, gardens and wats...
...himself as a skeleton. He would be about 25 today. As a boy of 10, he had dark, serious eyes and large ears that gave his face a scholarly look. His father, a doctor, had been executed by a firing squad because he was an intellectual and thus threatened Pol Pot's primitivist ideology. People who wore glasses also were killed because it was assumed they could read...
...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...
...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...