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...come away charmed by the lush beauty of the countryside and the smiling people. But the violent side of Cambodian life can manifest itself almost without warning. "Cambodians have this darkness, which is part of the shadow of their sweetness," says David Chandler, who has written a biography of Pol Pot and several histories of the country. "Many of us who keep going there still find it hard to understand." Chandler observes that Pol Pot, with his gentle voice, never failed to charm those he met. He liked to quote French poetry. This was the same...
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...
BANGKOK, Thailand: Pol Pot, the infamous and reclusive Cambodian leader, has been tried and sentenced to life in prison at a mass rally in Anlong Veng, according to Nate Thayer, a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review who witnessed the show trial on Friday. ABC News will broadcast Thayer's videotape tonight on Nightline. Until Friday, the Cambodian leader who led the bloody revolution that killed 2 million of his countrymen in the late 1970s, had not been seen by anyone from outside his country in twenty years; persistent and conflicting rumors this year have said either that...
Perhaps the hope was always an illusion. After the Siamese-twin government replaced the Vietnamese-installed regime, the chaotic and corrupt new administration accomplished almost nothing except to set up Ranariddh and Hun Sen as competing warlords. The situation became increasingly unstable when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, the other pocket of Cambodian power for 19 years, started to fall apart last year in its hidden jungle exile. First Prime Minister Ranariddh, son of venerable King Sihanouk, started negotiations with the disintegrating guerrilla group, offering jobs in his army, which was far smaller than Second Prime Minister...