Word: pols
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kampuchea, formerly known as Cambodia, came under the control of a Communist group, the Khmer Rouge, in 1975 after a five-year civil war. Their leader, Pol Pot, turned the country into a charnel house by directing a murderous drive to eliminate his opponents. Some 2 million people were killed. Three years later Vietnamese forces, backed by the Soviet Union, swept through the country, setting up a puppet government that both the U.S. and the U.N. refuse to recognize. In addition to the Khmer Rouge, whose 35,000 guerrillas are supported by China, the armed opposition to the current regime...
...once seemed, at least to the Left, to have simple answers. Did the people of South Viet Nam really want Communism? The 1 million people who have risked their lives to escape the regime have stated their opinion. Did the American bombing of Cambodia, as some contend, really cause Pol Pot's unthinkable holocaust? A Khmer Rouge leader and theoretician named Khieu Samphan actually formulated the ideological foundation for the genocide long before the Americans started bombing. Pol Pot, once in power, set in motion the "Year Zero" program that led to the extermination of one-fourth of the population...
...Khmer Rouge still refers to him by the royal honorific Samdech (which means Lord), and he remains the nominal leader of the U.N.-recognized Kampuchean coalition government-in-exile. Although Sihanouk, 62, has outlasted the Lon Nol and Pol Pot governments that replaced him, he is not sanguine about prevailing over the Vietnamese invaders who control his country. Says he: "The Vietnamese will never withdraw. In one or two generations, my people and their children will not know what they are." The prince resides in mansions maintained for him by friendly governments in China, North Korea and Thailand, and often...
Kampuchea offers a more extreme example. The anti-Vietnamese (hence anti- Soviet) resistance there includes the Khmer Rouge forces of Pol Pot, the deposed tyrant of that benighted country. He might be a pawn on the international chessboard; but, having presided over the murder of as many as 2 million of his own countrymen, he can hardly be called a freedom fighter...
Chorn and Hong began their account with the 1975 overthrow of King Sihanouk by Pol Pot's Marxist Khmer Rouge forces. Cities were emptied as intellectuals, lighted skinned Cambodians, and monks were herded into farming camps where they were worked to death, they said...