Word: pols
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" (Milan Kundera), which is why it is necessary not to let the brief glimpse the world had of Pol Pot be the last, and why the West, America especially, ought to call for another Nuremberg. By bombing Cambodia in 1970 we destabilized the country and were largely responsible for Pol Pot's rise; we could use some memory jogging...
...have no idea where Peov is today. Seng was adopted by a family in Massachusetts, and the last I heard from him he was studying math in a university. If the two of them saw the televised pictures of Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge show trial, I cannot imagine what they thought...
...that any trial would explain why Pol Pot did what he did. One looked in vain into that age-spotted, teary-eyed face for the source of the inventiveness that dreams up a portable guillotine for children. He seemed so quiet, evil recollected in tranquillity. Time passing has made him look like an ordinary man, perhaps even to those who survived and know better...