Word: pols
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...Pol Pot ever said was that he was creating a "pure" communist society and whatever he did was done for his country. "My conscience is clear," he told journalist Nate Thayer in a rare interview last October, never admitting his appalling conduct, never regretting the countless executions, the million more dead of starvation and overwork, the living population maimed in body or mind, the entire country reduced to Stone Age survival. Nineteen years after the hated Vietnamese drove him back into the jungle, the evil that he did lives on in Cambodia's traumatized society, poisoned politics, governmental misrule...
Elusive and mysterious throughout his life, Pol Pot slipped just as stealthily into death, guarding his secrets to the end. The teenage guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge who had kept him under "house arrest" since a show trial last year blandly informed reporters that one of the world's most notorious mass murderers had died peacefully Wednesday night of a heart attack, discovered when his wife came to tuck in his mosquito...
...timing of his demise was almost too uncanny, coming just as the beleaguered remnants of his once terrifying movement prepared to hand him over to Western justice in exchange for some kind of amnesty for themselves. Two weeks ago the Clinton Administration began drawing up plans for Pol Pot's capture and trial in an international court. Many who had trafficked with him--the Chinese, the Thais, the former Khmer Rouge cadres now running the government in Phnom Penh--had good reason to prefer his death to a revealing trial. But the 73-year-old's health had been failing...
Last week two more people were added to the list of Pol Pot's victims. In March 1996, British mine clearer Christopher Howes and his interpreter, Houn Hourth, were abducted by Khmer Rouge guerrillas near the famous Angkor temples. Their fate had been a mystery, with reported live sightings as recently as last June, plus ransom hoaxes and all the usual false leads attached to a Westerner's missing in Indochina. But Ke Pauk and Yim Panna, two senior Khmer Rouge leaders who had been instrumental in organizing the Anlong Veng mutiny, told TIME in separate interviews that both...
Asked why Howes was killed, Panna said, "That was Pol Pot's rule. He didn't want any foreigners involved in our society." It was of course this hostility to outsiders that kept the Khmer Rouge stuck in the jungle while the rest of Cambodia benefited from rapid economic development fueled in part by foreign investment. And it was resentment at missing out on this progress that prompted the latest, final rebellion in the Khmer Rouge ranks...