Word: pols
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...Seng (see above photograph) has survived quite well for someone who, when he escaped into Thailand two years ago, was nearly dead from malnutrition. His father, a doctor, was killed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge soldiers. The policies of the Khmer Rouge included the execution of Cambodian intellectuals. Kim Seng watched his father being taken away in a helicopter, and for a long time in the refugee camp at Khao I Dang, all he drew were pictures of helicopters...
...mother died afterward, of starvation, with Kim Seng at her side. He was eight at the time, a member of one of the mobile work teams of children instituted by Pol Pot for their ''education and well-being." The night before his mother died he was taken to her in a nearby village. He noticed how swollen she was, how frail and tired, and that she was breathing with great difficulty. Kim Seng's mother took his hand and told him that he would very soon be an orphan. Then she said: "Always remember your father...
...passivity. To be sure, there was a long time, between the 9th and 15th centuries, when Khmer culture sustained a golden age-the period of Angkor Wat with its five peaked towers and massive stone gods. But fundamentally, Cambodia has remained a village nation, and the values of Pol Pot, not to mention his horrors, must have seemed as shocking as they were terrifying. The children in Khao I Dang have simple values. They have been taught to honor the land, the country, their dead ancestors, their parents and their village...
That irony is not entirely consoling to the West. For one thing, even when Communists are fighting among themselves, their conflicts threaten to spread. The ongoing civil war in Cambodia, between the China-backed forces of Pol Pot and the Vietnamese puppet regime of President Heng Samrin could spill over into Thailand. A new outbreak of war between Viet Nam and China could embroil all of Southeast Asia...
...falling-out in 1979 between Viet Nam and the Maoist Thai Communist Party. Hanoi expelled Thai guerrillas from their sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos and confiscated their weapons and ammunition. The Thai Communists lost a second ally soon after when China sought support for Cambodia's Pol Pot regime from the five members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to which Thailand belongs. ASEAN in turn demanded that Peking minimize its relations with Southeast Asian Communist parties. As a result, it has sharply reduced its support of Thai insurgents...