Word: potful
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Those who sought to bring Pol Pot to justice hoped to help break the cycle of violence. With his untimely death, Pol Pot performed one last disservice to his people: his specter will continue to haunt the Cambodian psyche for years to come...
...Pot ignored the disaster he was inflicting on his people. Living in a deserted Phnom Penh, he was obsessed with his own safety, regularly changing houses in paranoid addiction to secrecy. He trusted very few comrades for long: he had 16,000 Khmer Rouge cadres tortured to death in the infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation center--"strings of traitors," as he saw them, who had to be "burned out." Yet when confronted with this by Thayer, Pol Pot claimed he had never heard of Tuol Sleng and showed no sign of remorse. "I came to carry out the struggle...
...taught school in Phnom Penh, and his former students remember him as a soft-spoken, even-tempered man who loved to recite his favorite poet, Verlaine. Francois Ponchaud, a French priest who first moved to Cambodia in 1965, says that when he heard the leader who called himself Pol Pot give a speech on the radio in 1977, "I remember saying to myself, this man knows how to speak. Not angry shouting, but with a gentle, well-modulated voice...
Even after his record of genocide was known the world over, Pol Pot inspired affection among the countryfolk who harbored him for nearly 20 years. "The people found him very kind--I mean the poor people," said Mit Sim, head of Pol Pot's bodyguards in northwestern Cambodia until 1994. During a visit to the area last fall, Sim led the way uphill to the remains of Pol Pot's house and pointed out a large rock at the edge of a nearby cliff. "This is where he would come and sit in the evening," said Sim. "When...
...Pot's equanimity in the face of the unaccountable brutality he unleashed defies analysis. When writing his biography, Brother Number One, historian David Chandler says he often had the uneasy feeling that Pol Pot "was just outside my line of vision observing me." The dictator's legacy is equally disturbing, says Chandler, pointing to the bloody coup staged by one-time Khmer Rouge lieutenant Hun Sen last year and the continuing political assassinations as the country prepares for elections in July that Hun Sen hopes will legitimize his regime. "In Cambodia you simply get rid of people...