Word: potted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thoughts are really on his kind of politics. There are no political opponents, only enemies to be eliminated; no debate, only plots to survive. "If you lead with your big pieces, you put them in danger." He knows about danger. He followed and abandoned the genocidal dictator Pol Pot, survived the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and civil war to become master of a country haunted by 1.7 million unavenged ghosts. For Hun Sen, power means survival, and it has only two settings: all or nothing...
...said in his speech, not only because of his daughter's marriage but also because that very day his troops had arrested Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge leader also known as "the Butcher," the last of the rebel commanders still at large since the death of the fugitive Pol Pot in the jungle last year. But diplomats at the feast were less than pleased. Hun Sen said Ta Mok was to be tried in a Cambodian court, not in the international tribunal the U.N. has been planning for months, and he did not talk about arresting other Khmer Rouge leaders...
...worst crimes against humanity this century has seen. Last month three independent U.N. jurists presented him with a report on how 20 to 30 top Khmer Rouge leaders could be put on trial in another Asian country. But after two decades of denouncing the "genocidal regime of Pol Pot," Hun Sen is balking. "We have no confidence in an international court of law," he says...
...company commander in the Khmer Rouge with a pistol strapped to his hip, fighting the U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol. He survived the war although he lost his left eye, and he then fled to Vietnam to escape bitter purges by an increasingly paranoid Pol Pot. Many colleagues who fell afoul of Pol Pot were tortured to death in the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. "I lost my first child during Pol Pot's time," Hun Sen says. "One of my in-laws was killed and many of my uncles and nephews." He returned to Cambodia...
...outlasted Pol Pot. The remaining Khmer Rouge leaders are decrepit, living in a small backwater town, their forces depleted. But the Khmer Rouge taught Hun Sen fear, and they taught it well. In the end, it is fear that stands between Hun Sen and the trials. "If we just kill these people, will we have peace?" he asks. But if he waits too long, fear will become his epitaph. Cambodia cannot wait forever for justice. "This is the only chance we have to set up a system so people will respect the law," says Youk Chhang, head of the Documentation...