Word: potted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tuol Sleng has been a notorious memorial to the Khmer Rouge killers who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Bump down a broken back street in the capital of Phnom Penh, and you come upon a former girls' school, bare except for the rusted beds on which Pol Pot's men interrogated victims, and the U.S. munitions cans they used as toilets. Display cases are littered with the hoes and shovels and iron staves they used to brain people to death; along the walls, hundreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed or terrified, recalling...
...Museum of Genocidal Crime, as the road signs call it, has long been one of the principal tourist sites in Phnom Penh, long enough for locals to have stubbed out scores of cigarettes in the eyes of Pol Pot in one photograph. But this spring the monument to the past came into the news again when the man who had overseen the torture for four years, Kang Khek Ieu, generally known as Duch, was suddenly discovered, by foreign journalists, in a western Cambodian village. He was running a crushed-ice stall in the countryside and had certificates of baptism...
...country in which every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself lost in a lightless labyrinth of sorts, in which every path leads to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. Last year Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in for a while to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large, Ta Mok, a one-legged...
...potholes extend psychically too, of course: almost every Cambodian you talk to has huge gaps in his life story, long silences. Since Pol Pot eliminated all those with education or knowledge of the outside world, Phnom Penh became a city of country people, as well as a city of orphans, and you still cannot find doctors or teachers or lawyers of a certain age. No one knows what his neighbors suffered, or how exactly they survived. To survive today, school-age girls still sell themselves for $2 a visit--ignoring what may be the fastest-rising AIDS-infection rate...
...Cambodian who returned here from Canada. "People tell me, 'Why do you want to look at these things? It's easier to forget.' But I want to understand why it happened"--he means the self-extermination of his country--"so it will never happen again." When Pol Pot died, Keo Lundi, from the Tuol Sleng center, says, "I spent my own money to go to his province, to talk to his brother and sister. I wanted to know what he was like as a child." What he found was that Pol Pot--born Saloth Sar--was a notably mild-mannered...