Word: saloth
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...Considering his dark contribution, history was remarkably kind to Pol Pot. Born Saloth Sar to a relatively prosperous rice-farming family, he had an eclectic education that included spells as both a Buddhist novitiate and a Roman Catholic schoolboy. A mediocre student, he won a scholarship to study in Paris largely because so few candidates applied. There, the future communist leader read the works of Marx ("I didn't really understand them," he confessed) and, more usefully, a Stalinist political primer that urged "pitiless repression" of all enemies. Inspired in part by the French Revolution, Pol Pot's hotchpotch ideology...
...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 boy, pious and delicate, who "never played with a gun" and often accompanied his mother to the pagoda. His own siblings claim not to have known that it was their courteous brother who was "Brother No. 1," the man who loosed a national madness...
...conundrum of the man is that he did not seem savage at all. Before fleeing into the jungle in 1963, the French-educated son of prosperous landowners, born Saloth Sar, 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...
...Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, has died in exactly the way guerrillas are not supposed to: peacefully in his sleep. By doing so, he cheated both his pursuers in Cambodia and his would-be international tribunal. It was perfect timing: "We could almost have arrested him tomorrow," said Youk Chhang of the Yale University project that was gathering evidence against the Khmer Rouge killer...
...leading Communists in the movement are Saloth Sar, leng Sary and Son Sen, who helped found the Cambodian Communist Party in 1951 during their student days in Paris. Most Western observers assume that the Communist Party is the Khmer Rouge's driving force...
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