Word: sleng
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years now, 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...
...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 boy, pious and delicate...
...have mother!" On the map given to visitors who go to the local tourist center, the text boasts of Cambodia's "wonderful history" and its status as a "land of tolerance and of plenty." Visit the "Choeung Ek Genocidal Center," it urges brightly of the rural equivalent to Tuol Sleng, where executioners once beat babies' heads against trees, adding that Cambodia will be "an inexhaustible source of memories to each one of you." The main sight at the center is a 10-story-high shrine made up of skulls...
...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 as part of the Vietnamese-backed government after Hanoi's 1979 invasion sent...
...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, not to kill people. Even...