Word: khmer
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...Cambodia. Largely on foot, with occasional hitched rides on oxcarts and trucks, the group made its way to the northwest, a distance of some 250 miles. Along the way, Seng's wife died. Finally, in May -- more than four years after he got his first close look at a Khmer Rouge guerrilla -- Seng and his ragtag, nearly starved company of survivors crossed into Thailand. Today they live in the Washington, D.C., area, where Seng is a successful taxi driver...
...sons labored twelve hours a day and more in the paddies, although Seng's wife was too weak to work. At that, they were lucky: in the same commune, perhaps a third of the 3,000 workers died of disease, starvation and overwork, or were executed by their Khmer Rouge overlords...
...thousands, that celebration may have been the last happy moment of their lives. For millions, including Seng and his family, it marked the beginning of a nightmare of death and suffering. Before nightfall on that first day, the Khmer Rouge were rounding up "traitors" (those who had served in the previous government) and "collaborators" (professionals, people who spoke foreign languages, teachers and the like). Most were summarily executed or tortured to death. By the next morning, the Communist government had begun the complete evacuation of the cities, which Cambodia's new rulers regarded as cesspools of bourgeois corruption. Nearly...
About 35 miles south of Phnom Penh, the great throng ground to a temporary and unexplained halt, like a train whose engine had broken down. For several months, the Khmer Rouge did not seem to know what to do next. Some of the , evacuees grew ill and died. Others wandered away to unknown fates. Most were assigned to villages where they worked in return for food rations...
...named Neh Kon, 30, lies on a wooden pallet. He has lost both legs -- one just above the knee, the other just below. The stumps are wrapped in flyspecked, blood-soaked bandages. Neh Kon's wife sits beside him, holding their young child. Two weeks earlier, on patrol in Khmer Rouge territory, Neh Kon stepped on a mine. "By the time we get peace," he says, "a lot of people won't have legs...