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When they heard that I was going to Cambodia, my friends and family first worried about my safety, and then reminded me to take lots of pictures of Angkor Wat. They told me that whenever they read something about the country, the reports were more often than not about bombings and crime. But after my recent five-day holiday, I discovered that the country, which has been ravaged for years by civil war, is peaceful. Incidentally, the hostage drama in an international school in Siem Reap happened after I came back, but I know that it was just a one-off unfortunate...

TIME 100: AUGUST 23-30, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 7/8 Pol Pot Born May 19, 1925 in Prek Sbauv 1949 Studies left-wing politics in France 1953 Returns to Cambodia and joins Communist Party, which he leads a decade later 1975 Khmer Rouge is victor of civil war and occupies Phnom Penh; reign of terror kills 1.5 million in next four years 1979 Goes into hiding after Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia 1998 Dies April 15 in Cambodian jungle "We were like babies learning to walk," he said of his "mistakes" Cambodia's ruthless dictator cheated justice, dying before he could answer for the...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. ...................................................................................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR ON April 17, 1975, I was a young man working for CARE in Phnom Penh. As I drove to my office on the Avenue de France at 7 a.m., I saw a group of heavily armed black-clad zombies walking toward the city center and me. I reversed quickly and went to the Hotel Le Royal, which had been turned into a Red Cross neutral zone. A doctor friend signaled for me to go to the side entrance opposite the National Library. He waited inside while I climbed over the locked gate. He and his colleagues had set up...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Cleveland TODAY is my birthday. April 17 is what's on my driver's license and other documents. But I don't know for sure, and probably never will. All I know is that I was born in Cambodia, sometime during 1970. In Cambodia, we didn't celebrate birthdays, so while my mother and father knew the date, I had no reason to remember it. Instead, my early years were marked by joyous events like the New Year, the Water Festival and various Buddhist holidays. In the early 1970's, Southeast Asia was full of strife; the Soviet Union, China and the United...

1.8 million were slaughtered in Pol Pot's Year Zero atrocities of the 1970s. His victims still wait for justice. Imagine a tsunami 10 times as destructive as the one we witnessed in south-east Asia. Imagine that nearly 2 million people have been wiped off the face of the earth. Surely the world would be rushing to help, pouring in millions of dollars and bundles of compassion in the wake of such an unspeakable catastrophe? Just such a tragedy did happen more than a quarter of a century ago. Yet the people most affected by it received little in international help...

What was the Iraq war about?.... The anti-war position is still based on the same three claims as 2003. First, the war was illegal because it was not specifically sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. This means that the 18 mandatory resolutions that the council had passed on Iraq were not even worth the paper they were printed on. Nor is the anti-war party concerned about the fact that legally speaking Iraq had been at war against the United Nations since August 1990. The fact that the British parliament, the U.S. Congress and parliaments in a dozen other democratic...

This is a look into the minds of our enemies. Keep this in mind when you hear the left praise terrorism today. ===== Distortions at Fourth Hand Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman The Nation, June 25, 1977 Books & The Arts George C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter. Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. Monthly Review Press (1976). Francois Ponchaud. Cambodge Année Zéro. Julliard Press. Paris (1977). John Barron and Anthony Paul. Murder of a Gentle Land. Thomas Y. Crowell (1977). * * * On May 1, 1977, the New York Times published an account of the "painful problems of peace" in...

SEN. KERRY: I still have the hat that he gave me, and I hope the guy would come out of the woodwork and say, “I’m the guy who went up with John Kerry. We delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge on the coastline of Cambodia.”

American Friends? HardlyBy Gordon LambFrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2003 When the first Quakers arrived in America in the late 17th century, they were thought of as heretics, sometimes witches and routinely bizarre. Theirs was a religion based on the ideas the individual is supreme, that the relationship between God and man is a very private affair not to be regulated by government or society, that temperance ("all things in moderation") is a noble way to live one's life. Above all, it prized peace and stated that violence should be avoided if at all possible.The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has mastered...

Long-lost Khmer Rouge soldiers emerge from jungle   By Ek Madra LOUT, Cambodia (Reuters) - When Vietnamese troops overran his village in 1979, Romam Chhung Loeung, aKhmer Rouge guerrilla, had no option but to flee with friends and family into the dense jungle ofnortheast Cambodia. Twenty-five years later, the group emerged from the forest in clothes made of bark and leaves,unaware that the war was over, the Vietnamese had gone and Pol Pot was dead. In an extraordinary tale of human survival, the refugees lived on whatever scraps they could find inthe jungle, fearful of any contact with humans, who...

A Cambodian expert on the Khmer Rouge said Friday he has asked former U.S. President Bill Clinton to help raise funds for a long-delayed U.N.-backed tribunal to try surviving leaders of the genocidal regime. The Cambodian government and the United Nations first discussed creating an internationally assisted tribunal in 1997. Cambodia finally ratified a pact with the United Nations for its creation in October this year. Finding funds for the court is seen as the final hurdle. Earlier this month, the two sides agreed a budget of US$56.2 million (€42.4 million) for the court. The government will shoulder US$13.2 million...

October 31, 2004, 12:42 p.m. John Kerry's Other Vietnam WarWhy would we trust this man to be our president? By Stephen Morris John Kerry has fought this election campaign as a political moderate. Certainly his main foreign-policy advisers are moderate Democrats. But that campaign posture disguises his 34-year record in public life — which produced no legislative achievement, but featured a well-documented obsession with Vietnam and Cambodia that continues to the present day. Kerry made his four and a half months of service in Vietnam an electoral issue, but it's his 34 years of political activism on Vietnam and...

The Khmer Rouge followed a harsh brand of communism, killing nearly two million people in their bid to return Cambodia to Year Zero. Now they have a new faith: evangelical Christianity. Hundreds of former fighters have been baptised in the past year. The Khmer Rouge's mountain stronghold, the town of Pailin in south-west Cambodia, has four churches, all with pastors and growing congregations. At least 2,000 of those who followed Pol Pot, the guerrillas' former leader who died six years ago, now worship Jesus. Many new converts were involved in the bloody battles, massacres and forced labour programmes that led...

WRITTEN BY LT.COLONEL CHARLES WADE Wednesday, October 13, 2004 Even before the primary elections, President Bush’s military service was a political issue as was Senator Kerry’s military service which he touted and others questioned. Reporters continue to seek comment from candidates, political operatives, and pundits. It seems that everyone is an expert, and everyone has an answer. Some of the more interesting responses have come from Republican senators who typically begin by asserting that they honor Senator Kerry’s Viet Nam service, but… Honor: What is that all about? What virtues are honorable? More important, what virtues are both militarily and...

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - King Norodom Sihanouk, a quixotic ruler who freed Cambodia from its colonial shackles but failed to keep it out of the Vietnam War or the clutches of the brutal Khmer Rouge, has abdicated, his son says. The frail 83-year-old monarch, apparently frustrated by interminable political infighting in his impoverished nation, asked on Thursday that the search for a successor begin. Despite declining health and diminished political clout in his twilight years, Sihanouk looms large over everyday life, his smiling image adorning homes and shops across the land. But for all his popularity, the ailing monarch could...

The explanation for Senator John Kerry that he was in “Cambodia on Christmas 1968” is by now a famous if not humorous footnote to his overall portrayal of hi own Vietnam War experiences. It is seared in his own, and now our own, memories. However the statement by John Kerry of his whereabouts at that time begs a very important question. Did Kerry in fact violate a secret oath, made official by his signature, under penalty of severe punishment?William Shawcross, in his 1979 book Sideshow, detailing covert U.S. operations in Cambodia during the period of the Royal Cambodian government...

This might be another nail in the Kerry-in-Cambodia coffin: how often, other than the 1986 Senate statement, did the "5 miles inside Cambodia" claim include encounters with Khmer Rouge? Apparently there were only 3,000 khmer rouge soldiers in 1970(at the takeover; increasing to 50,000 by late 1972.) In 1969 they were set up to put pressure on the government in Phnom Penh, the capital. So they wouldn't be hanging around the Cambodia-Vietnam border. http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/banyan1.htm banyan1 to banyan6 http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0827552.html http://united-states.asinah.net/american-encyclopedia/wikipedia/k/kh/khmer_rouge.html At least Kerry has not fabricated his own name.

I am John Kerry. I was against the first Iraq war, I am against the second Iraq war, but I voted for it. Now I'm against it but I was for it. I support the UN. I'm against terrorism and against the Iraq war. But I voted for the Iraq war. So, I voted against the first war and supported the second war, wait... I'm against gay marriage but for gay unions. I support gays but think the SF mayor is wrong. I support gay marriages. No, wait, gay unions. I'm Catholic. Wait, I'm Jewish. My dad was Jewish. But...

MIDI - IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...in the midst of war In Cambodia, Christmas trees, blow in the winter breeze Lt. Kerry wonders what's in store It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...he's set to depart But he bangs his head in the door and he writes himself up for One more purple heart John Kerry's telling his guys there's someone to despize Richard Nixon, who sent them there Even though Nixon is not yet in office, John Kerry doesn't much care He's got to blame it...