In late 1998, Peng Samonn, a war-weary Khmer Rouge cadre who had spent decades fighting in the jungles on the Thai border, got wind of a secret plot to desert the notorious ultra-communists and join Cambodia’s government forces.
“A Khmer Rouge commander told me about divisions and that there would be a defection soon, so to spread the news,” 70-year-old Samonn said earlier this month, sitting outside the same home he lived in under the Khmer Rouge.
“But if another faction had found out, I would have been killed. I shared it with 10 families and we all fled.”
