What Lingers After Decades of Reporting on the Cambodian Genocide

I had seen trauma before, but never an entire traumatized nation. All the adults I met were survivors or former killers.

“Where were you tortured, and when?”

It was an unremarkable question at a trial whose raw material was cruelty and suffering, during four years of brutal rule in Cambodia by Khmer Rouge fanatics.

Was the witness whipped, beaten, waterboarded, suffocated in a plastic bag? Did his torturer poke a stick into his wounds, were his toenails pulled out, were electric wires attached to his ears?

In full: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/reader-center/khmer-rouge-genocide-trial.html

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