A leftist hero

“In Chakrey village we could hear the screams from the forest nearby,” said one survivor cited in “The Pol Pot Regime,” a book by the historian Ben Kiernan. “The victims’ clothes were distributed to us the next day.”

Ms. Im Chaem also supervised construction of huge waterworks to increase rice production, including two dams. According to prosecutors, one was built entirely by hand in three months by 1,300 slave laborers subsisting on tiny portions of rice porridge.

She tells the story differently. In a 2012 interview with the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent research group, she said she had been called upon to “solve problems” because she had a knack for organizing workers and supervising rice cultivation. She said that poor conditions were endemic before she arrived in the area, and that she had improved things.

WTF? Are you serious?