He leans forward and pauses.
Every leader does good things and bad things.
Bad things were done. He ought to know. Like countless Cambodians, Meas Tung joined the Khmer Rouge as a teenager during the early 1960s. At age 13, he was swept up in the organization's romanticism about ethnic Khmer pride, and its calls for people to get back to the land. He became a combat soldier at 17, and tells me he helped plant some of the hundreds of thousands of land mines, booby traps and explosive devices still buried in fields across Cambodia.