They Smashed Banks for Pol Pot. Now They’re Founding Them.<br />By JULIA WALLACEMARCH 22, 2017<br />MALAI, Cambodia — For years, Tep Khunnal was the devoted personal secretary of Pol Pot, staying loyal to the<br />charismatic ultracommunist leader even as the Khmer Rouge movement collapsed around them in the late 1990s.<br />Mr. Dim Sok, 65, was a nearly illiterate farmer when he became a revolutionary in 1970,<br />fighting in the jungles with the Khmer Rouge for five years before they seized power.<br />"Frederick Taylor in the early 20th century, he talked about efficiency, but Drucker talked about effectiveness." During a recent lecture, Mr. Tep Khunnal exhorted his students to remember<br />that good management was just as important as good ideas.<br />The residents of this dusty but bustling town are almost all former Khmer Rouge soldiers or cadres and their families,<br />but they have come to embrace capitalism with almost as much vigor as they once fought to destroy class distinctions, free trade and even money itself.<br />Malai was still a malaria-infested jungle stronghold when Mr. Tep Khunnal moved here in 1998,<br />bringing with him Pol Pot’s widow, whom he married shortly after his boss’s death.<br />The area broke away from the Khmer Rouge in 1996, in part to avoid Pol Pot’s attempts to recollectivize property,<br />and soon after a few thousand ex-communists raised capital to build the market by issuing shares in a joint-stock company.
