Finally, Khmer Rouge leaders will face justice for mass murder

Trials of five brutal leaders will begin next month

NORMAN WEBSTER,

The Gazette

Finally, at everlastingly long last, someone is to answer for the atrocities of the Khmers Rouges - in particular, the savagery of 1975-79, when they ruled all of Cambodia. Agence France-Presse reports from Phnom Penh that Feb. 17 is the day the regime's torturer-in-chief will go on trial in the capital for crimes against humanity.

Kaing Khek Iev, better known as Duch, is the first of five scheduled to go before a UN-sponsored tribunal for one of the great crimes of the 20th century. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians out of a population of 7 million lost their lives to the insanity - sick, starved, worked to death or simply eliminated, cost-effectively, by a hoe to the back of the neck. It was madness, administered without remorse.

And it wasn't even genocide. This was not one race or cultural group trying to wipe out another. It was a small corps of ideologues brutalizing their own people, in a weird attempt to return Cambodia to "Year Zero" and an agrarian society uncorrupted by education, money, cities and towns, religion, family life or human emotions. Angkar ("the organization") saw all, controlled everything, ruled everyone, killed as it pleased, in a world to challenge the imagination of an Orwell.

No one has properly answered for this. The regime's sinister leader, Pol Pot, who acquired his vision of social perfection during studies in France, died in his bed, unrepentant, in 1998. Others have joined him, or soon will. Time is running out. At least these five will have to face their crimes.

The first, comrade Duch, has a story to shrivel the soul. He ran the regime's house of horrors, Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Some 17,000 victims, all carefully photographed for the prison's archives, passed through his inventive hands before ending up as piles of bones in the killing fields. He used to be a schoolteacher.

Khieu Samphan, perhaps the most interesting of those to be tried, has a Paris Ph.D in economics. Many were murdered for less, but Samphan also happened to be both close to Pol Pot personally and Khmer Rouge head of state during its years in power. His testimony could have historic value if it brings deeper understanding of whatever it was that drove Cambodia's serene, paranoid executioner.

One story that would be interesting to follow is related by Philip Short, former BBC correspondent and author of Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare. Short writes that Saloth Sar, as Pot was originally known, used to visit the royal palace to see his sister, who was a member of the king's harem. At 15, "little Sar" was considered young enough to enter the female quarters _ whereupon the young women would tease him, loosen his waistband, fondle him and masturbate him to a climax. Vairry interesting.

Plus these few scribbles from a traveller's notebook . . . .

The women of Laos are remarkably attractive - trim, personable, with ready smiles and warm brown skin. So it was a bit startling to hear our guide in Luang Prabang, a handsome woman in her late 30s, declare unhappily: "I wish my skin was whiter. Lao men prefer women with light skin." She isn't married and doesn't think she ever will be.

We heard the same lament in Vietnam.

Morning markets in Laos have all the usual food groups for sale, plus a few extras like rat, bat, lizard, deep-fried crickets and dried buffalo intestines. To wash everything down, there is rice liquor with a snake or scorpion pickled inside the bottle.

Out along the Mekong, the riverbanks are fertile with crops. All seems right with the world, except - the river and its weeds are littered with plastic bags, the bags that both Asian and North American shoppers use to carry home their vegetables, rice and dried buffalo intestines. It's a curse that girdles the globe.

In Vientiane, capital of Laos, we scored a guide with good English and an unusual accent. It wasn't the usual British or Noo Yawkish or even Indian English, with its odd Welsh lilt. No, it was purest Oz, acquired during studies at a Buddhist monastery in Melbourne. He sounded just like our Australian grand-daughter.

I asked him if his name was Bruce, but he didn't get the joke.

On to Hanoi, the Sparta of our world, where tall American tourists, many of them obvious veterans of the Vietnam War, tramp the streets with their families, unmolested and uninsulted. Our guide says he yawns when the regime drags out its warriors to reminisce about the good old days. He says he finds Vo Nguyen Giap boring.

Wow. Gen. Giap, now 97, is only one of the great military figures of our age - victor over the mighty French (Dien Bien Phu) and the mightier Americans, at level pegging with Rommel or Zhukov or China's Zhu De, a veritable modern Hannibal. Boring?! Giap's young critic risks having someone wash his mouth out with soap.

Norman Webster is a former editor of The Gazette.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2009