Is Judgment Day too late for Engineers of Cambodian Genocide?

(Photo: REUTERS / Chor Sokunthea)
Tourists look at skulls on display at the memorial stupa filled with more than 8,000 skulls of victims of the Khmer Rouge regime at Choeung Ek, a "Killing Fields" site located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh July 24, 2010.

By Michael Martin
International Business Times
June 29, 2011

Has judgment day come too late for the ailing Khmer Rouge engineers of the Cambodian Genocide, now on trial at a UN-backed tribunal in Phnom Penh?

The accused are between 79 and 85 years of age.

It was 1976, Pol Pot's Year Zero, when the Khmer Rouge regime emptied cities and relocated everyone in the country to communes, where they were forced to work toward a Communist agrarian utopia. During that time, some 1.7 million people, over 20 percent of the Cambodian population at the time, were killed, often for disloyalty to the regime.

From a rural family, Sorn says commune leaders didn't target her as much as city children were often starved and publically humiliated for disobeying orders.

Unlike Sorn, some Cambodians believe a symbolic conviction is just what Cambodia needs.