3 decades later, Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried for atrocities

By ASSOCIATED PRESS | Friday, January 9, 2009

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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

Thirty years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the specter of the murderous regime still haunted Cambodia on Wednesday as victims remembered the countless dead and the country prepared to finally try the movement's leaders.

More than 40,000 people jammed Phnom Penh's Olympic Stadium for speeches and a parade to mark the day Vietnamese troops entered the capital to oust the ultra-communists from power.

"On January 7, my second life began," said a 59-year-old farmer whose father and sister died of starvation under the Khmer Rouge. "I want to see Khmer Rouge leaders prosecuted as soon as possible because they are getting old now."

She was one of millions who endured what many survivors said was "hell on Earth."

Phnom Penh, the capital, was emptied at gunpoint; its citizens forced to work in vast slave labor camps on starvation rations and under the constant threat of execution. Religion, marriages not approved by the state, money and almost all entertainment were banned.

When it was over, 1.7 million or more Cambodians had perished during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 rule.

But none of the surviving leaders has yet faced justice.

One of the accused - Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, who headed the Khmer Rouge's largest torture center - will probably take the stand in March at a U.N.-backed tribunal, said co-prosecutor Robert Petit, adding that the trial is expected to take three to four months.

But the other four, all of them aging and ailing, probably won't be tried until 2010 or later.

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