Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Justice Delayed I: Cambodia & The Khmer Rouge

While most of the world has been looking the other way, there have been two watershed events nearly three decades after the killing of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.
Formal proceeding finally have begun against the surviving leaders, yet another of whom has died without being brought to justice.
Although the first United Nations-sponsored trial is not expected to begin until 2008, a special prosecutor's office has opened in Phnom Penh and has begun to work of sorting through hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence.

The investigation is in a race against mortality.
Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, died in 1998, while Ta Mok, the Khmer military commander (see photo), packed in on July 21.
For more on the investigation, go here. For more on Ta Mok, go here.

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