Khmer Rouge no. 2 to tell all at trial

Khmer Rouge No. 2 to tell all at trial - Yahoo! News

Khmer Rouge “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea is ready to lift the lid on Pol Pot’s
murderous regime when he appears in court on charges of war crimes and crimes
against humanity, a trial judge said on Thursday.”He has no complaints. He said
he would elaborate on the regime when the trial comes,” You Bunleng, a Cambodian
investigating judge on the $56 million United Nations-backed tribunal, told
Reuters.
Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s right-hand man during the Khmer Rouge’s
1975-79 reign of terror, was arrested at his simple wooden home on the Thai
border on Wednesday and flown to Phnom Penh by helicopter to face the
long-awaited tribunal.
An estimated 1.7 million people died during Pol Pot’s
Beijing-backed “Year Zero” revolution as his dream of transforming the Southeast
Asian nation into an agrarian peasant utopia descended into the nightmare of the
“Killing Fields.”
Despite many reports in the last five years of the
octogenarian guerrilla’s imminent demise, court spokesman Reach Sambath said
Nuon Chea was in good health and had 24-hour access to medical care to ensure he
was fit to stand trial.

Well, let’s see if this man is really tried and all the crimes the Khmer Rouge committed are brought to light.
For more info on Khmer rouge, visit Wikipedia.

In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into “Old People” through agricultural labor. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation.

The Khmer Rouge government arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed “enemies”:

• anyone with connections to the former government or with foreign governments,


• professionals and intellectuals - in practice this included almost everyone with
  an education,


• or even people wearing glasses (which, according to the regime meant that they were literate),


• ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Cambodian Christians, Muslims and the Buddhist monks


• Homosexuals


• “economic sabotage” for which many of the former urban dwellers (who had not starved to death in the first place) were deemed to be guilty of by virtue of their lack of agricultural ability.

Through the 1970s, and especially after mid-1975, the party was also shaken by factional struggles. There were even armed attempts to topple Pol Pot. The resultant purges reached a crest in 1977 and 1978 when thousands, including some important KCP leaders, were executed.
Today, examples of the torture methods used by the Khmer Rouge can be seen at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The museum occupies the former grounds of a high school turned prison camp that was operated by Khang Khek Ieu, more commonly known as “Comrade Duch”. Some 17,000 people passed through this centre before they were taken to sites (also known as The Killing Fields), outside Phnom Penh such as Choeung Ek where most were executed (mainly by pickaxes to save bullets) and buried in mass graves. Of the thousands who entered the Tuol Sleng Centre (also known as S-21), only ten are known to have survived.

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El Jémer rojo nº2 va a ser juzgado en Camboya por crímenes de guerra