Word: khmers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crowded at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh on Tuesday, as scores of foreign tourists visited the gated high school that was once a Khmer Rouge prison and execution center. Meanwhile, in a courtroom in the sprawling outskirts of the city, Tuol Sleng's former chief became the first member of Pol Pot's infamous regime to stand trial for crimes against humanity at the U.N.-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts (ECCC) of Cambodia, more than 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge...
...alias Comrade Duch, appeared relaxed as he jotted down notes while his lawyers argued for hours over the inclusion of witnesses and other details in the trial that is expected to last about three months. Duch, who is now 66, oversaw Tuol Sleng at the height of the Khmer Rouge regime's brutality in the 1970s, a waifish mathematics teacher turned zealous revolutionary cadre who ran the prison with maniacal attention to the details of the life and death of his prisoners. (Read "A Brief History of the Khmer Rouge...
...busy working to watch," said Klang Sokhan, 62, tending to the small shop opposite Tuol Sleng's gates where she peddles soft drinks and DVD documentaries about the Khmer Rouge to the hordes of tourists that visit the prison each day. "I am interested in the trial," she added, "and if you want to know whether Cambodian people are interested, let [the Khmer Rouge suspects] out of prison to walk down the street. Then there will be a prosecution." (Read TIME's 1979 cover story on the Cambodian genocide...
...Sokhan, the complexities and the slow pace of the U.N.-backed tribunal proceedings do not assuage her anger - or her thirst for revenge. "The court is difficult to understand. It's too complicated. What people want is for them to die," she said of Duch and the four other Khmer Rouge leaders now in detention...
...Though many Cambodians want to see justice done, most also have a limited understanding of the complex legal process the Khmer Rouge tribunal has become since it was proposed more than a decade ago. Negotiations between the Cambodian government and the U.N. to establish the hybrid court, which includes national and international judges and elements of international and domestic law, took years to hammer out, and on more than one occasion had many believing that the tribunal would never take place. Recent research conducted by the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, found that...