kaing guek eav

Former Khmer Rouge prison chief of S-21;


Former Khmer Rouge prison chief of S-21, Kaing Guek Eav better known as "Duch", stands in the dock of the court room at the Extraodinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal will on begin February 17, 2009.


The Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979, spreading like a virus from the jungles until they controlled the entire country, only to systematically dismantle and destroy it in the name of a Communist agrarian ideal. Today, more than 30 years after Vietnamese soldiers removed the Khmer Rouge from power, the first genocide trials will start — a bittersweet note of progress in an impoverished nation still struggling to rehabilitate its crippled economic and human resources.