Old and infirm but Khmer Rouge elite face justice over Killing Fields

NOW old and infirm, four of the top surviving members of the Khmer Rouge's ruling elite are about to face justice, decades after their plans for a Communist utopia in Cambodia left an estimated 1.7 million people dead through execution, medical neglect, over work and starvation.

Today a UN-backed tribunal, comprising Cambodian and foreign judges, will begin trying them on charges including crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, religious persecution, homicide and torture. With Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot long dead, this may be the nation's best chance to hold architects of the "Killing Fields" and the enslavement of millions of Cambodians accountable, though all four say they are innocent.

Nuon Chea, 84, was Pol Pot's No 2 and the group's chief ideologist. Khieu Samphan, 79, was its former head of state. Ieng Sary, 85, was its foreign minister, and his 79-year-old wife, Ieng Thirith, was minister for social affairs.

Together, they form what the tribunal calls Case 002. The chief jailer of a notorious Khmer Rouge prison was convicted last year in the breakthrough Case 001. Although this week's court sessions will be strictly procedural, with testimony and presentation of evidence expected to begin in August or September, it will mark the first joint appearance of the defendants in the dock, 32 years after the Khmer Rouge were defeated in 1979 with the help of a Vietnamese invasion.

Pol Pot escaped justice with his death in 1998, then a prisoner of his own comrades as his once-mighty movement, in jungle retreat, was collapsing.

The tribunal, officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, started operations in 2006. Its first defendant was Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, commandant of Tuol Sleng prison, known as S-21, where only a handful of prisoners survived. Up to 16,000 people were tortured under Duch's command and later killed.

Duch, now 68, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. His sentence was reduced to a 19-year term because of time previously served and other technicalities, bringing angry criticism from victims who called the punishment too lenient. Cambodia has no death penalty.

Alex Hinton, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and author of a book about genocide in Cambodia, says Duch's case had "enormous symbolic value" because the prison was so closely associated with the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. But Case 002 "is more significant in that it will put the four most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders on trial for the first time."

"We will learn much about their thinking, the way their regime worked, and, ultimately, how their programme of mass murder was enabled," he said.Despite the notoriety of the Khmer Rouge, proving the case may pose a challenge.

In previous public statements, the four defendants have tried to cast blame on others.

"Do I have remorse? No," said Ieng Sary in 1996, after he led a mass defection to the government. "I have no regrets because this was not my responsibility."

The four defendants had lived freely before being taken into tribunal custody in 2007. All are being held at a custom built jail in the same compound as the tribunal's headquarters and courtroom.