Chinese leader Mao Zedong, left, and North Korean President Kim Il-sung were friends and patrons of the Khmer Rouge during its brief period in power in the 1970s. (AFP/Getty Images).jpg)
Cambodia's present tyrant Hun Xen, as well as current client of China (AP)As a Khmer Rouge leader awaits his sentence, oppressors everywhere would do well to ponder the fate of Comrade Duch
Friday, Nov. 27, 2009
By MARK MACKINNON
PHNOM PENH — From Friday's Globe and Mail
Driving along the bumpy road that connects Phnom Penh with the courtroom on its outskirts that hosts the trials of the Khmer Rouge leadership, you pass through an intersection where Kim Il-sung Boulevard stretches north and Mao Zedong Boulevard heads south.
Both streets were named after the friends and patrons of the Khmer Rouge during its brief period in power in the 1970s, a time when Mao and Kim feted Pol Pot and China sold him weapons in exchange for rice even as hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were starving to death.
That the intersection lies on the road to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia - the United Nations-backed tribunal that is seeking to bring the surviving leadership of the Khmer Rouge to justice - seems fitting. The ECCC is located among the "killing fields" outside the Cambodian capital where many of the genocidal regime's estimated 1.7 million victims are buried. Most of those who were tortured at Phnom Penh's notorious S-21 prison under Comrade Duch - the Khmer Rouge jailer whose trial heard final arguments this week - passed through the same intersection before being forced to kneel beside the open pits that would become their graves.
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