Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Opinion: Comrade Duch and Cambodia’s sorrow

Duch's conviction last week was a case of justice delayed being justice denied.

August 3, 2010
By HDS Greenway
GlobalPost

BOSTON — Class and economic differences have all but vanished from the world today as a basis for war and extermination. With the failure of Communism the world has settled back to more traditional forms of aggression based on blood ties, tribe, ethnicity and religion. But most of the 20th century was plagued by class war, the most extreme example being the fate of Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979.

The conviction of Kiang Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, for crimes against humanity in Cambodia last week was a clear case of justice delayed being justice denied. Commandant of the notorious Tuol Sleng torture and extermination center in Phnom Penh, a converted school house, Comrade Duch oversaw the excruciating deaths of some 17,000 people during the Cambodian Holocaust more than 30 years ago. That his sentence was less than life in prison is a blow and a mockery to those who suffered during those terrible years.

The great Khmer civilization memorialized by the temple complex known as Angkor Wat ended almost a thousand years ago. Since then Cambodia has been in a long decline, squeezed, as Cambodians like to say, between the “tiger and the crocodile — a prisoner of geography between Thailand and Vietnam. From time to time one or the other has taken advantage of Cambodia’s weakness to invade.
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