Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009
At Last, Justice for Monsters
By Richard Bernstein
Closing Order Indicting Kaing Guek Eav alias Duch
by the Office of the Co-Investigating Judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Phnom Penh
45 pp., August 8, 2008
On February 17, a sixty-six-year-old man named Kaing Guek Eav, aka Comrade Duch, appeared before a mixed Cambodian-international tribunal—formally known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia—charged, in the words of the indictment against him, with 'murder, extermination, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, rape, persecutions on political grounds, [and] other inhumane acts.'[1] Kaing's appearance, in what was a rather dull procedural session, marked the beginning of a long-awaited and long-postponed event, the trial of several of the figures deemed most responsible for the atrocities committed during the three years, eight months, and twenty days between 1975 and 1979 that the Khmer Rouge were in power in Cambodia. The tribunal starts hearing evidence at the end of March.
Review, 4337 words
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