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PAILIN, Cambodia (AFP) - The most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea, was being questioned Wednesday by police and officials from Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal, a source close to him told AFP. Police blocked the road to the house of Nuon Chea in northwest Cambodia as the tribunal officials swept in. Shortly after 6:00 am (2300 GMT Tuesday) a convoy of police and Khmer Rouge tribunal vehicles was seen arriving at Nuon Chea's house, where he has lived freely since surrendering to the government in late 1998. "It is the order from the top to block the road and...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The former chief of a Khmer Rouge prison is willing to testify about the communist regime's atrocities that led to an estimated 1.7 million deaths in the 1970s, Cambodia's genocide tribunal announced Wednesday. Duch, 64, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, on Tuesday became the first top Khmer Rouge figure to be indicted for offenses committed when the Khmer Rouge held power from 1975-79. He was charged and detained by order of the U.N.-backed international tribunal's foreign and Cambodian judges. Duch headed the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where some 16,000 suspected enemies of the regime...

BANGKOK, July 31 — A tribunal in Cambodia charged the commandant of the main Khmer Rouge torture house with crimes against humanity on Tuesday, bringing the first charge in a long-delayed trial in the deaths of 1.7 million people in the late 1970s. The commandant, Kaing Guek Eav, 64, known as Duch, was the leader of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh where at least 14,000 men, women and children were tortured and sent to killing fields. Only a handful survived. Two weeks ago, prosecutors announced that they had submitted to the tribunal a list of five potential defendants...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Cambodia's international genocide tribunal charged the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center with crimes against humanity on Tuesday, a historic first indictment against a top figure in the communist regime that created Cambodia's infamous killing fields. The suspect, Kaing Guek Eav, has acknowledged heading the S-21 prison, where the Khmer Rouge's suspected enemies were tortured before being taken to killing fields near the capital. An estimated 1.7 million people died from hunger, disease, overwork and execution when the Khmer Rouge was in power in 1975-79. The 62-year-old, also known as Duch, was one of five...

September 28, 2006This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like As Congress has debated legislation that would set up military tribunals and govern the questioning of suspected terrorists (whom the Bush administration would like to be able to detain indefinitely), at issue has been what interrogation techniques can be employed and whether information obtained during torture can be used against those deemed unlawful enemy combatants. One interrogation practice central to this debate is waterboarding. It's usually described in the media in a matter-of-fact manner. The Washington Post simply referred to waterboarding a few days ago as an interrogation measure that "simulates drowning."...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Aug. 1 — More than 27 years after the mass killings and after nearly a decade of wrangling between Cambodia and the United Nations, formal proceedings have begun against surviving leaders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. On July 10, a special prosecutor’s office opened its investigation into one of the last century’s most sustained atrocities, in which 1.7 million people died from 1975 to 1979 through torture, systematic killings, overwork, starvation and disease. A first shipment of 383,149 pages of evidence, contained on 524 reels of microfilm, was delivered to the prosecutors on July 17. snip......

Hundreds pay respects to Ta Mok In a traditional Buddhist funeral ceremony, incense was burned and prayers recited over Ta Mok's body, which was daubed with white powder. The ceremony took place in Ta Mok's former stronghold of Anlong Veng, in the north of Cambodia. Ta Mok, who died on Friday, was the regime's military commander and linked to many atrocities of the 1970s. About 1.7 million people died under the Khmer Rouge, through a combination of starvation, disease and execution. Ta Mok was the only Khmer Rouge leader who refused to bargain with authorities following the collapse of the...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Former Khmer Rouge military commander Ta Mok died Friday as he awaited trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, his lawyer said. The notoriously brutal commander had been in government detention since his capture in 1999. He was transferred from prison to a military hospital last month suffering from high blood pressure, tuberculosis and respiratory complications. He had been in and out of a coma since last week. Ta Mok was believed to be 80. His lawyer, Benson Samay, said that he died at 4:45 a.m. Friday. Ta Mok, whose real name is Ung...

France faces moment of truth over events that ended embassy siege in Cambodia He is safe, she thought. But he was not. Four days later two French gendarmes dragged Ung Boun Hor, the former speaker of the Cambodian national assembly, to the compound gates and delivered him, with six other alleged "traitors", to a platoon of waiting Khmer Rouge soldiers.

A former Khmer Rouge commander convicted in February of the 1994 murders of three Western backpackers but on the run from authorities was arrested in Cambodia, an official told AFP. Cambodia's Supreme Court ordered one-time guerrilla Chhouk Rin jailed for the abduction and murder of an Australian, Briton and Frenchman earlier this year but authorities had not managed to capture the 51-year-old. "He was arrested this afternoon (Tuesday) at 1:00 pm (0600 GMT) in Oddar Meanchey province," interior ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak said. Chhouk Rin was arrested in Trapeang Prasat district in northwestern Anlong Veng -- one of the final...

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - A new Cambodian cafe is offering diners a slice of life under the Khmer Rouge, with a menu featuring rice-water and leaves, and waitresses dressed in the black fatigues worn by Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist guerrillas. Newly opened across the road from Phnom Penh's notorious Tuol Sleng "S-21" Khmer Rouge interrogation and torture center, the cafe is meant to remind Cambodians of the 1975-1979 genocide in which an estimated 1.7 million people died. But the set "theme menu" of salted rice-water, followed by corn mixed with water and leaves, and dove eggs and tea at $6 a...

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from 1976-1979. "Khmer Rouge" (or Khmer Reds) was the French rendering of the organization’s official name: the "Communist Party of Cambodia," later the "Party of Democratic Kampuchea" and also the "Communist Party of Kampuchea," or CPK. (Kampuchea is the local name for Cambodia.) Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in what is now the province of Kompong Thong, Cambodia in 1925. He came from a prosperous farming family that in 1931 moved to the capital, Phnom Penh, where the young Pol Pot learned some of...

The first time Bono and Madonna got together to save Africa, the unintended consequence was the death of perhaps as many as 100,000 people. That's aid expert David Rieff's conclusion in the July 2005 issue of the resolutely liberal American Prospect magazine regarding the end result of Live Aid in 1985. Billed as "The Greatest Show on Earth," Live Aid was a multivenue rock concert held on July 13, l985, in London and Philadelphia in order to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. With an estimated 1.5 billion viewers watching the live broadcast in 100 countries, the event reportedly...

Senators from both sides of the aisle competed on Monday to extol the humane treatment of detainees whom they said they saw on a weekend trip to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. All said they opposed closing the center. "I feel very good" about the detainees' treatment, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said. That feeling was also expressed by another Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska. On Monday, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, said he learned while visiting Guantánamo that some detainees "even have air-conditioning and semiprivate showers." Another Republican, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, said...

When they heard that I was going to Cambodia, my friends and family first worried about my safety, and then reminded me to take lots of pictures of Angkor Wat. They told me that whenever they read something about the country, the reports were more often than not about bombings and crime. But after my recent five-day holiday, I discovered that the country, which has been ravaged for years by civil war, is peaceful. Incidentally, the hostage drama in an international school in Siem Reap happened after I came back, but I know that it was just a one-off unfortunate...

TIME 100: AUGUST 23-30, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 7/8 Pol Pot Born May 19, 1925 in Prek Sbauv 1949 Studies left-wing politics in France 1953 Returns to Cambodia and joins Communist Party, which he leads a decade later 1975 Khmer Rouge is victor of civil war and occupies Phnom Penh; reign of terror kills 1.5 million in next four years 1979 Goes into hiding after Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia 1998 Dies April 15 in Cambodian jungle "We were like babies learning to walk," he said of his "mistakes" Cambodia's ruthless dictator cheated justice, dying before he could answer for the...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. ...................................................................................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR ON April 17, 1975, I was a young man working for CARE in Phnom Penh. As I drove to my office on the Avenue de France at 7 a.m., I saw a group of heavily armed black-clad zombies walking toward the city center and me. I reversed quickly and went to the Hotel Le Royal, which had been turned into a Red Cross neutral zone. A doctor friend signaled for me to go to the side entrance opposite the National Library. He waited inside while I climbed over the locked gate. He and his colleagues had set up...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Cleveland TODAY is my birthday. April 17 is what's on my driver's license and other documents. But I don't know for sure, and probably never will. All I know is that I was born in Cambodia, sometime during 1970. In Cambodia, we didn't celebrate birthdays, so while my mother and father knew the date, I had no reason to remember it. Instead, my early years were marked by joyous events like the New Year, the Water Festival and various Buddhist holidays. In the early 1970's, Southeast Asia was full of strife; the Soviet Union, China and the United...

1.8 million were slaughtered in Pol Pot's Year Zero atrocities of the 1970s. His victims still wait for justice. Imagine a tsunami 10 times as destructive as the one we witnessed in south-east Asia. Imagine that nearly 2 million people have been wiped off the face of the earth. Surely the world would be rushing to help, pouring in millions of dollars and bundles of compassion in the wake of such an unspeakable catastrophe? Just such a tragedy did happen more than a quarter of a century ago. Yet the people most affected by it received little in international help...