Kill another human being, you will likely spend many years locked away. Murder millions and you will likely evade punishment entirely. The belated trial of surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge conducted by the United Nations and Cambodia affirms this paradox.
From 1975 to 1979, the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge transformed Cambodia into a human slaughterhouse. The Maoist government killed roughly 20 percent of the population, about 1.5 million people, during its brief but bloody rule. The militant atheists forced Muslims to eat pork, killed every other Cambodian Catholic, and felled the population of Buddhist monks from 60,000 to 1,000. The Khmer Rouge abolished money, emptied cities, imposed a drab black national uniform, executed the handicapped as shirkers, and outlawed eyeglasses as a vain capitalist accessory. In their violent wake, the Khmer Rouge left a ravaged population in which women outnumbered men by two to one and minors nearly outnumbered the remaining adults.
Perhaps the strangest thing about these strange atrocities is that nobody was ever really held accountable. Attempting to right this wrong is the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which is currently trying a case against top officials of the Khmer Rouge government.
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