This past December marked 37 years since the end of the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, whose warped ideology and systematic violence brought death to a quarter of Cambodia’s eight million people.
For years afterward, the US government and its allies, fighting Cold War battles in the wake of the Communist victory in neighbouring Vietnam, cynically backed the ousted Khmer Rouge at the United Nations.
In part as a result, it took more than a quarter century to establish a court to try those most responsible for the horrific crimes. By then, many Khmer Rouge leaders, including Pol Pot, its founding leader, had died.
