Ta Mok: Cheating justice

Phnom Penh, July 21 (Reuters): Former Khmer Rouge military chief Ta Mok, one of Pol Pot’s most ruthless henchmen and a key defendant in upcoming “Killing Fields” trials, died today in an army hospital in the Cambodian capital.

The one-legged 82-year-old, dubbed “The Butcher” for overseeing mass purges during the ultra-Maoist regime’s four years in power, had been in hospital with breathing problems since last month. He lapsed into a coma a week ago, his lawyer said.

Around 1.7 million people ? a quarter of Cambodia’s population then ? are thought to have died under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which seized power in the jungle-clad southeast Asian nation in 1975 and promptly emptied the cities into the countryside.

Some victims were tortured and executed, often for trivial offences. Many died of starvation, disease or overwork as the guerrilla movement’s “Year Zero” dream of creating an agrarian utopia descended into the nightmare of the “Killing Fields”.

The Khmer Rouge were ousted by invading Vietnamese troops in 1979. But no leader ever faced justice for the atrocities, one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, although a special Cambodian-UN court has just started work.

For the majority of Cambodians, however, Ta Mok's death is likely only to heighten the feeling that justice so long delayed is justice denied.

“I blame the court for the slow process,” said 65-year-old Bou Meng, one of the handful of survivors of Phnom Penh’s notorious Tuol Sleng S-21 interrogation centre, set up to root out enemies of the revolution. “We have now lost another key witness against the Khmer Rouge and I am worried that other surviving leaders will die soon,” he said.