Pol Pot trial raises too many questions

When we think of Pol Pot, we think of killing fields. We think of genocide. By his brutal acts of the past, Pol Pot manifested his contempt for any kind of law other than that of the gun. How ironic, then, that he should now be standing trial. And it is even more ironic that his accusers are his own former followers. Sometimes a nightmare can be a reporter's dream. But is the reporter who broke this story being unknowingly manipulated? Are we all?

From the early days, back in the mid-1970s, when the first inklings of what was happening in Cambodia broke upon a horrified world, attempts at investigation, amplified by all the murky ramifications that have been uncovered, raised more questions than answers.

Evidence has been rigorously sifted -- evidence of slave labor, atrocities and mass executions of intellectuals, doctors, soldiers and monks. But the questions remain. Is Pol Pot dying? Is he dead? Has he been put on trial? Is the reported trial merely a charade aimed at sanitizing the image of the Khmer Rouge so it can re-emerge on the Cambodian political scene? But the most pressing question of all is: How could it have happened? What mad reasoning lay behind Pol Pot's attempt to begin again at Year Zero?

Instead of trying to take an independent Cambodia forward by constructing a cohesive society which would have contributed to nation building and economic advancement, he tried to take it back into a primitiveness that might have been acceptable in the Middle Ages but was sadly out of place in the latter half of the 20th century. Pol Pot may or may not be on trial. But history has already rendered its verdict. And he will be remembered as the man who made it possible for the phrase "killing fields" to enter the political lexicon.

-- The Hong Kong Standard