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The former chief interrogator and top torturer for Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime died early Wednesday in hospital in Phnom Penh. He was 77.Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his alias Duch, had served as the head of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison and was later convicted of crimes against humanity by a UN-backed war crimes tribunal for his role in the "Killing Fields" regime.

Lim Pengkhun was born in 1980 near the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. The possibility he’d one day manage his own business would have been quite literally beyond imagination for his parents at the time. Just five years prior, the Khmer Rouge, led by communist revolutionary Pol Pot, had seized absolute political and economic control of Cambodia. Following the examples of Stalin and Mao, Pol Pot brutally murdered more than one million Cambodians in the infamous Killing Fields of 1975-1979 as he implemented his vision of communist utopia. He abolished private property, money, prices, commerce, and even cities—a full descent into barbarism. In...

In 2nd century AD Egypt, the legendary Greco-Roman scientist Claudius Ptolemy put the extent of the known world onto paper. From his home in Alexandria, he gathered reports from sailors who had made perilous journeys to India and possibly beyond. Though details were sparse, a voyager named Alexander described a distant port called Kattigara on the Sinus Magna (Great Gulf) to the east of the Golden Chersonese peninsula - widely considered to be mainland Malaysia. Halfway across the world around the same time, the bustling seaport Oc Eo was part of the flourishing Funan Kingdom, the earliest known pre-Angkorian civilisation...

Koh Ker was part of the Khmer kingdom during the Angkor period in what is now Cambodia. For a mere two decades in the tenth century CE, the city served as royal capital, and it has long been proposed that after the royal seat moved back to Angkor, the city and its surroundings were abandoned. In this study, Hall and colleagues tested this theory by analyzing charcoal and pollen remains in sediment cores spanning several centuries in three Koh Ker localities, including the moat of the main central temple. From these data, they inferred a long history of fluctuations in...

PHNOM PEL, Cambodia: Over a hundred 'burial jars' and a dozen coffins arranged on a ledge in remote Cambodian jungle have for centuries held the bones -- and secrets -- of a mysterious people who lived alongside with the Angkor era. Why the bones were placed in jars on a cliff some 100 metres (320 feet) high in the Cardamom Mountains, or indeed whose remains they are, has long puzzled experts. For seven years Nancy Beavan, an archaeologist who specialises in carbon dating, has been looking for an answer, painstakingly piecing together clues left by the enigmatic people at 10...

The face of Sath Om reveals even more than her chilling words. The pain seems so immediate and real, it is as if time has stopped. "It's still real," the 92-year-old survivor of the Cambodian genocide says through translation as the tears flow. "It's like a stick in your eyes when it's remembered." Om has harrowing stories of life during the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 when upward of 2 million Cambodians died from malnutrition, disease and murder in the country's notorious Killing Fields. Om was burned out of her house and had to run...

Starting in 1975, Pol Pot and his Communist revolutionaries killed almost 2,000,000 Cambodians, out of a total population of 5,000,000. Why?? Pol Pot lived in Paris for many years where he became a Marxist intellectual. Sitting in classrooms and cafes, he visualized the perfect Cambodia. He went back to Cambodia to eliminate foreign influences, purge educated people, and thereby create an agrarian workers paradise. Pol Pot was a fanatic, a true believer. The best one-word summary is to say that Pol Pot was an ideologue. He had ideas in his head; he knew they were right; and he was thereby...

The purpose of this statement is to provide all Member States of the United Nation with an objective description of the various aspects of the problem arising from the Khmer territories of Cochin-China (South Vietnam). In the past those territories were part of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and they are still inhabited by over half a million Khmers who remain deeply attached to their culture, religion, customs, traditions and ancestral land. When the odds became unequal in 1854, the reigning Khmer ruler, King Ang Duong, found it necessary to appeal to a Power of the Western world, namely France, for...

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...

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...

American Friends? HardlyBy Gordon LambFrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2003 When the first Quakers arrived in America in the late 17th century, they were thought of as heretics, sometimes witches and routinely bizarre. Theirs was a religion based on the ideas the individual is supreme, that the relationship between God and man is a very private affair not to be regulated by government or society, that temperance ("all things in moderation") is a noble way to live one's life. Above all, it prized peace and stated that violence should be avoided if at all possible.The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has mastered...

This month the Kerry Campaign abandoned one claim that John Kerry had made for years about his Vietnam War service and put another into question. The claim that has been dropped: that Kerry was in Cambodia at Christmastime in 1968. In a 1979 review of the movie Apocalypse Now in the Boston Herald, Kerry wrote, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 5 miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our Vietnamese allies." In a 1986 speech on the Senate floor, Kerry said, "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. . . . I...

Arn Chorn-Pond, the musician whose story is the focus of "The Flute Player." For Arn Chorn-Pond, heaven and hell are tightly woven in long dulcet melodies played on a bamboo flute that sweeps errant memories back into view.When he plays, he closes his eyes and rides the high notes back to his homeland, Cambodia, back to a youth spent struggling to survive in the notorious "killing fields."In 1975, when the communist Khmer Rouge regime took control of Cambodia, soldiers forced Chorn-Pond and millions of other Cambodians into concentration camps. An estimated 2 million civilians were executed, starved or worked to...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — "I say Cambodia is safe," said Ahmad Yahya, one of the most prominent Muslims in the country, addressing fears that Islamic militants could find a niche in this unruly land. "But who knows?" With its porous borders, its corruption, its hide-and-seek legal system and its disorganized Muslim community, some analysts say, this small Southeast Asian country could easily become a refuge and a breeding ground for terrorists. "I told the ambassador, don't worry about our people," Mr. Yahya said, referring to the American envoy. "Our people I can guarantee. But the Bangladeshis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Saudis and...