Tearful Cambodians marked an annual “Day of Anger” with a re-enactment of Khmer Rouge crimes at a notorious “killing field” yesterday to commemorate relatives killed by the regime.
About 3,000 people, including Buddhist monks, watched as students mimed raping, bludgeoning, strangling and eviscerating bound victims to remember those who died at Choeung Ek, a field outside the capital Phnom Penh.
Many sobbed during the performance by the black-clad students just meters from mass graves where Khmer Rouge soldiers murdered thousands of people during the rule of the hard-line communist movement in the late 1970s.
PHOTO: AFP
“I still feel very much anger toward the regime,” Chea Thov, 63, said during yesterday’s ceremony.
“Justice is near, but I want all bad Khmer Rouge leaders to be sentenced to death,” she said, adding that Khmer Rouge killed her husband and 15 relatives.
Up to 2 million people were executed or died from starvation, overwork and torture during the communist regime’s 1975 to 1979 reign as it emptied Cambodia’s cities and enslaved the population on collective farms.
Five Khmer Rouge leaders are being held by a UN-backed genocide court over their roles in the hard-line communist government.
Final arguments in the court’s first trial, of Khmer Rouge’s main prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, ended in November and a verdict is expected later this year.
Four other leaders including the regime’s “Brother No. 2” ideologue Nuon Chea and head of state Khieu Samphan, foreign minister Ieng Sary and his wife, minister of social affairs Ieng Thirith, are expected to stand trial next year.
“I am speechless about Khmer Rouge crimes. I hope justice will be rendered very soon so that sadness will fade away from the people’s hearts,” Nob Chin, 72, another relative of the regime’s victims said.
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