More than thirty years have passed since the Khmer Rouge launched radical communist revolution in Cambodia. Their aim: to turn rural, "backward" Cambodia into an industrial nation in twenty years. Cambodian peasants were the tools of Pol Pot's crazed revolution. Bourgeois urban intellectuals, doctors and other professionals were the enemy, to be recruited into forced labour, starved to death or executed in the Killing Fields. Buddhist monks -- parasites in Khmer Rouge eyes -- were targeted too. About 1.7 million died in this nightmarish social experiment, put to a halt by Vietnam in December 1978. Now, a United Nations-backed tribunal is preparing to try five senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Pol Pot died in 1998 - on the eve of his handover - but five of his senior cohorts are under lock and key just outside Phnom Penh. Meanwhile, many young Cambodians are hazy about the crimes that swept their beautiful land between 1975 and 1979. Many of their parents are sceptical that the mixed international-Cambodian justice process will serve a useful purpose. Others disagree. Cambodians need to understand how and why the Khmer Rouge did what it did, they say. This documentary was produced for Radio Netherlands' program The State We're In.
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