Continued from a previous post ...

Ask almost any Cambodian adult how the genocide happened and they'll shrug.

Unlike every other genocide, the almost two million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge were not separated from their torturers by race, religion, ethnicity, cultural identity, or anything else. Those that did the killing were exactly the same as those that died. There was no, Red/White, Hutu/Tutsi, Shiite/ Sunni, Serb/Croat, German/Jew ... pick a genocide, any genocide ... divide. (At the very beginning, there was some idea of picking on city people and giving preference to the rural poor, usually referred to at the time as the "Ancients", but it was no time at all before they were all dying together, and once the regime began its decent into total madness they were also likely candidates for torture, starvation and murder.)

The whole thing made so little sense on every level that attempts to understand the "why" are futile.

Ask them if it could happen again and you'll get an immediate and emphatic affirmative. This is a generation that lives with a totally reasonable, completely valid paranoia. Is there any reason they should trust the system ... any system? Every single one let them down, abandoning them to a truly horrendous fate.

Now, almost thirty years later, the former Khmer Rouge are finally the ones getting nervous. Some are touting their innocence and claiming to be pleased to have their day in court and defend their actions of the 1970s.

Others are slinking off in the middle of the night.

Seventy-five-year old Khieu Samphan, Head of State under the KR regime, had many of his worldly goods piled into a pickup truck, then drove away with his wife in the middle of the night earlier this week.

His daughter had this to say ...

"He's not running anywhere," Khieu Rattana said by telephone. "He has no remorse in his life, because he believes he has done everything for the nation."

...

and claims he's just gone off to visit unnamed friends in Battambang.

Yeah, right. Don't know about you, but I don't pack a stove and a couch when I'm off to spend a couple of weeks with a buddy just down the road a few miles.

A quote from his son is also quite telling:

Separately, the couple's son, Khieu Uddom, said his parents were visiting him in Anlong Veng, another former Khmer Rouge stronghold 190 miles north of Phnom Penh. He declined to stay how long they planned to stay.

"He is not escaping anywhere," Khieu Uddom said in a telephone interview. "He spent years carrying on a (revolutionary) struggle in the jungle and he had no fear about it, so why should he be afraid?"

Battambang or Anlong Veng? So, where exactly where has this hero of the nation gone?

Still hanging around the hometown neighborhood in Pailin, a town in the northwest of the country with KR leanings that continue until this day, are the former Khmer Rouge ideologue, Nuon Chea, and Ieng Sary, the regime's foreign minister.

Actually, Ieng Sary has homes all over Cambodia, so apparently has done well for himself. I can't imagine he's too worried about ending up in one with few comforts and no view provided by the state.

He has months or years more to think about his options, though, and may very well decide to slink off, as well ... one way or another.