The week's news from Cambodia is all over the place, so where better to start than with happenings in Minnesota ...

Wat Munisotaram, a bit of Cambodian Buddhism on the prairie, was recently consecrated and its Buddha image blessed.

The $1.58 million temple has been years in the building, but according to some of the 7,000 visitors stopping by during the three-day open house, it is well worth the time and money. Constructed with the layout and architecture meant to look and feel just like a temple in Cambodia, the beauty and impact was well appreciated by the 118 monks from Cambodia and around the world who attended.

Sticking with monks for a while, this commentary out of Hong Kong looks at the 'extremist political culture' pervading Cambodia.

From the Global Witness report that caused so much fallout a while back, to a defrocked monk, the article illustrates Hun Sen's "iron fist' policy in no uncertain terms, and traces extremism back through modern history.

Now Cambodia has swung from extreme communism to capitalism which, in the absence of the rule of law, has gone to the opposite extreme. In the society destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, the biggest landholding was 132 hectares, and large landholdings were rare. Now Cambodian society has quickly become a feudal society ruled by a corrupt oligarchy under a democratic cloak in which the powerful and their cronies own up to tens, or even hundreds of thousands, of hectares of land during a time when the population has doubled and landlessness has increased. Cambodia's countryside very much resembles the English countryside during the period of enclosure.

Ironically, even Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge ideologue now about to face trial for the Killing Field atrocities, has said that the society he and his comrades destroyed was better than the present one.

Very interesting.

And speaking of Nuon Chea, he declared his innocence in involvement of genocide as "Brother Number Two" in the Khmer Rouge (KR).

Known as the KR's chief ideologue, he's insisting now that he had no intention to kill people, saying, ""I was president of the National Assembly and had nothing to do with the operation of the government. Sometimes I didn't know what they were doing because I was in the assembly."

He's eighty-two-years-old now and claims that it's difficult to remember what happened thirty years ago.

Not for far too many Cambodians, I'm afraid. Millions remember every detail. But I suppose if he was busy in the assembly ...

There are five suspects set to face trial still living, unnamed at this time, but it's clear that the list contains, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and Kaing Kheck Iev ... the infamous "Dutch", head of the S-21 torture center, now the chilling and gruesome Genocide Museum.

Pol Pot, of course, is dead, so has presumably been suffering his punishment for quite a while now.

Photo credit: Amanda Schwengel