This is an excerpt from a longer documentary that I'm working on. It will be about an hour and a half to two hours and delve more into the history, hear more of some of the characters you saw and also from others whom we weren't able to fit into this time, like the judge whom you saw briefly.  We talked to him about the Cambodian justice system, the taking of bribes, and about many other survivors. 

The Prime Minister himself was former Khmer Rouge.  He was in the movement until just before the Vietnamese invasion and obviously that had lots to do with his feelings on it – many of the people in his government were part of the Khmer Rouge.  One of the theories of why the Cambodian government has put up such obstacles to having a trial is that he's afraid of the information that could come out if these people were put on the stand.

Everyone knows where Nuon Chea lives.  He lives right next door to another one of the Big Five members.  Everyone knows where they are.  They have some security, but it's minimal security when you consider there are11 million people in the country.  People also ask why no one ever rose up during the time of the Khmer Rouge.  There were some revenge killings, right after the Khmer Rouge was driven from power, but not many.

My personal opinion is that it's part of the culture.  A lot of the people I talked to, the survivors, when they discuss their entire family being decimated, the Cambodian way of talking about it is laughing.  The woman in the film was really the only one who displayed what we would consider emotion that you would expect.  But that's just the normal way that Cambodian people display their emotion.  I'm not trying to relate the two, but I'm just saying that laughing when talking about an entire family being killed in front of you is one of those things that is hard to understand - why people don't rise up.  Another reason, I think, is that authorities, the God figure, is engrained in their culture going way back to the position of the leader as being so paramount.

Actually, it reminds me of a woman we talked to who lived right down the road from Pol Pot's grave.  She was actually the one who raised the money to buy the roof that you see over the grave.  We talked to her and she said she had a dream that Pol Pot came to her and said he was cold at night and hot during the day and he had nothing to eat.  She had nothing; she had a tiny store in mountains, but she raised money and sold a lot of her possessions and built this roof over his grave and put all of this money towards having a big feast.  Then she had a dream that Pol Pot came to her and said, "thank you."  He was well taken care of and he wasn't cold any more.  The weird thing about that story is that she's actually not Khmer Rouge. She was a survivor from the Khmer Rouge time and when she was talking to us she could barely hear us because her hearing had been destroyed from the torment she'd had.  She couldn't really stand any more because her knees had been shot.  Her whole family had been killed and we asked her, Why would you build a shelter for this man and spend all your money on a feast for him who did this to you, who destroyed your life and the lives of your family and destroyed your country? And she looked us, shook her head and laughed and said, "Who can explain any of this?"

We did talk to a man at the documentation center in Cambodia.  He spent the last ten years scouring the country, and getting testimonies from every possible Cambodian, whether they were with the Khmer Rouge or survivors and he is meticulously going through all that documentation and preparing for a trial should it ever occur.  He's also just trying to prepare the history of Cambodia, because one of the big questions that Cambodians have is not just wanting justice, but also wanting to know what happened and why it happened.

We called them Marxists, (Khmer Rouge) but obviously their ideology was beyond any political ideology you can ever imagine, let alone Communist.  They weren't Communists in the traditional sense; they were ultra-nationalists and very isolationist.  The roots of their ideology are interesting.  One of the speculations, and again it's only really speculation, because we're still trying to figure out what exactly happened and what they were thinking-the people who were involved in Paris when they were coming up with their ideology aren't talking- but part of the problem was that Pol Pot was trying to hearken back to the great Cambodian civilization.  The idea was that if they stripped away everything that wasn't purely Cambodian from the country they took it back to the Stone Age and could build the country through Cambodian power.

Pol Pot saw Cambodians as a superior race.  They once had the greatest civilization in the region, one of the greatest civilizations in the world, and thought that it had been destroyed through the influences of others like Thailand and Vietnam, that it had continually been eaten away through Western imperialist powers of France and then the United States.  They felt like "If we could just get everyone out of the country, start over again, we don't want anything that has anything to do with outside influence – books and education.  We start from the very beginning, "Year Zero", is what Pol Pot called it, and his plan was that in 20 years they could go from a strictly agrarian society to an industrialized civilization.  In that amount of time they would do what they did with the idea behind the Great Wall in China but they could do it even faster, using just purely Cambodian power.  That was the idea.  They actually had a plan for how quickly they could get to that point if they were left alone and if no one messed up the country any more.

A lot of the lower-ranking people we talked to now admit that as many of the people who were in the Khmer Rouge it saw it as a patriotic organization.  Their country was being bombed back into the Stone Age, and they wanted to stop their country from being bombed by the U.S., and so they saw themselves as being patriots.  They were going to be independent and so that was their explanation as to why they got involved with the Khmer Rouge in the first place.  The people I talked to were unable to pinpoint how things went so horribly wrong.  Just to show you how fast things changed and how quickly it got out of control, we talked to a man who's not in the film who was sent off to China to get the new Khmer Rouge money that they were going to use for currency right after the Khmer Rouge came to power.  By the time he got back with the money, the Khmer Rouge had decided to outlaw money.  That just gives you a sense of how things were changing and how it seemed like no one was in charge.   We asked them about the emptying of Phnom Penh, how did that plan come about?  Many of the people told us, Plan?  There was no plan.  Were you planning to empty a city of a million people in three days?  They didn't even know where the order came from.  They claimed that they didn't even know that was going to happen.  So it really seemed like things escalated out of control really quickly.

Pol Pot went to China before the Khmer Rouge came to power; that influenced him, but he was quoted by saying that the Chinese didn't know what they were doing and that the Cambodians could do it better.  But that was the main influence, and China was a big supporter of the Khmer Rouge during the regime later, and China has continually blocked there being a trial.

The U.N. Secretary General just announced that he would be sending a U.N. delegation to Cambodia, either next week or the beginning of March.  The General Assembly passed a request asking that negotiations be reopened with Cambodia, and he is scheduled to report back to them by March 16.  So things are happening, but it's more talks in order to establish formal talks.  It's really hard to tell how likely all of this is to take place because they're having these talks, they're meeting again after a year's hiatus, but the problem is that all of the same road blocks that were there before are still there.  So it's a question of whether anyone will budge?  The Cambodians are throwing fits that the trials be held with a majority of Cambodian judges within their justice system, which is a problem, as most of the lawyers and judges were killed during the Khmer Rouge regime.  Many of the judges now didn't graduate from high school, let alone law school.  Corruption is rampant.  The judge we talked to makes $30 a month and openly admitted to taking bribes; there are established people in Cambodian courts who are the middle men to help you get a better bang for your buck.  I'm told that's a problem.  A former Khmer Rouge controls everything in the country.  He controls the courts.  The justice system and the executive branch were joined until just a few years ago.

So it's unclear whether the Cambodian government is willing to budge on any of these things.  Now the UN has just said that they want a majority of international judges, which is going back to their stance at the beginning of negotiations several years ago.  So the big question is whether anyone will budge on these issues.  There's a conflict within the international human rights community, some are saying there's no use in having a trial unless it's a real trial that's up to international standards.  Cambodia deserves the same kind of justice that anyone else would have in the world.  Other people are saying that an imperfect trial is better than no trial at all.  Wouldn't it be ironic if these same international human rights activists who are proposing a perfect trial are the ones who let these people off the hook? 

As you saw, many of the Khmer Rouge and even other Cambodians we talked to, were taught that the Vietnamese were responsible for the genocide — and these weren't just former Khmer Rouge.  When we were with a student group in Phnom Penh — and these were the best and brightest university students, very highly educated, very intelligent about the Pol Pot regime and one of them stood up and asked, "What are you talking about?  I heard that it was the Vietnamese who were responsible."  These are the best and brightest of the country, so there's still that misapprehension.  There's been a lot of name calling, and part of the reason people wanted a trial was to set the record straight and get this history straight.  So that is definitely still very much a commonly held belief.

They don't learn about it in school.  The first textbook that mentioned the Khmer Rouge only came out last year and it still hasn't been issued at schools, or in the Khmer Rouge territory.  They don't hear anything about it on television, so the only way they hear about it is from family.  Obviously they hear the stories but among the younger kids, the teenagers that we talked to, there seems to be a feeling of "mom and dad are just talking about walking to school in the snow" and telling these fanciful stories about the "boogey man" or the "Khmer Rouge will come and get you if you're not good."  Most of them seemed to have a visceral sense of what their parents were talking about and they didn't have it validated anywhere else.  So these stories seem so fantastical.  They say "why was it tough?"  "Why would you be driven out of the city?"  Why wouldn't you be given enough food to eat?  It sounds so horrible; maybe it's not true. We heard this from students and from parents.  A lot of parents don't want to talk to their kids about it because it was such a horrible time, it was so hard to talk about.  They won't share this with their children because they want to move on and create a life for themselves.  It's incredible, but there still is a gap.

We found a similar thing with the woman in the film.  We asked her if she would testify at a trial.  She said she would be too afraid.  We asked her what she thought of justice and she said, "Justice would be nice, but I have to worry about getting food on the table, we didn't have a good crop this year."  That was part of the problem.  She didn't have the luxury of thinking about justice and also, she told us "Listen, my one son got one of his legs blown off by a land mine; the other one lost his arm in the war, my husband was killed.  I'm a Buddhist.  I must have done something bad in a former life and that's why all these bad things are happening to me.  So I can't worry about justice for these people.  I have to try and live a good life now and be a good Buddhist so that in the next life I have a better chance and have good things happen to me then."

The Khmer Rouge, even though their country was falling apart and the movement was starting to execute its own, started to invade Cambodia.  They would run across the border, massacre a village and then come back.  This happened for a couple of years and the Vietnamese tried to hold the border.  They didn't want to invade their new fellow-Communist nation, but the Khmer Rouge kept crossing the border and massacring villagers so actually they then took a lot of the Khmer Rouge defectors, and invaded the country.  Cambodia was so decimated at that point that the Vietnamese tanks ran out of gas before they encountered resistance and they took over the country in two weeks.  In fact the Khmer Rouge were still believing their own propaganda to the end.  The reason we have a lot of this evidence is that the head of the prison didn't realize that the Vietnamese had already invaded the entire country and surrounded the capital.  So he was literally in his pajamas and he looked out the window and saw the Vietnamese tanks coming through the gate. He happened to escape and blended into the crowd but he didn't have time to destroy any of the evidence.  That's why we have a lot of the evidence today.  That was how quickly the Vietnamese were able to invade and they might have been hailed as rescuers if they'd left, but they stayed for ten or so years and complicated the situation.

The Vietnamese and Cambodians are historic enemies dating back hundreds and hundreds of years.  The Cambodians consider Lower Vietnam an historic part of Cambodia, so it's ironic that one of Pol Pot’s goals was to save Cambodia from Thai and Vietnamese hegemony.  In the end, it brought invasion and occupation of his own country.

Cambodia today is one of the poorest countries in Asia.  It's propped up by a lot of foreign aid.  There are a lot of problems right now.  Many of you probably saw in the papers that a member of Hun Sen's party was just assassinated yesterday. Elections are coming up in July and in the last two years of their local elections dozens of opposition candidates from the various parties were assassinated.  So there's a lot of strife going on there.  Hun Sen has just announced, keep in mind that this is supposedly a democracy where there are elections every so often, that he will be in power for another ten years.  It's the kind of government where supposedly, Hun Sen takes the keys to the country's tanks with him when he goes out of the country to make sure nothing happens in his absence.    It's been speculated that one of the reasons Hun Sen has flirted for so long with this idea of a trial, is that he sees foreign aid coming.  So it will be interesting to see.  Two years ago, when there were local elections, dozens of opposition candidates were assassinated.  So far, leading up to the July elections, several have already been killed. Members of Parliament seem to have a lot of robberies and a lot of personal disputes.  So, we'll see how things lead up to that in July.

I had never been to Cambodia before I did this piece, but I had seen a film of the trial of Pol Pot back in 1997 – I don't know if any one saw that – we hadn't seen Pol Pot in 20 years and here he was, his followers had finally turned on him.  He was this old man, frail, ridden with malaria, his followers had turned on him and were holding a trial not because of the genocide, but because he had killed one of his colleagues and 14 members of his colleague's family and the Khmer Rouge had had enough.  He was a broken man, the movement was all but finished and it was so strange and I just remember thinking, Pol Pot is still around?  We haven't dealt with him?  Is Khmer Rouge still around?  It was just so strange that I started researching it, and the more I read about it, the more interested I was in finding out what had happened to the Khmer Rouge, how you go on after there's been no closure about this issue, how you justify what you've done in this horrible time and what happens to a country when an injustice is denied.