The latest insane killer to turn up is Kiang Kek Iev, who prefers the nom de guerre "Deuch." It was this man, in the concentration camp he ran in Phnom Penh, who continued torturing suspected dissidents to death as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city. Out of the 20,000 prisoners in his prison, 7 survived. They were the ones left behind as he legged it to the Thai border along with the rest of the Khmer Rouge crew.

In Thailand he helped run a refugee camp along with a few other KR goons. He didn't get hip with the humanitarian objectives and resorted to what he knew best, and continued torturing Cambodians on Thai soil in a UN camp.

But because his army was fighting those pesky North Vietnamese, the USA showered him and his repugnant like with guns and tanks and other shit for killing people with. China also lavished cash and more ammo on them while the UN kept the KR seat warm, making them the first government in exile to be recognized by that upstanding fart-factory. But I digress.

Deuch, now calling himself Hong Ben or Ta Pin as the fancy took him, snuck back into Cambodia and got baptized as a Christian by the International Hope University, a group of useless scripture-quoting wankers. They even helped get him a job. "We are in a state of shock," said his present employer, a faceless fucker with another ineffectual NGO, the American Refugee Committee, "He was our best worker." Wake up you twat! The whole west of Cambodia is crawling with these cats -- ex-KR killers who buried their uniforms when the Viets started closing in. In the far, far west, the rest of the KR live, having shaken Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen's hand and thereby getting off the hook.

In November 1997, two of the bloodiest architects of the reign of paranoid atrocity, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, popped down to Phnom Penh from their mansions (complete with heli-pad, swimming pool, private border crossing with Thailand!) to say "hi" to Hun Sen. Hun Sen, himself a one-time KR officer, had the corners of his exceptionally wide mouth drawn back almost all the time he was escorting them around the most beautiful places in Cambodia. Once, on the steps of Cambodia's most enormous and stupefyingly grand monument, Angkor Wat, Khieu Samphan mumbled, "Sorry, so sorry." But "Hey! We got the rubies, if you'll stop shelling my ass!" is what he meant to say. Kinda thoughtless of the NVA to chase the KR into the only corner of Cambodia that has anything of any value; the area around the "Pailin Autonomous Zone" is choc-a-bloc with rubies and sapphires, which usually get shipped off to Bangkok jewelry stores in a Thai army convoy.

Before he met Nuon Chea and K-man, Hun Sen's main boast was that he was whipping the KR's butt. That was probably how he won the 93 election. Suddenly, after the meeting, he said that to try them would risk "returning Cambodia to civil war." Come on, do I have to spell it out? Hun Sen did a deal with his old mates to stop the war in exchange for a cut of the gem trade.

So, the big Cambodia question remains: what will happen to the men and women who ordered, allowed, and carried out the bayoneting of babies in midair, the extraction of literally millions of toenails, the hanging of people upside down so that their heads were submerged in water, the burying alive of thousands, premeditated famine and thousands of other ingenious torture devices? Despite the rhetoric (read, shit) spouting from all politicians, events show that the cold-blooded architects of pointless mass genocide will get a guided tour of Cambodia and a funky house within commuting distance of the gem mines.

Deuch, who once remarked that one of his prisoners would "make good fertilizer," and signed a death warrant for 9 children "kill them all," also feels, "very sorry about the killings and the past." I guess this lets him off then, Hun Sen is likely to say.

Oliver Green, Ganja Gonzo