Pol Pot's lieutenant nabbed

Finally, the law caught up with the most senior surviving leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Nuon Chea, who was the second-in-command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, was arrested by the Cambodian police on Sept. 19. News reports from Phnom Penh reveal elements of drama as the police and officials of the special tribunal to prosecute the former Khmer Rouge leaders drove to Nuon Chea's remote home in Pailin, close to the Thai-Cambodian border, to nab him. He was then flown by helicopter to the Cambodian capital. Pailin has been for long a Khmer Rouge stronghold and served for many years as the movement's jungle headquarters. "He was arrested on the orders of the court," Helen Jarvis, chief of public affairs for the UN-backed tribunal, said during an interview from Phnom Penh. "He will be detained after an initial appearance before the co-investigating judges of the tribunal." For Cambodian's like Youk Chhang, the arrest of the 82-year-old Nuon Chea is a watershed moment in his country's struggle to ensure that the Khmer Rouge leaders face justice for the brutal deeds they committed. It also put to rest a belief that had gained ground among Cambodians over many years that the leaders of a regime that committed horrific crimes during its rule between 1975-79 would get away without a day in court. "The look on the faces of people in Phnom Penh says a lot about how people are feeling today. There is a sense of relief," Chhang, who survived the Khmer Rouge brutality but who lost family members during that period, told IPS over the telephone. "People are smiling on the streets because no one believed such an arrest would happen." Placing the man who was also known as 'Brother Number Two' in custody is being viewed, furthermore, as a boost to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), as the war crimes tribunal is officially called. "This will convince the public and others wanting justice that the trial is really working," adds Chhang. "It will help to restore trust in the legal system of the country." And few people know more than Chhang about the horrors committed by the Khmer Rouge that require to be exposed in a court of law. For he is the director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DCC), a Phnom Penh-based independent body that has spent years unearthing facts about Khmer Rouge atrocities. In July 2006, the DCC gave the ECCC boxes of evidence that included numbing details from some 20,000 mass graves, 189 prisons and 30,000 interviews of victims. Till his arrest, Nuon Chea had been leading the life of a free man after receiving amnesty from the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen in December 1998. He had also used that phase to declare his innocence, including statements made in July this year in an interview with the AFP news agency that he "was not involved in the killing of people" and "I don't know who was responsible." The weight of research in books written about the Khmer Rouge period suggests otherwise. Authors have fingered Nuon Chea as being a key figure in giving orders for the extermination of tens of thousands of his fellow Cambodians as the extreme Maoist group tried to create an agrarian utopia in the country. Nuon Chea's arrest comes over a month after another notorious figure of the Khmer Rouge -- Kaing Khek Eav, also known as 'Duch' -- was placed in the custody of the ECCC. Duch had been held in a military prison since 1999. He had been the head of the Toul Sleng interrogation center in the Cambodian capital during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. In Toul Sleng, a former high school, 14,000 people accused of being traitors died and only 12 inmates survived. The current developments raise the question as to when other leaders of the Khmer Rouge enjoying freedom will be taken into custody by the ECCC. They include Khieu Samphan, the former head of state during the Khmer Rouge years, who has been living in Pailin, and Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister of this extreme communist movement. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, died in 1998, consequently evading a trial. Another who has evaded a similar prospect was Ta Mok, widely known in the South-east Asian country as 'The Butcher,' since he died in July last year. The one-legged Ta Mok was appointed the army chief of the Khmer Rouge in 1977 and was instrumental in purging Cambodian cities of their inhabitants, including Phnom Penh, where some two million people were forced out to work in the provinces. The Khmer Rouge was responsible for killing close to 1.7 million people, nearly a quarter of the country's population at the time. Most of the Cambodian victims were either executed or died due to forced labor or from starvation. Although the Khmer Rouge were driven out of power in 1979 by invading forces from Vietnam, it took nearly two decades before formal discussions for a war crimes tribunal to prosecute its leaders began. Talks between the United Nations and Phnom Penh got underway in 1997 to create the ECCC, but it was a process that faced many roadblocks due to the shifting moods of the Hun Sen administration.