Survivor recounts horror of Khmer Rouge

Youk Chhang was 13 when he was beaten by members of the brutal Khmer Rouge for picking mushrooms and offering them to his pregnant, starving sister.

Even his mother, who was in the crowd of onlookers, couldn't react or both of them would have been executed.

Years later, filled with revenge, Chhang returned to Cambodia to confront the perpetrator.

"He didn't even remember me," Chhang said in an interview today at a three-day conference on the prevention of genocide. "That was the most heartbreaking thing and I realized revenge was not the answer."

For the past 10 years, Chhang has been collecting evidence that will be used at the recently established tribunal in Cambodia to prosecute the leaders of the regime responsible for the deaths of about 2 million people, including many of Chhang's family members.

In July, two of the leaders behind the notorious "killing fields" between 1975 and 1979 were arrested and Chhang said three more will be picked up in the coming weeks. Now aged between 64 and 82, they've been living openly in Cambodia, close to the Thai border.

When the first trial begins next year - three decades after the killings - it will be the first ever to address one of the world's biggest mass murders.

About a quarter of the country's population was either murdered or died of torture, exhaustion, illness or starvation during the insane social-engineering experiment in which urban residents were forced at gunpoint into the countryside.

Chhang's Documentation Centre of Cambodia in Phnom Penh has amassed 1.5 million pages of documents, uncovered 28,000 mass graves, and discovered 189 prisons and photographs.

They also spoke to 10,000 perpetrators, who, says Chhang, were very open when speaking about their actions.

"All of them had been indoctrinated to believe that it wasn't his responsibility, that it was the responsibility of someone above him," he said. "Some of the killers were just farmers, being indoctrinated to believe his action was for the good of the nation."

Canadian Robert Petit, who worked in Montreal as a criminal prosecutor for eight years before heading to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, is acting as co-prosecutor with a Cambodian. The Canadian government has provided $2 million of the $56-million budget for the tribunal, which has a three-year time limit.

But it comes about 10 years too late to get Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla force that set in motion the killings. He died in a jungle hideout in 1998.

Last year, one of the top Khmer Rouge leaders, Ta Mok, died at age 80.