Thousands of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge marked 30 years yesterday since the fall of Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist regime, responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people.
Up to 80,000 people packed into the capital's Olympic stadium for a rally organised by the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), descendant of the government installed by Hanoi after its troops ousted Pol Pot on January 7th, 1979. "We have always remembered those who sacrificed their lives to save us from genocide," ageing CPP president and former guerrilla Chea Sim told the cheering crowd.
Despite international and domestic repugnance at the Khmer Rouge and their disastrous attempt to create an agrarian utopia, a significant minority of Cambodians mourn January 7th as the start of a 10-year occupation by their hated Vietnamese neighbours.
Political opponents of prime minister Hun Sen, a one-eyed former Khmer Rouge commander who has been in charge for the last 23 years, frequently label him a Vietnamese stooge, a charge he rebutted in typically blunt style this week.
"Whoever is against the day of victory is either Pol Pot or an animal," he told a crowd on Tuesday at the inauguration of a bridge south of Phnom Penh, now a bustling city of 2.5 million far removed from the derelict ghost town of 1979. Skyscrapers springing up on the banks of the Mekong, land prices rivalling Bangkok's and a stock exchange planned for this year all attest to an economy shaking off its past, thanks to growing investment over the past decade.
After fleeing into the jungle along the Thai border, the remnants of Pol Pot's black-shirted guerrilla army resisted the Vietnamese and Hun Sen until their final surrender in 1998, the year in which the movement's "Brother Number One" died.
Pol Pot's top surviving henchmen, all of them ageing and infirm, are only now being brought to justice, although ordinary Cambodians are growing increasingly frustrated at the interminable delays to a joint Cambodian-United Nations tribunal.
The court admitted this week that Cambodia's prosecutor was blocking a bid by her international counterpart to go after more than the five top cadres now in custody on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Human rights groups said the admission confirmed long-held suspicions that Hun Sen was manipulating the court to ensure it did not dig too deep, for fear it unearthed dark secrets about Khmer Rouge figures inside his administration.
The government denies this.