Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cambodians-search-for-justice-after-pol-pots-brutal-regime Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript The people of Cambodia are still searching for justice three decades after former dictator Pol Pot's regime accused of forced labor, starvation and mass executions. The Bureau for International Reporting gives an update. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. KIRA KAY, NewsHour Correspondent: Cambodian painter Vann Nath creates vibrant scenes of his country's rich history and peaceful moments in its lush countryside.But the work he is better known for is darker. It portrays the time he spent under torture and interrogation as a prisoner of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. VANN NATH, Cambodian Painter: I was arrested December 30, 1977. KIRA KAY: Vann Nath was targeted for being an artist, a member of the elite, educated class, and therefore, according to the Khmer Rouge, an enemy of the people. VANN NATH: I arrived at the prison at 3:00 a.m. They measured how tall I am and took pictures of me. I was interrogated. And all around me, I could hear other people being beaten, screaming and yelling because of their pain. I did not know then, but these people were taken away. KIRA KAY: Taken away to the infamous killing fields by the hundreds of thousands. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge presided over one of the most brutal periods in history. Marked by mass executions, death by starvation, and forced labor, all in an attempt to create a demented vision of a communist utopia, dreamed up and carried out by Pol Pot and his cadres.YOUK CHHANG, Documentation Center of Cambodia: Everywhere you go, you see mass graves. You see skull. Just like a broken glass, when you drop a glass on the floor and broken, it's what we are. KIRA KAY: Youk Chhang runs the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which is dedicated to collecting proof of the atrocities that engulfed his nation, an archive of thousands of photographs, documents and interviews that provide the body of evidence that might one day convict those responsible for the deaths of an estimated 2 million people, around a quarter of the entire population.Now, three decades later, that day may finally be here. In the dusty outskirts of the capital, Phnom Penh, a shiny new courthouse has been built. It is called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a lofty name with lofty ambitions: to finally bring justice to a country that has yet to see any accounting for crimes they have suffered.By the hundreds, Cambodians from across the country are being bused in to tour the complex, to see where trials will be held, to understand that the tribunal is really here, it is finally happening.