Trial of Khmer Rouge trio begins

20 November 2011 Last updated at 22:58 ET

The defendants are all now in their eighties

The three most senior surviving leaders of Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime have gone on trial.

They include Nuon Chea, also known as Brother Number Two. He was the right-hand man of the Maoist regime's supreme leader Pol Pot, who died in 1998.

The former leaders, now all in their eighties, face charges including genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge regime fell in 1979, and the process of trying its senior figures has taken many years.

Cambodia originally asked the United Nations and the international community to help set up a tribunal into the genocide in the mid-1990s.

A joint tribunal was finally established in 2006 following long drawn-out negotiations between the Phnom Penh government and the UN - but to date, only one person has been convicted.

'Absolute suffering'

The other leaders on trial now are the regime's former head-of-state Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary, who was foreign minister and international face of the organisation.

The trial has been broken up into several smaller cases, with the first hearing set to judge on the offence of enforced removal of people from the cities.

The BBC's Guy De Launey in Phnom Penh says the defendants are old and frail, and concern that they might die has forced the tribunal to split the case into several mini-trials in the hope of gaining at least one conviction.

The regime attempted to create an ideal communist society by forcing city residents to work as peasants in the countryside, and by purging intellectuals, middle class people and any supposed enemies of the state.

About 1.7 million people - about one-third of the population - are believed to have been murdered, or died of over-work, starvation or torture from 1975 to 1979.

The tribunal was told on Monday that the Cambodian people were in a "pitiful state" and their suffering "was absolute" during the regime's rule.

Pol Pot died in 1998 before facing a full trial for his crimes.

The only senior Khmer Rouge figure to be convicted so far is Kaing Guek Eav - better known as Comrade Duch.

He was head of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison - a torture facility located in a school building - where he presided over the torture and murder of thousands of people.