Guerillas tainted by massacre join army

Khmer Rouge fighters involved in the massacre of 22 people in a racially motivated attack last year were welcomed into the army yesterday.

About 150 guerillas from rebel Division 785 shed their olive-green uniforms for government fatigues in a ceremony in rural Kompong Chhnang province, 80km northwest of Phnom Penh.

Division members murdered 22 people and wounded 16, most of them ethnic Vietnamese, in an April 1998 attack on Chnouk Trou, a small fishing village.

They attacked without warning around midnight as villagers slept. The rabidly xenophobic Khmer Rogue, which had carried out three other massacres of ethnic Vietnamese in the previous five years, immediately claimed responsibility.

Provincial authorities arrested four men who confessed to being spies and helping to carry out the killings. They were jailed for 10 years, although they are considered to be scapegoats.

'Many people were involved in the massacre but we only arrested four,' said one provincial official yesterday. 'We just don't know how many or which ones.' Rosemary McCreery, director of the Cambodian Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Phnom Penh, said they hoped authorities would follow up on the case after the integration.

But Defence Minister Sisowath Sirirath suggested the Government had to accept such atrocities in the spirit of reconciliation.

'I am concerned with the Khmer Rouge as a whole,' he told the Cambodia Daily. 'They were involved in the mass murder of two million of their own people. Everyone has blood on their hands, and I don't know if justice can be rendered to the families of the victims.'