Dagestan and Cambodia

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Owen Bennett Jones introduces personal stories, insight and analysis from correspondents around the world. In this edition: Today, Lucy Ash feels the fear on the streets of Makhachkala as Dagestan's security forces and insurgency pursue a war of attriction; Max Shapira in Phnom Penh remembers his meeting with artist Vann Nath, witness to the Khmer Rouge's crimes. Death stalks Dagestan The struggle between militant Islamists and state authority takes a similar form in many different parts of the world. While suicide bombers - often young boys - kill themselves in indiscriminate attacks, the authorities respond with torture and extra-judicial killings. It happened in Iraq; it’s happening in Afghanistan, in Pakistan and as Lucy Ash has been discovering, it's becoming the way of the world in Dagestan. The man who saw - and painted - Year Zero International justice is a growth industry. What happened in Nuremburg after World War II, is becoming more normal: the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sudan and Cambodia are all now the subject of supra-national legal processes. The victims in all of these places want the guilty to face up their crimes. But does that ever happen? Or do the accused simply hang on to their own self-justifications? As the three most senior surviving members of the Khmer Rouge finally go on trial, Max Shapira recalls his meeting with a man who'd witnessed the worst of the horrors which they decreed - and was determined that the guilty should indeed have their day in court.