Pol Pot’s 76-year-old sister-in-law, Ieng Thirith, pleaded with a Cambodia court to grant her mercy and not find her guilty of contributing to the deaths of the at least the 1.7 million who perished in that country’s "killing fields."

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, and, under Pol Pot, a Marxist leader, and the support of China, the Khmer Rouge forced millions of people to work on communal farms, and ultimately contributed to families dying of starvation, overwork and disease — not to mention execution.  Nearly all of Cambodia’s lawyers, doctors, artists and intellectuals were killed. Most of the murders occurred in the nation’s rural and country areas, known as the killing fields, which later became the basis for the Oscar-award winning 1984 movie by the same name.

Reuters reports that Thirith’s husband has been charged with war crimes, but Thirith — then the movement’s social minister — says she was only working on humanitarian issues after capital city Phnom Penh fell in 1975.

"I don’t know why a good person like me has been accused of such crimes. I have suffered a great deal," she said during a bail hearing. "I have been wrongly accused." She continued, "We worked very hard at the pharmaceutical factories. There were four factories and we had two Chinese experts helping us."

The trial of the Khmer Rouge’s chief torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, began last week. Many descendants of the regime’s victims have waited 30 years for these trials, hoping to see the perpetrators of the genocide finally brought to justice. And the Toronto Star definitely approves of the judicial moves.

Why hold lesser, elderly players to account decades late? Because Cambodians deserve justice, if belatedly; the perpetrators should face surviving accusers. Because there is no statute of limitations on genocide. Because the world must remember Cambodia’s holocaust, as it recalls the crimes of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong. And to serve notice on despots and warlords in our own era that they can no longer commit mass murder, war crimes and genocide with impunity.

No trial date has been set for the Thirith case.