From the start I’ve had no hope at all for the recently, finally launched Khmer Rouge war crimes trials, and now, with the death of Ta Mok, the Head Butcher, it seems even more pointless.

I twice visited Cambodia in the early ’90s and heard plenty of the locals saying they wished the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge could be brought to justice, but I don’t think they ever expected what the world is trying to give them now by way of closure. This trial procedure is too big, too expensive and too political, just like ex-king Sihanouk says it is.

The pain of the pointlessness washed over scenes of Ta Mok’s death and burial this past weekend. Here was the butcher-in-chief worshipped reverently in death by his cling-on comrades, given a Buddhist funeral of the sort he would never have allowed his fellow citizens under his rule. Most of the two million who died got chucked together in a bug crater and covered with a bit of dirt, then later their bones were recovered and their skulls were piled up in monuments, like the one pictured above – to which I’ve wishfully added Ieng Sary, Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea.

This was Ta Mok on Saturday, his corpse getting spruced up by the family for the big do (AFP photo). He’d been under “hospital arrest” in Phnom Penh since 1999, poor fella. His daughters dragged his poison carcass home to a hero’s funeral in Anlong Veng not far from the Thai border.

Since Hun Sen, a one-time Khmer Rouge cadre, is prime-minister-in-no-danger-of-budging, the good old boys of the Khmer Rouge were allowed to carry on their little power fantasy in a couple of outposts far from the capital. They even had their own internal power struggles, the last of which saw Ta Mok arresting Brother Number 1, Pol Pot. There was nothing left to squabble over really, but it kept Ta Mok in the villagers’ good books anyway.

So on Saturday they stuck talcum up his nose to keep him from smelling his own stink, dressed him in his Sunday best and folded up the right leg of his trousers where he’d lost a limb stepping on a landmine more than two decades ago. Now how did that got there?

The Buddhist monks, contractually forgiving, came round and started chanting things they wouldn’t have been allowed to chant if Ta Mok had still been in charge of the country. Maybe they were chanting their thanks that they don’t have to dig needless ditches in a vision of agriculture by Heironymous Bosch.

A steady stream of mourners streamed, some in tears. Now who’s going to build our roads (or whatever the “infrastructure projects” were that the media have been crediting Ta Mok for)?

This was Noun Chea earlier this month, on the front porch of his home in the other Khmer Rouge rat’s nest, Pailin (AP photo). Somebody bless Noun Chea, because at least he’s got the gumption to defend himself, the lying weasel. He says he had the best interests of the country in mind and was fighting off American colonialism until those blasted Vietnamese came in and put an end to the genocide, or rather, The Project.

Ah, the good old days. AFP seems to think this is “Ta Mok greeting Chinese officials”, but actually I think it’s Kang Kek Ieu, known as “Duch”, who used to run the no-fun-at-all Tuol Sleng prison. And those don’t look like Chinese officials to me.

This is Anger Day (AFP photo). Fine-arts students get together at the Choeung Ek killing field outside the capital, where folks were taken once they’d done their time at Tuol Sleng, and given a good rap on the head (since bullets were in short supply, like everything else). Today the students re-enact scenes from those good old days.

The Cambodians are wonderful hosts to tourists, almost as good as the Thais at hospitality and light-years ahead of the Vietnamese, who all seem to have their heads up their butts politically and socially (offence intended). Cambodia is an amazing place to visit, even if you don’t make it to Angkor (which would be a horrendous omission), but everywhere you go there are these hair-raising reminders that things got horribly wonky three decades ago and it’s just going to take a lot longer to sort them out.

Putting these old geezers on trial will accomplish nothing. Let death take them at their hour, but beware of their reincarnation – they’re hauling so much bad karma that they’ll be hell to deal with when they come back.