For years wildlife poacher Lean Kha had prowled the war-ravaged forests of Mondulkiri Province in eastern Cambodia looking for meat. A former teenage soldier for the Khmer Rouge political party, he estimates that he killed a thousand animals, including ten tigers, after the fall of the brutal Pol Pot regime in 1979.

Once dubbed the "Serengeti of Asia," almost all of Mondulkiri’s wildlife was wiped out by poachers during decades of conflict, which began with the war in neighboring Vietnam. 

Now, with Cambodia finally at peace, small but growing populations of animals—including Indochinese tigers, Asian elephants, and critically endangered species such as the giant ibis—are returning to one of Southeast Asia’s last remaining dry forests.

And Kha, now 45 years old, is helping to protect them as a head ranger supported by the international conservation group WWF.

"At the time I was ignorant and did not think there was a problem when I shot those tigers," he said, sitting at the forest headquarters in Mereuch as the Srepok River rushed behind him.

"Now I know we need to protect these animals for our children and grandchildren."

Coming Back Home

Humans cannot live inside the protected Mondulkiri Protected Forest reserve. A visitor can walk for miles without seeing any sign of humans, an unusual experience in otherwise densely populated Cambodia.

And with the region’s searing summer temperatures and open, shadeless terrain, it’s also usually hard to spot wildlife during the day.

But camera traps that take pictures at night show a different story.

A few years ago park rangers caught their first Indochinese tiger on camera. In 2007 a camera trap produced a picture of a female leopard and her cub.

Families of the victims arrived at the courthouse on Thursday

Outside, TV reporters continued their live broadcasts in the pouring rain of northern France.

Such is the media interest here, that a special annex has been bolted on to the Cour d’Assises at Charleville-Mezieres.

In a construction resembling a church hall, journalists and members of the public sit in pews watching the proceedings unfold on a large screen.

Inside the courtroom, the "duo diabolique" - one newspaper’s description of the accused couple - will spend much of the next two months side by side in the dock, divided from the outside world by bulletproof glass.

Details contested

More than 20 years after the first alleged victim was lured to her death under the obscure pact he is said to have struck with his wife, Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier are finally facing trial.

They have broadly confessed to what they did, although some details are contested.

Alain Behr is representing the family of Isabelle Laville, the first victim

Dressed in a blue jumper, Michel Fourniret replied to the presiding judge’s opening questions by holding up a sheet of paper.

"My lips are sealed if there is no closed-door hearing," it read, making clear he did not intend to speak as long as the proceedings were conducted in public.

He handed over another rolled-up document which was passed on to the judge.

In the court’s entrance hall, police kept a check on the wall of microphones and cameras.

The first break produced a clamour for reaction from the families’ legal teams.

‘Manipulate’

Alain Behr, representing relatives of the couple’s first alleged victim - Isabelle Laville, who died in 1987 - said they were under no illusions that Mr Fourniret would not try to manipulate the proceedings.

"He wants to be the master of this trial," he said.

"It’s very difficult for the family. For 20 years they’ve been waiting for this, and today Michel Fourniret is again playing with them."

Fourniret was first detained by Belgian police in 2003

Philippe Jumelin, one of the lawyers defending Michel Fourniret, said the paper his client passed to the judge contained a declaration that he had intended to read out.

He was not surprised by Mr Fourniret’s attitude in court, describing it as typical of his character.

"For him, the outcome is known," he said, but did not rule out that the defendant would intervene at some stage.

In court, Monique Olivier sat on the same bench as her husband, separated from him by two police officers.

Her hair now completely grey, she spoke only briefly to confirm her legal team.

Her lawyers have been keen to portray their client as a submissive partner, in fear of her husband.

The Laville family interpret Ms Olivier’s role somewhat differently.

Maximum sentence call

They are among several relatives who have come to attend the trial.

Isabelle’s father, Jean-Pierre, believes Mr Fourniret’s wife played a highly pro-active role in his daughter’s murder, luring the 17-year-old into her car and driving her to the killer’s home.

"In my eyes she is 100% guilty", he told Le Parisien, calling for the maximum sentence.

Over the following two months the court will seek to establish the precise roles played by both husband and wife.

It may also highlight shortcomings in the investigations in both France and Belgium that enabled the crimes to go unsolved for so long.

Longtime Carrollton resident Socheata Poeuv was born 28 years ago in a refugee camp on Cambodian New Year, a day that is supposed to bring luck. As it turned out, her entire immediate family was blessed with fortune. They survived.

Now she has told her story in the documentary New Year Baby, airing Tuesday on KERA (Channel 13) as part of the Independent Lens series.

New Year Baby is a prime example of filmmaking as self-discovery. It started Christmas of 2002, when Ms. Poeuv’s parents called a family meeting in their Carrollton home and dropped a bombshell: Ms. Poeuv’s two sisters were in fact her cousins, and her brother was her half brother. Her parents had adopted the children of family members murdered by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, which killed one-quarter of the country’s population between 1975 and 1979. But Socheata, her parents and those she still considers her siblings lived to create a new life in Texas.

This knowledge only made Socheata want to learn more. So she persuaded her parents and her half brother to return to Cambodia for the documentary. They confronted old ghosts, loved ones and hard memories. When it was over, the filmmaker found herself more dedicated to her family than ever.

"It certainly deepened my respect and my love for my family and for my parents for what they went through," she says by phone. "It’s given me another perspective on who I am, having known their story. Because of that I’ve found a sense of responsibility for the community, to do something that serves them."

That something is Khmer Legacies, described by Ms. Poeuv as "an effort to document the Cambodian genocide through personal videotaped testimonies."

"The idea is that the younger generations interview their parents about their life stories and their stories of survival," she says. "The interviews will be part of an archive that can be used as an educational tool, whether it’s through museum exhibits or school curriculums or other films and documentaries." Khmer Legacies is a nonprofit organization based at Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program.

"Because of the sacrifices my parents made, to have the kind of life where I just serve myself doesn’t seem like the best way to honor what they have done," she says.

The film features some difficult moments for the parents, including visits to the labor camps where they once toiled and a confrontation with a former Khmer Rouge cadre. Ms. Poeuv wasn’t sure if they would like the film when it was finished. "I had this whole scheme worked out," she says. "If my parents hated the film I would try to make it up to them by taking them on a cruise. That was always Plan B."

No need. After New Year Baby showed at the 2007 AFI-Dallas International Film Festival, her parents received a standing ovation. "The audience kind of created a receiving line with people coming up to tell them how great they were," Ms. Poeuv says. "It was that experience of having the audience affirm their life story that really transformed their relationship to their past." New Year Baby