He was pivotal in creating and running the regime charged with meeting the government's inflation target.
Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the man who effectively ran the regime in recent years, kept Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi under detention for most of the past two decades.
The first defendant, Kaing Guek Eav, known by his alias as Duch, was the junior official who ran the regime's central torture chamber.
The Khmer Rouge's chief torturer who ran the regime's most feared prison today admitted murdering thousands of Cambodians and told of his "heartfelt sorrow" for the crimes he committed more than 30 years ago.
The reporter, Sarah Ferguson, pressed him further: "But are you not responsible for the people in those centres or on those islands as the Australian prime minister who runs the regime that holds them there?" "Well, we don't hold them there," he said.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema was Macias's nephew and trusted henchman, running the regime's notorious "Black Beach" prison-torture complex and leading the National Guard.
Sensing the shift in political winds, even Japan's long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, which ran the old regime along with powerful bureaucrats, has jumped on the decentralization bandwagon.
The first in the dock is Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, who ran the former regime's notorious S-21 torture prison and who is charged with crimes against humanity, torture and murder.
Back in 2003, she chaired the U.N.'s former Human Rights Commission, which discredited itself not only by picking Al-Hajjaji, envoy of Libya's despotic regime, to run the show, but also by slamming Israel 27 times from 2001 to 2006.
