Pol Pot number two blames outsiders for ills

"My fellow Cambodians, today Cambodia is enjoying peace,solidarity and national reconciliation and its development isimproving gradually," the octogenarian former guerrilla chief,charged with crimes against humanity, said at his bail hearing.

"But difficulties remain due to the influence of foreigncountries that are hindering Cambodia's growth," he saidwithout elaborating.

His only other words were in praise of Prime Minister HunSen, a one-eyed ex-Khmer Rouge fighter who defected to Vietnamin the late 1970s before returning with the 1979 Vietnameseinvasion that ousted Pol Pot's four-year reign of terror.

An estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died oftorture, disease and starvation under the ultra-Maoist regimeas Pol Pot's dream of creating an agrarian peasant utopiadescended into the nightmare of the "Killing Fields".

The effects of the "Year Zero" revolution and the nearlytwo decades of civil war that followed are still being felt 30years later, with Cambodia one of the poorest and most heavilymined countries in Asia.

The court is expected to rule on Nuon Chea's bail requestin several days. He is highly unlikely to be freed.

Besides Nuon Chea, top cadres now in custody are formerPresident Khieu Samphan, former Foreign Minister Ieng Sary andhis wife, Ieng Thirith, and Duch, head of Phnom Penh's TuolSleng, or "S-21" interrogation and torture centre.

Pol Pot died in 1998 in the final Khmer Rouge redoubt ofAnlong Veng on the Thai border.

(Reporting by Ek Madra; Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing byMichael Battye and Bill Tarrant)