Cambodian’s bucolic life, atrocities charges aside
Woman known as Grandma Chaem accused of overseeing killing tens of thousands as Khmer Rouge official
In this dusty mountain hamlet on the Thai border, she is known as Grandma Chaem.
The tiny 74-year-old lives peacefully in a snug, stilted house surrounded by papaya, lime and custard-apple trees. Her children and grandchildren live nearby. She grows cucumbers and donates to her local pagoda, chews betel leaf and tends her cows.
But Im Chaem, the woman enjoying this apparently idyllic retirement, is accused of overseeing the killing of tens of thousands of people as a Khmer Rouge official in northwestern Cambodia in 1977 and 1978. In 2015, a United Nations-backed tribunal charged her with crimes against humanity, including mass murder, extermination and enslavement.
On Wednesday, the tribunal’s investigating judges quietly dropped the charges, raising questions about whether they had yielded to pressure from the Cambodian government, which opposed the prosecution.
The tribunal, set up to try people accused of being responsible for the worst crimes committed during the nearly four years the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, is a joint project of the United Nations and the Cambodian government. The government, however, has fought efforts to prosecute anyone beyond the Khmer Rouge’s senior leaders and one notorious prison chief.
The case was dismissed, the tribunal said in a statement, because Im Chaem “was neither a senior leader nor otherwise one of the most responsible officials of the Khmer Rouge regime.”
Im Chaem said she had never planned to go to court anyway.
“I do not like what they accuse me of,” she said in a recent interview at her home in Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold.
As many as 2.2 million people died in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule, and there have been battles over whom to prosecute since the tribunal’s inception.
Since it opened in 2006, the tribunal has convicted only three people: two senior leaders and the regime’s chief jailer.
A fourth elderly suspect died during prosecution, while another was declared unfit for trial because of dementia. Three midranking suspects are also under investigation but have not been arrested.
The government — whose nucleus is a group of former Khmer Rouge officials and soldiers who defected early on — has effectively blocked the tribunal from reaching further into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, many of whom gained positions in the army or local government when they agreed to reintegrate in the 1990s. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier, has repeatedly warned that more trials would cause fresh outbreaks of civil war and chaos. A U.N. prosecutor, Nicholas Koumjian, said in a December statement that “Im Chaem played a key role in the commission of crimes which led to many thousands of deaths,” and that she clearly fell under the court’s purview.
The tribunal has cost the U.N. and international donors about $300 million so far.
According to a confidential document submitted by prosecutors in 2008, Im Chaem and another official, Yim Tith, were sent to the country’s northwest in 1977 to purge cadres seen as traitorous, often because they could not meet the regime’s hefty rice quotas with their starving labor forces and primitive technology. They killed many others along the way, collateral damage in the quest to enforce a radical communist vision.
Together, they may have been responsible for as many as 560,000 deaths, the prosecution document said.
An entire village of 400 people, Chakrey, was virtually eliminated; fewer than 10 men were alive by the end of 1978. At a nearby jail, about 6,000 people were killed, 20 or 30 every night.
“In Chakrey village we could hear the screams from the forest nearby,” said one survivor cited in The Pol Pot Regime, a book by the historian Ben Kiernan. “The victims’ clothes were distributed to us the next day.”
Im Chaem also supervised construction of huge waterworks to increase rice production, including two dams. According to prosecutors, one was built entirely by hand in three months by 1,300 slave laborers subsisting on tiny portions of rice porridge.
She tells the story differently. In a 2012 interview with the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent research group, she said she had been called upon to “solve problems” because she had a knack for organizing workers and supervising rice cultivation.
She said that poor conditions were endemic before she arrived in the area, and that she had improved things.