Santa Fe New Mexican

Khmer Rouge’s slaughter in Cambodia ruled genocide

- By Hannah Beech New York Times

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Many of the foot soldiers for the Khmer Rouge remain in Cambodia’s remote reaches, each with a chronicle of the horror-soaked years in which Pol Pot and his Communist disciples turned the country into a deadly laboratory for agrarian totalitari­anism.

Mea Chrun, a former bodyguard in the Khmer Rouge, lives in the jungle-choked hills of northern Cambodia, in Anlong Veng. He is matter-of-fact about the weight of the slaughter. “I think that 1 million people were killed,” he said. “Don’t say 3 million.”

On Friday morning — four decades after a total of at least 1.7 million people, a fifth of Cambodia’s population, were culled by execution, overwork, disease and famine — an internatio­nal tribunal for the first time declared that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against the Muslim Cham minority and ethnic Vietnamese.

The panel also issued guilty verdicts against the two most senior surviving members of the regime, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, now 92 and 87 respective­ly.

Nuon Chea was found guilty of genocide against both the Cham and Vietnamese, and Khieu Samphan against just the Vietnamese. The pair were found guilty of various crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Convention­s. And they were sentenced to life imprisonme­nt, the same sentence they had received in an earlier trial.

In dry legal prose that did not camouflage the violent class struggle waged by the Khmer Rouge, the verdict repeated certain words: murder, exterminat­ion, enslavemen­t, imprisonme­nt, torture, persecutio­n on political grounds and other inhumane acts against human dignity.

Detailed instances of forced labor, such as the building of dams and dikes at the threat of death, were enumerated, along with forms of torture ranging from suffocatio­n by plastic bags to the extraction of toenails and fingernail­s.

For some, the verdict felt like a marginal footnote to a murderous history that has made Cambodia a byword for genocidal mania.

“It may be finished,” said Iam Yen, 52, who gave testimony to the tribunal of her years imprisoned in a child camp under the Khmer Rouge. “But I won’t ever have peace.”

Still, a verdict of genocide in Cambodia, no matter how delayed or limited in scope, carries implicatio­ns for future prosecutio­ns of crimes against humanity, such as in the cases of Sudan or Myanmar.

“We need to show the world that even if it takes a long time, we can deliver justice,” said Ly Sok Kheang, the director of the Anlong Veng Peace Center and a researcher in peace and reconcilia­tion efforts.

For more than a decade, the U.N.-backed tribunal, called the Extraordin­ary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, has sifted through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, called hundreds of witnesses and heard in exhaustive detail how the Khmer Rouge ran its killing fields.

The entire effort has cost more than $300 million.

Yet the court has convicted just three senior Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity: Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, who commanded a prison camp where at least 12,000 people were tortured and ordered to their deaths.

Only five top Khmer Rouge leaders have been arrested and put on trial. But as the court’s deliberati­ons dragged on, the other two elderly defendants died.

With Friday’s judgment, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has made clear he would prefer the tribunal to cease its highprofil­e work. But others would like trials to extend to many lower-ranking officials who are believed to have carried out some of the Khmer Rouge’s most horrific crimes.

Hun Sen, a onetime Khmer Rouge cadre who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades, had opposed the formation of the tribunal in the first place. Rather than put Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea on trial, he said in 1998, they should be greeted with “bouquets of flowers, not with prisons and handcuffs.”

“This trial has frequently been a disgrace and a farce,” said Sophal Ear, a professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles, whose family fled the Khmer Rouge. “The message is that you can be held to account, if you live long enough.”

Khieu Samphan, head of state during most of the Khmer Rouge years, and Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s aide-de-camp and chief political strategist, were arrested in 2007, after having spent years living freely in the country’s north.

When handed life sentences in 2014 at an earlier trial for other crimes against humanity, both men denied responsibi­lity for the regime’s brutality, even though they were among its highest leaders.

Friday’s genocide conviction comes more than 40 years after the Khmer Rouge imposed its reign of terror on Cambodia. In 1975, Pol Pot and his communist forces marched into Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, and declared it “Year Zero.”

The aim was a classless agrarian society. People were executed for the slightest of crimes: wearing glasses, speaking French or liking ballet.

Many of the Khmer Rouge’s most fervent ideologues were foreign-educated. Khieu Samphan studied political science at the Sorbonne, while Nuon Chea went to college in Thailand. The support they garnered, however, came from Cambodia’s young, rural base, which had suffered from years of civil war and U.S. bombardmen­t as the Vietnam War spilled over the border.

 ?? ADAM DEAN/NEW YORK TIMES ?? Victims involved in the genocide case gather Friday after verdicts were announced by the internatio­nal tribunal, the Extraordin­ary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Four decades after the Communist movement’s reign of terror, two surviving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge were held accountabl­e in a genocide verdict at the trial that opens the door for other rulings.
ADAM DEAN/NEW YORK TIMES Victims involved in the genocide case gather Friday after verdicts were announced by the internatio­nal tribunal, the Extraordin­ary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Four decades after the Communist movement’s reign of terror, two surviving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge were held accountabl­e in a genocide verdict at the trial that opens the door for other rulings.

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