Khmer Rouge henchman never really faced justice
One of few officials put on trial but died before release of verdict
Ieng Sary, a former Khmer Rouge official whose defection from the Cambodian Maoist rebel group in 1996 led to its collapse, bringing an end to nearly two decades of conflict, has died aged 87.
The Khmer Rouge came to power through a civil war that ousted the American-backed regime of Lon Nol, and ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. They aimed to transform the country into a pure socialist society. To this end, they abolished money, private property, religion and traditional culture. Cities were emptied, forcing urban residents to become rural labourers, growing rice and building irrigation schemes.
In four years, between 1.7 million and 2.2 million people — a quarter of the population — died in the “killing fields” from starvation, disease, overwork, torture and mass execution.
Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, were members of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot’s inner circle. They had all studied together in Paris and were linked by ties of marriage — Ieng Thirith’s sister, Khieu Ponnary, was Pol Pot’s first wife. Under Pol Pot’s dictatorship, Ieng Sary served as deputy prime minister in charge of foreign affairs until 1979, when Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge; a new Hanoiinstalled government sentenced the two men to death in absentia.
The Khmer Rouge retreated to the Thai border, where they continued fighting for nearly two more decades. During these years, Ieng Sary was a crucial link between the organization and China, a key source of money and arms. Former colleagues later accused him of embezzling millions of dollars from the illegal logging and gem mining operations along the border with Thailand.
In 1996, however, with the group’s fortunes on the wane, Ieng Sary struck a peace deal with the Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen, and days later led 3,000 Khmer Rouge fighters out of the jungle.
The move was a catalyst for the movement’s final disintegration in 1999 (Pol Pot had died the previous year). It secured Ieng Sary a royal pardon from King Norodom Sihanouk, a measure of credibility as a peacemaker and a comfortable life which he divided between an opulent villa in Phnom Penh and another home in Pailin, northwestern Cambodia.
Ieng Sary claimed that Pol Pot had been “the sole and supreme architect of the party’s line, strategy and tactics,” and that he (Ieng Sary) had been a secondary figure, excluded from decisions on policy and executions. “Do I have remorse? No,” he said in 1996. “I have no regrets because this was not my responsibility.”
The Cambodian government of Hun Sen, too, was reluctant to investigate former Khmer Rouge figures, some of whom had become political allies.
But campaigners fighting for justice soon found evidence that Ieng Sary had been deeply involved in the bloody purges. In particular, he was alleged to have persuaded hundreds of Cambodian intellectuals and diplomats to return home from overseas to help rebuild their country. The returnees were arrested and put in “re-education camps.” Most were executed.
Ieng Sary was also alleged to have publicly encouraged and facilitated arrests and executions within his Foreign Ministry and throughout Cambodia. Under his revolutionary alias “Comrade Van,” he was the recipient of many internal Khmer Rouge documents giving details of tortures and mass executions: “We are continuing to wipe out remaining (internal enemies) gradually, no matter if they are opposed to our revolution overtly or covertly,” read one cable in 1978.
In 2007, Ieng Sary was arrested by a joint CambodianUN tribunal, and subsequently put on trial for genocide, crimes against humanity and breaches of the Geneva Convention. But he died before any verdict could be reached.
Ieng Sary was born Kim Trang on Oct. 24, 1925 in the Tra Ninh province of southern Vietnam, to a Cambodian father and a Chinese mother. He first met Pol Pot in the mid-1940s, when they were classmates at Phnom Penh’s elite Lycée Sisowath. Both won government scholarships to study in France, where they joined the French Communist Party.
In 1951, while still in Paris, Ieng Sary married a fellow student, Khieu Thirith, who would become social affairs minister in the Khmer Rouge regime.
After returning to Cambodia in 1957, Ieng Sary taught history at a school in Phnom Penh while engaging in clandestine militant activities. In 1963, at a time when suspected communists were being arrested, he and Pol Pot slipped out of the capital to start a guerrilla movement in the countryside. In 1971 he moved to Beijing, where his role was to coordinate the Cambodian resistance. When the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, Pol Pot was named prime minister and Ieng Sary his deputy prime minister responsible for foreign affairs.
In this role, Ieng Sary publicly and repeatedly dismissed reports of atrocities and mass killings. However, a chilling account of life in the Foreign Ministry’s camp in Phnom Penh, codenamed B-1, was later provided by Laurence Picq, a Frenchwoman who had married a Khmer Rouge activist but later defected from the movement. In 1984 she wrote a book in which she described a seminar in the camp in 1978: “Ieng Sary spoke solemnly about the purge movement. Foreigners had undermined the whole state, he declared. Two new spy rings had recently been dismantled. The first had been led by one Van Piny, who had confessed that one of his crimes was wasting 50 coconuts. ‘Fifty coconuts!’ Ieng Sary repeated with an offended air. ‘That’s economic sabotage!’”
Ieng Sary, she claimed, “saw conspiracies and traitors everywhere. He led denunciation sessions that would turn into collective hysteria. Young wives denounced their husbands without evidence, children denounced their parents. All children of workers were revisionists and members of the Soviet KGB. Anyone who had ever smoked an American cigarette was CIA. Any person with nostalgia for a café creme on the Boulevard StMichel belonged to the French secret service ...”
Since the UN-backed tribunal was established in 2006, only one former Khmer Rouge official has been tried and convicted. Ieng Sary’s wife was also a defendant until she was ruled unfit to stand trial last year because she is suffering from dementia.
The Khmer Rouge almost destroyed Cambodian Buddhism, executing tens of thousands of monks and desecrating pagodas. Yet towards the end of his life Ieng Sary claimed to be a believer, and his family are reported to be planning to cremate his body in a Buddhist ceremony.
“I am a gentle person. I believe in good deeds,” he claimed.