No mercy for Khmer Rouge’s last surviving member

CAMBODIA’S UN-backed Khmer Rouge war crimes court gave its final verdict yesterday, upholding the genocide conviction and life sentence imposed on the regime’s last surviving leader.

The tribunal was ruling on an appeal by Khieu Samphan, head of state for the communist regime that wiped out a quarter of the Cambodian population in less than four years in the 1970s.

Survivors welcomed the verdict, the last that will be issued by the tribunal, which has cost more than $330 million and prosecuted only five Khmer Rouge leaders, two of whom died during proceedings. “The Supreme Court chamber finds no merit in Khieu Samphan’s arguments regarding genocide and rejects them,” Chief Judge Kong Srim said in the lengthy ruling.

The court also upheld the 2018 convictions against the 91-year-old for multiple crimes against humanity, even if he did not personally take part.

About 500 people packed the court to hear the verdict, including Buddhist monks, diplomats and government officials.

The hybrid court, with both Cambodian and international judges, was set up to try the senior leaders of the genocidal regime, which wiped out about two million people through starvation, torture, forced labour and mass executions during its 1975-79 rule.

Regime chief Pol Pot, known as “Brother Number One”, never faced justice, dying in 1998 before the court was set up. The genocide conviction relates to the persecution of ethnicminority Vietnamese.

The frail Khieu Samphan sat hunched in a wheelchair in the dock, listening intently to the ruling through headphones.

Alongside him in the 2018 case, “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea was sentenced to life for genocide and other crimes, including forced marriages and rapes. He died in 2019.

Both were given life sentences in 2014 for crimes against humanity in another case related to the violent evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, when the capital’s population was forced into rural labour camps.

The only other person convicted by the special court was Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, head of the torture interrogation centre where about 18 000 people were murdered. Duch also died several years after being convicted.