First genocide convictions against Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge lieutenants
THE last surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge that brutally ruled Cambodia in the Seventies were today convicted of genocide in a landmark judgment.
The guilty verdicts against Nuon Chea, 92, and Khieu Samphan, 87, are the first to rule that the regime’s activities were genocide. Up to two million people are believed to have been wiped out under the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.
The sites where the atrocities took place are known as the Killing Fields. Most of the victims died of starvation, torture, exhaustion or disease in labour camps or were bludgeoned to death in mass executions.
Chea was deputy to regime leader Pol Pot and Samphan was head of state. They were sentenced to life in prison, the same sentence they are already serving after earlier convictions for crimes against humanity connected with forced transfers and mass disappearances of people. Both men denied the charges and suggested they were targets of political persecution.
Judge Nil Nonn read out the ruling to the UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in capital Phnom Penh. Victims of the Khmer Rouge packed the courtroom to hear that the regime committed genocide against the Vietnamese and the mainly Muslim Cham minorities.
The Khmer Rouge aimed to establish a farming utopia by emptying cities to establish vast rural communes. Instead their radical policies led to what has been termed “auto-genocide”, when a government targets its own people.
The court found that during their rule, the Khmer Rouge had a policy to target Cham and Vietnamese people to create “an atheistic and homogenous society without class divisions”, the judge said in the verdict.
The Cham “were dispersed and scattered among Khmer villages for their communities to be broken up and fully assimilated into the Cambodian population”, the judge said. “A great number of Cham civilians were taken ... and were thus killed on a massive scale.”
Hundreds of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers were killed at the S-21 interrogation centre, at a converted Phnom Penh school called Tuol Sleng, after being tortured and forced to admit they were spies. “The fate of these prisoners was a foregone conclusion as they were all ultimately subject to execution,” the judge added.
The court was set up in 2005. Its first conviction was in 2010 when it sentenced Kaing Guek Eav, alias “Duch”, the head of S-21. Two other leaders, Ta Mok and Ieng Sary, died before their cases concluded. Pol Pot died in 1998.