Chattanooga Times Free Press

A Cambodian’s bucolic life, charges of atrocities aside

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ANLONG VENG, Cambodia — 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. “I don’t want to think about that. There’s no reason for it. I don’t want to have any trouble. I just want to live in peace.”

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 more trials would cause fresh outbreaks of civil war and chaos.

A U.N. prosecutor, Nicholas Koumjian, said in a December statement, “Im Chaem played a key role in the commission of crimes which led to many thousands of deaths,” and she clearly fell under the court’s purview.

Anne Heindel, a co-author of “Hybrid Justice,” a book about the court, said the dismissal of the case was hard to understand in light of the evidence.

“What a farce and pretense of justice to spend so much money convicting only the three — a foregone conclusion — while pretending that the process was independen­t and not limited by politics for a decade,” Heindel wrote in an email.

“I don’t want to have any trouble. I just want to live in peace.” – IM CHAEM

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