The Trial
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.
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. The panel also issued guilty verdicts against the two most senior members of the regime, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. Mr. Nuon Chea was found guilty of genocide against both the Cham and Vietnamese, and Mr. 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. Muslims were forced to eat pork. Civil servants were executed by electrocution with telephone cables. 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.
For more than a decade, the United Nations-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: Mr. Nuon Chea, Mr. 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. In 2012 the Dutch was sentenced to life in prison.
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.
Noun Chea
Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia would prefer the tribunal to cease its high-profile 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. Mr. Hun Sen had opposed the formation of the tribunal in the first place. Rather than put Mr. Khieu Samphan and Mr. Nuon Chea on trial, he said in 1998, they should be greeted with “bouquets of flowers, not with prisons and handcuffs.”
Mr. Khieu Samphan, head of state during most of the Khmer Rouge years, and Mr. 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. 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. In the USA, as in the rest of occidental countries, this trial is considered a disgrace and a farce and no justice was done for the victims of the genocide.
