The Khmer Rouge trials
Justice late, better late
than never
Aug 7th 2014, 13:34 by
L.H. | PHNOM PENH
For Cambodians it has
been a long wait. Almost 35 years after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power
by a Vietnamese invasion, the movement’s last surviving senior leaders have
been found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to jail for life.
Or whatever is left of
their lives. Nuon Chea, chief ideologue for the Khmer Rouge and “Brother No. 2”
after Pol Pot, is 88 years old, Khieu Samphan, once the
head of state in Democratic Kampuchea as the country had been renamed, is 83.
When they were taken away from the purpose-built courthouse on August 7th, a
palpable sense of relief descended on the room.
Hundreds of Cambodians
had been brought from far and wide to pack the public gallery for the historic
decision. Many of them hugged, smiled and bowed in a show of respect to the
tribunal that saw the case through, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia (ECCC). Bou Meng, a survivor of the S-21 torture and extermination
camp, smiled broadly and expressed his approval simply: “good, good”.
In passing their final
sentence, the judge Nil Nonn said that these two leaders had stripped
Cambodians of their fundamental rights in the course of perpetrating a joint
criminal enterprise to “suppress and subjugate the human population”. They were
found guilty of conducting a systematic attack on civilians.
“The attack took many
forms, including forced transfer, murder, extermination, enforced
disappearances, attacks against human dignity and political persecution,” Mr
Nil Nonn said. “This attack victimised millions of Cambodians.” He cited one
testimony according to which witnesses saw “a Khmer Rouge soldier tear apart a
crying baby who was crawling on his dead mother's body.”
As many as 2.2m people
perished between April 1975 and January 1979. At that point the Vietnamese-led
Communist takeover marked the end of one civil conflict but also the beginning
of another, as Pol Pot led his loyalists into the jungle to fight a rearguard
war against the new regime in the capital.
While the Khmer Rouge
were still in Phnom Penh, the institution of money itself was abolished—along
with all semblances of traditional Khmer life—as the cities and towns were
emptied and millions of civilians forced into the remote countryside. There
they were worked under wretched conditions, desperately lacking food, water and
medicine.
In a way, there were
too many crimes with which Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and many of their cohorts
should have been charged. The fraction of their guilt that was decided in this
hearing, Case 002/01 it is called, focused on the forced evacuation of Phnom
Penh, the forced movement of people up until late 1977 and the persecution of
former soldiers, civil servants and their families from the regime of Lon Nol,
the American-backed nationalist who preceded them.
Nuon Chea wore his
characteristic grimace and black sunglasses and remained seated in his
wheelchair. Khieu Samphan stood as their verdicts and sentences were read.
Neither man flinched.
Both had insisted they
were innocent of the specific charges against them. At its heart their
justification was that the evacuation of Phnom Penh had been deemed necessary
to save the Cambodian people; they had reason to believe that the Americans
were intending to bomb the capital. Mr Nil Nonn said the bench of international
and Cambodian justices had decided their defence deserved no credence.
Nuon Chea had also
claimed evidence used against him was “littered with doubts and full of lies”,
in particular the testimony given by Kaing Guek Eav. “Duch”, as he is also
known, is already serving a life sentence, for the role he played in killing
thousands of detainees processed under his command at a prison complex called
S-21.
Khieu Samphan’s
judgment was less severe. The court found that he had never held sufficient
authority to issue orders to commit the crimes in question. He had however
“justified, defended and praised the common purpose and policies” of the Khmer
Rouge that resulted in the atrocities.
The ECCC, which is
backed by the UN, has been criticised sharply during its nine years in
operation. Its critics fault it for lengthy delays; its susceptibility to
interference by Cambodia’s current prime minister, Hun Sen; and for kickbacks
to local staff, when it was being established.
It has also been
costly. More than $200m has been spent on its proceedings already. The
tribunal’s supporters justify the high cost by arguing that the total sum works
out to equal about $100 for each person who died under the reign of the Khmer
Rouge. It makes for a macabre accounting of the ultra-Maoists’ dream of
moulding Cambodia into an agrarian utopia.
Youk Chhang is the
executive director of an NGO called the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, which
has been dedicated to collecting evidence from the Khmer Rouge period that
could be used in a prosecution. He is among those who thinks that the court’s
search for justice was better late than never, even if its legal processes were
flawed.
Its accomplishment is
more significant, Mr Youk Chhang says, in light of the fact that the world has
done so little to change its ways in the decades since the Cambodian nightmare.
Indeed, in his view “since the UN signed the Genocide Convention in 1948, not
one genocide has been prevented. A court of law is only established after
millions have already died. We need to search for a means to prevent such
crimes from happening again,” he said.
Nuon Chea and Khieu
Samphan know now where they will be spending the rest of their days, as they
did long before this verdict. Whether this will be their final conviction is
another question. Both men are facing additional charges of genocide in Case
002/02; it was launched last week and is expected to take another two years.
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