Last of top 5 Khmer Rouge leaders is arrested

Monday, November 19, 2007
By Seth Mydans
Posted by The International Herald Tribune (France)

"Government officials, military officers, the rich, indulge themselves with excessive spending ... Clearly, if the present situation continues, our country will unavoidably see its own dissolution" - Khieu Samphan discussing about the current Hun Sen's regime

PHNOM PENH: Khieu Samphan, the former head of state for Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, was arrested at a hospital here Monday. He is the last of five top leaders targeted by prosecutors in advance of trials expected to begin next year.

An urbane, French-educated leftist intellectual, Khieu Samphan, 76, had been living quietly in a former stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, the group responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people from torture, executions, starvation and the exhaustion of forced labor from 1975 to 1979.

Khieu Samphan was brought to a hospital here last Wednesday after suffering an apparent stroke. Witnesses said he was supported on both sides by the officers who escorted him to a police car for arrest.

"An initial appearance will be held today during which he will be informed of the charges which have been brought against him," said a special international tribunal in a statement.

Khieu Samphan was to join three other members of the Khmer Rouge central committee, as well as the commandant of the Tuol Sleng torture house, in a detention facility at the tribunal's headquarters on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

The commandant, Kaing Guek Eav, 64, known as Duch, was due to appear at a pre-trial hearing Tuesday, the first appearance in open court of any Khmer Rouge figure for the crimes of the 1970s.

A close confidant of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader who died in 1998, since their student days in France, Khieu Samphan has denied responsibility for any massacres, saying he only learned of the atrocities committed by his regime when he saw a documentary about Tuol Sleng in 2003.

"It is normal that those who have lost their families, that they - what to say - feel some resentment," he said in 1998 after retiring from a decade-long stint as a guerrilla leader following the ouster of the Khmer Rouge regime.

But he added: " 'Let bygones be bygones' is the best solution for our country, because it is the only way to reach national reconciliation. It is the sine qua non condition for peace and stability in our country."

As his lawyer, Khieu Samphan has selected another associate from his student days, Jacques Vergès, a French lawyer who has made a name defending men accused of the most barbaric crimes. Vergès defended the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, the confessed serial killer Charles Sobhraj and the former Nazi Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie.

"He and I used to attend meetings of student committees against colonialism," Khieu Samphan told The Associated Press in an interview in 2004.

In France, Khieu Samphan wrote a doctoral thesis titled "Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development" that advocated national self-reliance. But it did not foreshadow the extreme and brutal methods of the Khmer Rouge, which drove all residents from the cities and transformed the nation into a massive labor camp.

Returning here from France in 1959, he became a university lecturer and leftist newspaper editor. He won a popular reputation for his incorruptibility and simple lifestyle. He fled into the jungle in 1967 to escape a crackdown on leftists and joined a small movement of Cambodian communists.

He remained in the top tier of the Khmer Rouge movement through its four-year rule in the late 1970s and through the civil war that continued until the time of his surrender to the government at the end of the 1990s. Phnom Penh took no action against him at the time.

In a book published last week, Khieu Samphan describes the Khmer Rouge regime as a popular uprising against repression and inequality and says its atrocities were carried out by brutal and uneducated lower-ranking cadre.

"There was no policy of starving people," he writes in the 157-page book, titled "Reflection on Cambodian History Up to the Era of Democratic Kampuchea," using the country's name under Khmer Rouge rule. "Nor was there any direction set out for carrying out mass killings. There was always close consideration of the people's well-being."

But he writes that "coercion was needed" in order to make the population work hard in the face of food shortages.

He describes Pol Pot as a leader who "sacrificed his entire life" to defend national sovereignty. But he also says it was Pol Pot who was responsible for the purges within the movement that took many thousands of lives.

In addition to Pol Pot, a number of his colleagues at the top tier of the Khmer Rouge have died before they could be brought to trial.

Those in detention now include Nuon Chea, 82, the movement's chief ideologist, who surrendered together with Khieu Samphan in 1998 and had lived next door since then in the remote town of Pailin, where most of their neighbors were former members of the Khmer Rouge. He was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

They also include the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister, Ieng Sary, 82, and his wife and fellow central committee member, Ieng Thirith, 75, who were arrested on Nov. 13. Both were charged with crimes against humanity, and Ieng Sary was also charged with war crimes.

In a statement released by the court, Ieng Sary called the charges against him "unacceptable" but said he was "very happy that this court has been established because it will be an opportunity for me to discover the truth."

Like Khieu Samphan, he claimed ignorance of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.

"I would like to know the truth about a dark period in our history," the court quoted him as saying. "I do not know where the truth lies."

In his book, Khieu Samphan portrays the Khmer Rouge regime as just another chapter in the ups and downs of Cambodian history, and far from the worst of them.

It supplanted a period of misrule, injustice, corruption and social ills under a regime supported by the United States following a coup in 1970, he writes.

"Now such a regime is gradually re-emerging in Cambodia," he writes, citing corruption, decadence, land grabbing and illegal logging.

"Government officials, military officers, the rich, indulge themselves with excessive spending," he writes. "Clearly, if the present situation continues, our country will unavoidably see its own dissolution."

This is the view of history he offered when he surrendered in 1998, saying at a news conference, "The developments of history in our country are very complicated."

"To say who is wrong and who is right and who is doing this and who is doing that, et cetera," he said, and his voice trailed off.