PREVIEW: Long-awaited trial of Khmer Rouge leaders set to start

Former Khmer Rouge prisoner Mom Kimsen, shows her portrait on display at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21 prison), in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 31 May 2011. The Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has announced that the initial hearing in Case 002 will commence on 27 to 30 June 2011. The indicted persons in Case 002 are former Head of State Khieu Samphan, former Deputy Prime Minister in Charge of Foreign Affairs. Ieng Sary, former Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Nuon Chea and former Minister of Social Affairs Ieng Thirith.

Jun 24, 2011
By Robert Carmichael
DPA

Phnom Penh - The mass grave lies just a few kilometres off national road 5, which connects Phnom Penh to Battambang town in western Cambodia. Villagers tell you this was a Khmer Rouge prison and that many thousands died here.

There is little to indicate that today. This place, the former Chong Chrouy Prison, is a five-minute walk off a narrow dirt road and is overgrown with bushes. Crumbling concrete fragments are all that remain of its buildings; shallow depressions in the earth mark the burial pits.

Villager Puon Kosal, 23, says that when he was a boy, there were too many holes to count and the ground was littered with bones.

'Now there aren't many left,' he says, pointing out a scrap of clothing sticking out of the ground at a place the villagers call 'the prison of ghosts.'

'The old people say many died,' he says.

The Documentation Center of Cambodia, a genocide research organization, estimated in a 1998 survey that 70,000 to 100,000 people are buried here in hundreds of mass graves.

It is impossible to know the true figure because Chong Chrouy Prison was not excavated, but villagers say large numbers of people died here during the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge rule. There are similar sites across Cambodia.

On Monday, the trial of the four surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who stand accused of responsibility for the deaths of up to 2.2 million people, is to begin in Phnom Penh before a UN-backed tribunal.

The four are party ideologue Nuon Chea, known as Brother Number Two; then-head of state Khieu Samphan; foreign minister Ieng Sary; and his wife, social affairs minister Ieng Thirith.

They are accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and an array of other charges. The four deny all the charges.

It has taken three decades to try them. Although Monday's hearing is to be procedural rather than evidential, it is a landmark, says the Documentation Center's director, Youk Chhang, whose organization has provided half a million documents to the court.

He says this trial, the second held by the court, was the 'most important for me and I think for most Cambodians,' he says. 'We all know these four [defendants]. They do not accept, they put all the blame to their subordinates, and they blame others.'

Youk Chhang says the trial 'will help us to put this [period] behind us and move on.'

Last year, the court jailed the regime's security chief, Comrade Duch, for 30 years after finding him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Duch has appealed his conviction.

But case two, which is to have its first hearing Monday, is more complicated in a number of ways, one being that Duch ran a prison where suspected enemies of the revolution were tortured and later executed. In short, he was an implementer of policy.

But the defendants in case two are charged with devising policy, which puts them at a remove from Duch's hands-on role.

Clair Duffy with the Open Society Justice Initiative, which is funded by US billionaire George Soros and monitors the tribunal, says defence teams at other trials involving alleged senior leaders have used that distance to claim their clients lacked knowledge of atrocities.

'[They say] either that they weren't present at meetings where these kinds of policies were devised or that they weren't aware of what actually was going to be the result of the policies that were being devised - such as killings, torture, etc,' Duffy says.

There are other issues. The defendants are elderly, from 79 to 85, and in varying degrees of health. There are fears one or more could die before the trial concludes.

That has happened elsewhere, most prominently with former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 during his trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

For that reason, the Khmer Rouge tribunal has brought in a new rule allowing it to deliver convictions or acquittals as the trial proceeds.

The prosecution is confident of its case with a file containing 350,000 documents. Not so the defence team for Nuon Chea, whose lawyer Michiel Pestman says he believes his client has little chance of receiving a fair trial.

Pestman says Cambodian politics has dominated key areas of the tribunal's pursuit of justice. Among other reasons, he cites an event in 2009 when case two investigators were reportedly told to favour evidence that indicated guilt.

'The signs are on red as far as we're concerned,' Pestman says. 'We are seriously worried that this court is unable to do what they are supposed to do, and that is deliver a fair trial.'