The Extraordinary Trial of Khmer Rouge Leaders

Nuon Chea at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in November 2011. (Mark Peters/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

January 16, 2013
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
International Herald Tribune (France)

BEIJING — Brother Number Two is ill.

That means the Khmer Rouge genocide trials in Cambodia, “one the most significant war crimes trials since ” (according to the scholar Peter Maguire, author of “Facing Death in Cambodia,”) have slowed again.

Still, the attempt to deliver justice to more than 1.7 million Cambodians killed by their government between 1975 and 1979 continues: the hospitalization of Nuon Chea, 86, the highest-ranking surviving leader of the regime and its main ideologue, known as Brother No. 2 during the reign, is merely the latest bump in the road for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.

It is a remarkable tale of perseverance and pitfalls.

Set up by the United Nations and the Cambodian government, the court began operating in 2006 and has to date convicted just one man, “Duch,” or Kaing Guek Eav, the commandant of the main Khmer Rouge prison, Tuol Sleng. “Duch” was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. This video from the court’s Web site shows Duch apologizing repeatedly.

Bowing to political pressures within Cambodia and overseas, the experimental, mixed tribunal is a “special new court” jointly created by the Cambodian government and the U.N. and supposedly independent of both. The reality has been far messier, critics say.

Probably more criticized than praised, the trial is in itself a real achievement, as Mr. Maguire wrote in this newspaper in 2011, at the beginning of the current trial of Mr. Nuon Chea and his co-defendants, leng Sary, the former foreign minister, and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state.

Damir Sagolj/Reuters Human remains at a memorial center on the grounds of the killing fields of Cambodia.

“The fact that the case has even made it this far is a minor miracle to those of us who were in Cambodia during the 1990s, when the defendants’ amnesties seemed secure,” Mr. Maguire wrote.

“Yet the roller-coaster court was jolted again in December by the resignation of three lawyers, Jasper Pauw, Michiel Pestman and Andrew Ianuzzi. The lawyers were defenders for Nuon Chea in Case 002, as the current trial is known. They cited “government interference that prevented them from best defending their client,” the Phnom Penh Post reported.

Among the main problems raised by the lawyers were that sitting Cambodian government ministers refused to reply with court summonses, a complaint described by Clair Duffy, a tribunal monitor for the Open Society Justice Initiative, as having “some merit,” according to the Phnom Penh Post story.

So Brother No. 2’s hospitalization on Sunday at the Khmer Soviet Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh with acute bronchitis was merely the latest in a string of issues. Increasingly, ill health among the accused, who are all over 80, threatens to terminate the trial completely. A fourth defendant, Ieng Thirith, the sister-in-law of the regime’s former leader, Pol Pot, and the wife of Mr. Ieng Sary, has already been dropped from the case on grounds of dementia.

Brother No. 1, Pol Pot, died in 1998 without being tried.

In an expert commentary on the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor’s Web site, Mr. Maguire lashed out at the United Nations, saying: “Cambodia’s ‘mixed tribunal’ should be deemed an expensive, overcomplicated experiment that should never be tried again.”

Mr. Maguire warned that the United Nations ran the risk of never completing Case 002 – and failing to bring justice to Cambodia. But the court could still succeed in what has become a race against time, he said.

“The court’s reputation can be salvaged if they can complete the case against the senior Khmer Rouge leaders while they are still alive,” he wrote. The court would “end on a high note that even longtime critics like myself will concede.”

To follow the extraordinary – and extraordinarily complicated – proceedings of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Trial Observer blog offers regular updates and links from Phnom Penh, as Cambodian and international lawyers fight to bring to justice the accused.

An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified three lawyers — Jasper Pauw, Michiel Pestman and Andrew Ianuzzi — as prosecution lawyers, when they were actually defenders for Nuon Chea in Case 002.