Ieng Sary dies during Khmer Rouge trial

Former Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary, who was foreign minister under the regime, appears in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia on November 22 2011 in Phnom Penh (Getty)

March 14, 2013 10:50 am
By Ben Bland
Financial Times

“His death is another reminder that justice delayed is justice denied,” said Theary Seng, a Cambodian legal activist whose parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the Boeung Rei prison while she was detained there as a child. “He has taken with him many secrets that could have shed light on a very dark period of Cambodia’s history, which continues to haunt us.”

Ieng Sary, the former top diplomat of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, spoke only briefly at the start of his trial for genocide in 2011, confirming his name, date of birth and address before maintaining his right to silence.

His death on Thursday in a Phnom Penh hospital at the age 87 ensures that he will never have to answer for the crimes the regime committed more than 30 years ago. Nearly 2m Cambodians were executed or died through overwork, starvation or disease as the government led by Pol Pot attempted to create an agrarian communist state from 1975 to 1979.

Ieng Sary was one of three remaining senior leaders from Cambodia’s Communist party (also known as the Khmer Rouge) who are on trial in a controversial UN-backed tribunal in Phnom Penh for genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva convention.

His wife, former social affairs minister Ieng Thirith, was also charged but was ruled unfit to stand trial last year because she was suffering from dementia.

Ieng Sary founded the Khmer Rouge alongside Pol Pot, his brother-in-law. He was the deputy prime minister for foreign affairs from 1975 to 1979.

His demise, after a series of ailments left him immobile, deals a blow to those still fighting for justice and underlines, for the tribunal’s many critics, the futility of putting octogenarians through a protracted and highly contested legal process.

“His death is another reminder that justice delayed is justice denied,” said Theary Seng, a Cambodian legal activist whose parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the Boeung Rei prison while she was detained there as a child. “He has taken with him many secrets that could have shed light on a very dark period of Cambodia’s history, which continues to haunt us.”

After years of inaction following the ousting of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the UN and the Cambodian government agreed in 2006 to set up a hybrid court to try the leaders, staffed by local and international judges and lawyers.

But the process, which has so far cost more than $170m, has been dogged by allegations of corruption and interference from the Cambodian government, which is led by a number of former Khmer Rouge fighters, including long-ruling prime minister Hun Sen.

Born on October 24, 1925, in what is now the Vietnamese province of Tra Vinh, Ieng Sary was one of a group of young Cambodians who joined the French Communist party while studying in Paris in the early 1950s.

He returned to Cambodia in 1957, where he worked as a teacher before joining the newly-founded Cambodian Communist party’s central committee in 1960. He was sent to Beijing as a special emissary of the government-in-exile after US-backed general Lon Nol ousted the ruling Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970.

He returned to Phnom Penh shortly after the Khmer Rouge, which had been fighting an insurgency against Lon Nol with Sihanouk’s support, took control of the capital.

When the Khmer Rouge was forced from power by Vietnam in 1979, Ieng Sary fled with other top leaders, waging an insurgency until 1996 when he defected, along with many others.

In his position as chief international spokesman for the regime and a key member of the ruling cadre, war crimes researchers Stephen Heder and Brian D. Tittemore claim that Ieng Sary “repeatedly and publicly encouraged and also facilitated arrests and executions within his foreign ministry and throughout Cambodia”.

But Michael Karnavas, Ieng Sary’s international defence lawyer, claimed that he never participated in the massacres.

“While he was in a very high position, as others were, he was not involved in any decision that would have led to any deaths,” said Mr Karnavas, an American who previously defended genocide suspects at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. “He was not calling the shots even though he was in charge of a ministry. He was getting marching orders from those in charge.”

Victims like Ms Seng, who attended Ieng Sary’s court appearances on a number of occasions after his arrest in 2007, are angry that they will never have the chance to disprove this defence.

And they are angry about a messy process which they believe has failed to deliver either justice or truth and reconciliation.

Only one man has thus far been convicted – the commander of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch – while two elderly top leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, remain on trial, with five further suspects under investigation.

But ultimately, says Ms Seng, Cambodians will have to look beyond the legal process if they are to move on from the past.

“Of course we have been denied legal justice but that doesn’t mean we can’t pursue other forms of justice. Justice is a process with many elements to it. When crimes are this large, the pursuit of justice will never end in this lifetime.”