Khmer Rouge Leaders (Finally) Stand Trial

A Cambodian woman looks at portraits of victims of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh on Nov. 17. (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images)

December 22, 2011
By James O. Grundvig
The Epoch Times

So far the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which is mired in the bureaucracy of the United Nations, and in Cambodian and international law, and the Geneva Conventions, has achieved little. By letting three of the four Khmer Rouge leaders fire the first salvo in their defense—that they committed the atrocities to “protect the people against the Vietnamese”—not only mocks the truth, but it allows them to rewrite history in the same breath.

One year ago no one predicted the Arab Spring uprising with its toppling of the long oppressive regimes in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, and, perhaps soon, Syria. Nor did anyone imagine the collective frustration, unrest, and anxiety that gave the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests the fuel to flare up across America this fall.

Social and political changes were the hallmark of the 20th century. They were fought over in the numerous wars or liberated in emerging countries rising out of third world poverty. In the sea of young OWS protesters, how much history do they really know prior to the 1980s? Not enough.

The Khmer Rouge leaders—those who remain of Pol Pot’s inner circle of the brutal and failed communist experiment—have finally been put on trial for the genocide, torture, and enslavement of their Cambodian brethren. But if the start of the often put off, much delayed, and now five-years-in-the-making U.N. sponsored Cambodian crimes against humanity trial of the octogenarian rebels is any indicator, history won’t be told, it will be mocked.

Cambodia lost more than 25 percent of its population of 7 million with hundreds of thousands more crippled by landmines after the Vietnamese scattered the Khmer Rouge across the Thai border in 1979. Yet, only one member of the Khmer Rouge regime has been convicted in connection with this horrendous suffering: Duch, the chief torturer of the notorious Toul Sleng Prison.

For those who are keeping score since the U.N. peace talks and repatriation of the Cambodia people in the early 1990s, it has been two decades, five years of pretrial motions at a cost of $200 million and rising, with zero leaders convicted for master planning the “killing fields” massacre. And with Duch, the henchman responsible for the 15,000 vicious murders at the S-21 torture center, receiving a light sentence—nineteen years in jail—justice continues to die in Cambodia.

The Flawed Arm of the Law

So far the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which is mired in the bureaucracy of the United Nations, and in Cambodian and international law, and the Geneva Conventions, has achieved little. By letting three of the four Khmer Rouge leaders fire the first salvo in their defense—that they committed the atrocities to “protect the people against the Vietnamese”—not only mocks the truth, but it allows them to rewrite history in the same breath.

How can the smirking senior leaders, who committed the murders, executions, and starvation, and destroyed the lives of more than 2 million citizens in less than four years, get away with such crimes? Just have a U.N. trial in Cambodia.

Several of the past and surviving members have been tried and convicted before. First, Ieng Sary was put on trial by a Vietnamese-sponsored court in 1979. Then Sary again and most of the cadre were tried in Phnom Penh in 1994. Naturally, the king of Cambodia granted them a royal pardon in 1998 in an attempt to put the past behind.

Those who stand trial today are Nuon Chea, chief ideologist and Pol Pot’s right-hand man; Ieng Sary, deputy prime minister and Pol Pot’s brother-in-law; and Khieu Samphan, former Khmer Rouge head of state. Sary’s wife, Ieng Thirith, arrested in 2007, was deemed unfit to stand trial last month due to Alzheimer’s. Too bad.

As the regime’s minister for social affairs, Thirith purged the managers and executives in the government buildings, hospitals, and supply factories in the collapse of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. She then went on to be in charge of the detention centers for those who survived and were forced to work in the rice paddies under inhumane conditions. In turn, she put teenagers and uneducated peasants in charge of the hospitals and medicine.

On day one of the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge assassinated citizens wearing glasses—they were seen as intellectual—including doctors, dentists, professors, lawyers, accountants, and officials. As the eradication spread out, the Khmer Rouge evacuated more than 1 million citizens and chased them out to the countryside, where they would toil as slaves, die of starvation, or be executed in periodic purges.

The Faceless Khmer Rouge

During the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge, which had been chased into the jungle along the Vietnamese border by the CIA-backed Lon Nol government, honed their fighting skills, survived the U.S. carpet bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and then defeated Lon Nol’s army ending the five-year long civil war.

When they entered Phnom Penh on that fateful April day, the people, exhausted from war, thought they were finally free. But what they soon learned, the Khmer Rouge had other plans for those who had survived the civil war and exile from their homes.

They, along with the rest of the world, didn’t know who the Khmer Rouge leaders were—not even some in the rebel army. The Khmer Rouge cut off all ties with the outside world—except with the communist leadership in China—and put the nation in a blackout. No trade. No external communication. No relations with the international press. Nothing.

It wasn’t until 1977, after one of the periodic, violent, paranoid-fueled purges of the Khmer Rouge middle managers that the world would learn the identities of the faceless leadership and their brutally austere form of agrarian communism.

When the names of Saloth Sar (aka Pol Pot), Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Son Sen, and Khieu Ponnary—Pol Pot’s first wife—surfaced the West knew it had a problem on its hands. Many of them were staring in the mirror. Pol Pot—who died in 1998, never having been tried for crimes against humanity—and his inner circle were intellectuals, raised in good families, and taught Buddhism. They were educated abroad, most of them in France, where they got a taste for, and developed their dogma in, Marxist communism.

Intellectuals of the Khmer Rouge

After they were chased from power, the horrors of the mass graves, killing fields, and photographic library of tortured citizens put to death at S-21 emerged. Few understood why or how it could happen. Why would intellectuals kill intellectuals made in their own image, with the same blood, names, culture, and country? It was a painful mystery. But as journalists and historians made their way into Stone Age Cambodia in January 1979, the savage truth poured out.

With the Khmer Rouge leaders being educated abroad, questions arose as to why they would ever do such a horrific thing to their own people. Where did the hatred come from? What fueled such sociopathic behavior?

Today, the Cambodian co-prosecutor Chea Leang vowed that the evidence he would present would prove that the Khmer Rouge spawned “one of the most brutal and horrific [regimes] in modern history.”

Beyond the cries of current Cambodian leaders trying to undermine the tribunal process, the greater concern is this. Will the prosecutors present not only the myriad corpses murdered by the Khmer Rouge, but will they go back in time and tell the world the truth? That the Khmer Rouge leaders were educated abroad, drank the Kool Aid of communism, and set out to destroy and then remake their once beautiful nation into a charnel house of death.

James Grundvig is a freelance reporter, writer, and columnist based in New York.