federalidea.com

by D.B.S. Jeyaraj

The wheels of justice are grinding slowly but surely for ex – Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia. Though Pol Pot is no more and some others too are dead, there are a few yet remaining.

Now some have been arrested and will face trial at the hands of a” hy-brid” tribunal set up by the United Nations and the Cambodian government.

Since most leaders are Septugenarians and Octogenarians and also ailing, there is a race against time to ensure that these perpetrators of massive crimes against humanity get the retributive justice they deserve.

Among those arrested are the husband and wife duo Ieng Sary and Ieng Thiirth; Ieng Thirith’s real name is Khieu Thirith. Her sister’s name was Khieu Ponnary. The sisters married Pol Pot and Ieng Sary who went on to become the leader and deputy leader of the Khmer rouge regime.

[Former Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, right, and his wife Ieng Thirith, left, arrive at a polling station in Pailin in this July 26, 1998 file photo. Police entered the home of Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister of the communist Khmer Rouge regime, early Monday, Nov. 12, 2007, in an apparent move to arrest him for trial before Cambodia's U.N.-backed genocide tribunal. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit, File)]

Both sisters were close relatives of Khieu Samphan ex – president of the Khmer rouge and former head of state.. Cambodians referred to the Khmer rouge regime as the Pol Pot – Ieng Sary regime.

Ieng Sary was both foreign minister and deputy prime minister. Ieng Thirith was Social services minister. They had met and fallen in love in Paris. Their arrests have made Cambodian seekers of justice happy.

According to a “New York Times” report filed by Thomas Fuller, Ieng Sary, was also charged with war crimes.

The two were arrested at their Phnom Penh home, where they had lived for the past decade under a government amnesty granted to Ieng Sary in 1996. That amnesty may complicate his prosecution it is felt. The charges against the couple were brought by a special court that was created with assistance from the United Nations to bring the Khmer Rouge leadership to justice. With the arrests on November 12th , the court has charged and detained a total of four people. It was expected to arrest a fifth, Khieu Samphan , former member of the leadership soon. After a decade of preparation and delay, the first trials against the aging former leaders are likely to begin next year, said Helen Jarvis, a court spokeswoman.

According to court documents obtained by The Associated Press, Ieng Thirith is accused of involvement in the “planning, direction, coordination and ordering of widespread purges,” as well as the “unlawful killing or murder of staff members from within the Ministry of Social Affairs.”

The specific charges against Ieng Sary are not public, but scholars say he had knowledge of massacres carried out by the government, citing telegrams he had received from officers in the field.

One Khmer Rouge telegram sent to him and other leaders on April 10, 1978, referred to “internal enemies.”

“We are continuing to wipe out the remaining elements,” the telegram said. “They were against our revolution both openly and secretly.”

The documents have been compiled by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent research organization.
Testimonies by survivors say Ieng Sary persuaded diplomats, students and other Cambodians living abroad to return home; many of them were subsequently killed.

Ieng Sary has consistently denied any involvement in any killings. “Pol Pot made all decisions on all matters by himself,” he said in a statement when he surrendered to the government in 1996 as part of the amnesty deal. Pol Pot, he added, “killed people without careful consideration.”

At the time, Ieng Sary’s surrender was welcomed by the Cambodian government because it effectively brought an end to the Khmer Rouge as a fighting force, although some holdouts, including Pol Pot, remained in the jungles of northwest Cambodia . After his surrender, Ieng Sary received a royal pardon, rescinding the death sentence that had been handed down in absentia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge to Vietnamese-backed forces. That pardon covered genocide. Judges will presumably weigh its relevance against the current charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Khieu Samphan whose arrest was widely anticipated has suffered a stroke.Mr. Khieu Samphan’s daughter, Khieu Rattana, said he was stricken just a day after two of his colleagues-Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith-were arrested by the tribunal and charged with crimes against humanity.

The tribunal has already detained Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who was in charge of the Khmer Rouge Security Prison 21, where thousands of people were tortured and killed; and Nuon Chea, former Prime minister and the chief of ideology for the Khmer Rouge. A panel of three Cambodian and two foreign judges will hear the trials.

The special tribunal is known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).The plenary session commenced in early June this year.The Internal Rules are expected to meet the highest standards of international justice.

In June 2003, the United Nations and the government of Cambodia signed an agreement to establish the ECCC to bring “to trial senior leaders of Democratic Kampuchea and those who were most responsible for the crimes and serious violations of Cambodian penal law, international humanitarian law and custom, and international conventions recognized by Cambodia, that were committed during the period from 17 April 1975 to 6 January 1979.”

On November 2006, the ECCC published a draft of the Internal Rules and invited submissions from civil society. The Internal Rules define their purpose to “consolidate applicable Cambodian procedure for proceedings before the ECCC and, pursuant to Articles 20, 23, and 33 of the ECCC Law and Article 12.1 of the Agreement, to adopt additional rules where these existing procedures do not deal with a particular matter, or if there is uncertainty regarding their interpretation or application, or if there is a question regarding their consistency with international standards

The Khmer rouge had its genesis in the Paris students group set up in the early fifties in France during French colonial rule. This radicalized leftist group consisted of upper and upper middle class Cambodian youths. Their families were from the landowner class or top echelons of the bureaucracy. They were brilliant students who got government scholarships to study in Paris. They began as young communists inspired by the French communist party and subscribing to Stalinist ideology.

After returning to Cambodia the Khmer Rouge began evolving and developed its own indigenous ideology. The leadership consisted of intellectuals educated in France. This core leadership of Khmer rouge continued unchanged from the sixties to the nineties.

The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge’s Central Committee (”Party Center”) during its period of power consisted of:

-Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) “Brother number 1″ the effective leader of the movement, General Secretary from 1963 until his death in 1998

-Nuon Chea (Long Bunruot) “Brother number 2″ Prime Minister – alive, arrested in 2007

-Ieng Sary “Brother number 3″ Deputy Prime Minister – Pol Pot’s brother-in-law – alive, arrested in 2007.

-Ta Mok (Chhit Chhoeun) “Brother number 4″ Final Khmer Rouge leader, Southwest Regional Secretary – died in custody awaiting trial for genocide.

-Khieu Samphan “Brother number 5″ President of the Khmer Rouge – alive but suffered a stroke.

-Son Seng Defense Minister -dead.

-Yun Yat – dead.

Ke Pauk “Brother number 13″ Former secretary of the Northern zone – dead.

-Ieng Thirith – alive,arrested in 2007.

According to published reports the ” Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency , outlawing all religions confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into “Old People” through agricultural labor. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation.”

“In Phnom Penh the capital and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved only about “two or three kilometers” outside the city and would return in “two or three days.” Some witnesses say they were told that the evacuation was because of the “threat of American bombing” and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would “take care of everything” until they returned. These were not the first evacuations of civilian populations by the Khmer Rouge. Similar evacuations of populations without possessions had been occurring on a smaller scale since the early 1970s.” say reports.

According to reports “The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population (”New People”) into agricultural communes. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labour camps During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who had the potential to undermine the new state including intellectuals and killing many others for even minor breaches of rules.”

“Cambodians were expected to produce three tons of rice per hectare; before the Khmer Rouge era, the average was only one ton per hectare. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work for 12 hours non-stop, without adequate rest or food. They did not believe in western medicine but instead favoured traditional peasant medicine; many died as a result” reports further said.

” Family relationships not sanctioned by the state were also banned, and family members could be put to death for communicating with each other. In any case, family members were often relocated to different parts of the country with all postal and telephone services abolished. The total lack of agricultural knowledge by the former city dwellers made famine inevitable. Rural dwellers were often unsympathetic or too frightened to assist them. Such acts as picking wild fruit or berries was seen as “private enterprises ” for which the death penalty applied.” added these reports.

The Khmer Rouge government arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed “enemies”:

-anyone with connections to the former government or with foreign governments

-professionals and intellectuals – in practice this included almost everyone with an education , or even people wearing glasses (which, according to the regime, meant that they were literate)
ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Cambodian Christians, Muslims and the Buddhist monks

-Homosexuals

-”economic sabotage ” for which many of the former urban dwellers were deemed to be guilty of by virtue of their lack of agricultural ability.

Through the 1970s, and especially after mid-1975, the party was also shaken by factional struggles. There were even armed attempts to topple Pol Pot. The resultant purges reached a crest in 1977 and 1978 when thousands, including some important KCP leaders, were executed.

The exact number of people who died as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s policies is debated, as is the cause of death among those who died.

Modern research has located thousands of mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia, containing an estimated 1.39 million bodies. Various studies have estimated the death toll at between 740,000 and 3,000,000, most commonly between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease.
The US department of State and the State Department funded Yale Cambodian Genocide Project give estimates of the total death toll as 1.2 million and 1.7 million respectively. Amnesty International estimates the total death toll as 1.4 million.

One of the Khmer Rouge sayings about the urban residents forcibly re-located to rural areas was “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.”.

Ironically the same saying can apply to those Khmer rouge leaders as awaiting justice as well.

DBS Jeyaraj can be contacted on: djeyaraj@federalidea.com