The Khmer Rouge tribunal announced on Friday what are, in all likelihood, the final verdicts in a 12-year-long trial of top members of a genocidal regime responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people, or 20 percent of Cambodia’s population, in the span of less than four years. The tribunal’s final two defendants, two men with a combined age of 179 who are already serving life sentences for crimes against humanity, were found guilty of acts of genocide for their role in the brutal purge of ethnic minorities, including Cambodia’s small Cham Muslim community.
“We need to show the world that even if it takes a long time, we can deliver justice,” said Ly Sok Kheang, the director of the Anlong Veng Peace Center and a researcher in peace and reconciliation efforts, as quoted in The New York Times.
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The verdicts, the first actual charges of genocide proven by the court, were seen by most as a landmark victory for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). But the success of the court itself is still hotly debated. In the end, the ECCC trialed three men for the deaths of 1.7 million—and all at a total cost of about $300 million USD. It’s a far cry from the nearly 5,000 Nazis brought to justice during the Nuremberg trials—which this tribunal was allegedly modeled after.
The tribunal originally started with five individuals in mind, four men and one woman—all of them once prominent members of the Khmer Rouge. One of the defendants, a man named Ieng Sery, died before his trial concluded. His wife Ieng Thirit, who was also facing charges, was declared mentally unfit for trial and let off the hook.
Only two men, Nuon Chea, a 92-year-old better known as “Brother No. 2,” and Khieu Samphan, the 87-year-old former head of state, were found guilty of committing genocide. A third, King Guek Eav was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity for his role as overseeing a notorious prison where more than 15,000 people died.
Together, the three are among the most well-known leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Nuon Chea is believed to have been the architect of the executions that took place in prisons and at the “killing fields.” And Khieu Samphan, according to a study by two prominent experts, played an instrumental role in getting those orders passed down the chain of command.
“Khieu Samphan’s political star rose literally on heaps of corpses,” wrote Stephen Heder, a historical scholar who focuses on Cambodia.
Khieu Samphan, for his part, has remained dismissive throughout the trial calling the entire tribunal and all allegations of genocide nothing more than “Vietnamese propaganda”—a statement that touches on a deep vein of resentment and distrust in Cambodia of its more-powerful neighbor. He also attempted to recast the Khmer Rouge as the heroes of a war waged against Vietnam and the United States—which actually was secretly bombing both Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War.
“I want to bow to the memory of all the innocent victims but also to all those who perished by believing in a better ideal of the brighter future and who died during the five-year war under the American bombardments and [in] the conflict with the Vietnamese invaders,” Khieu Samphan said, according to reports by the Associated Press. “Their memory will never be honored by any international tribunal.”
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime was an exercise in ideological brutality that attempted to remake the former French colony into an agrarian nation through the forced relocation of people from urban centers to the countryside and the execution of anyone seen as a threat to the regime’s ideology—a list that included intellectuals, Muslims, and Cambodians with Vietnamese ancestry.
The Khmer Rouge were only in control of Cambodia for less than four years, but it forever changed the trajectory of the country. But on the streets, there’s a real sense of disinterest in the tribunals and a doubt that the court will bring about anything that could remotely be called justice.
“It’s just a show,” Vang Tam told a reporter from Al Jazeera when asked about the tribunal. “It’s meaningless.”
Efforts to bring new defendants to trial were met with opposition from the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a one-time mid-ranking member of the Khmer Rouge. Hun Sen left the Khmer Rouge in 1977, fleeing over the border to Vietnam only to return as part of the military forces that overthrew Pol Pot’s government. His grip on power has only tightened since then. He was elected into power in 1985 in an election that was marred by allegations of intimidation, violence, and voter fraud.
Since then, Hun Sen has ousted all challengers, including the recent jailing of Kem Sokha, a top Cambodia National Rescue Party official, that effectively gutted any actual opposition to Hun Sen’s CPP-run government. He then called an election he easily won where ballots were filled with political parties, many of them poorly organized, that seemed to spring up overnight.
Hun Sen has warned the ECCC against further probes into those who may be responsible for the Khmer Rouge killings, outrageously claiming that new trials could cause the country to fall into civil war. There’s a real sense among human rights campaigners that Hun Sen will do everything he can to keep the ECCC from digging any deeper into Cambodia’s past, explained Brad Adams, the executive director of Asia at Human Rights Watch, in an interview with the Nikkei Asian Review.
“If they expand it beyond the original list of household name Khmer Rouge leaders they would be able to go pretty quickly into the CPP ranks—people like Hang Samrin and Hun Sen himself,” he told the Nikkei. “I think Hun Sen has a guilty conscience and there are a lot of senior CPP officials who were very young men then who probably did some terrible things.”
