November 21, 2018 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 9
News
Last Khmer Rouge Leaders Guilty of Genocide, Get Life Terms
By Sopheng Cheang
Associated Press
PHNOM PENH, Cambo-
dia — The last surviving
leaders of the Khmer
Rouge regime that ruled
Cambodia in the 1970s,
when their reign of ter-
ror was responsible for
the deaths of an estimat-
ed 1.7 million people,
were convicted Friday by
an international tribu-
nal of genocide, crimes
against humanity and
war crimes.
Nuon Chea and Kh-
ieu Samphan were top
leaders in a regime that
forced residents out of
the cities into the coun-
tryside, where they
labored under brutal
conditions in giant ag-
ricultural cooperatives
and work projects. The
communist
Khmer
Rouge, under the lead-
ership of the late Pol Pot,
sought to eliminate all
traces of what they saw
as corrupt bourgeois
life, destroying most re-
ligious, financial and so-
cial institutions.
Nuon Chea (NOO’-ahn
CHEE’-ah) and Khieu
Samphan
(KEE’-yoh
sahm-PAHN’) were sen-
tenced by the U.N.-assist-
ed court to life in prison,
the same punishment
they are already serving
after being convicted in a
previous trial for crimes
against humanity con-
nected with forced trans-
fers of people and mass
disappearances. Cambo-
dia has no death penalty.
Nuon Chea, 92, was
considered the Khmer
Rouge’s main ideologist
and Pol Pot’s right-hand
man, while Khieu Sam-
phan, 87, served as the
head of state, presenting
a moderate veneer as the
public face for the highly
secretive group.
Dissent under Khmer
Rouge rule was usual-
ly met with death, and
even the group’s loyal-
ists faced torture and
execution as the radical
experiment at revolu-
tion failed, with blame
cast about its ranks for
alleged sabotage.
But executions count-
ed for only a fraction of
the death toll. Starvation,
overwork and medical
neglect took many more
lives, amounting to as
much as one-quarter to
one-third of the entire
population.
Only when an inva-
sion by Vietnam finally
drove the Khmer Rouge
from power in 1979 did
the magnitude of Cambo-
dia’s holocaust become
known.
Friday’s verdict, read
aloud by Judge Nil Nonn,
established that the
Khmer Rouge commit-
ted genocide against the
Vietnamese and Cham
minorities.
Scholars had debated
whether
suppression
of the Chams, a Muslim
ethnic minority whose
members had put up a
small but futile resis-
tance against the Khmer
Rouge, amounted to
genocide.
The crimes against hu-
manity convictions cov-
ered activities at work
camps and cooperatives
established by the Khmer
Rouge. They included
murder, extermination,
deportation,
enslave-
ment,
imprisonment,
torture, persecution on
political, religious and
racial grounds, attacks
on human dignity, en-
forced disappearances,
forced transfers, forced
marriages and rape.
The breaches of the Ge-
neva Convention govern-
ing war crimes included
willful killing, torture or
inhumane treatment.
The tribunal, officially
called the Extraordinary
Chambers in the Courts
of Cambodia, or ECCC,
also ordered reparations
for some of those judged
to be victims.
It found Khieu Sam-
phan not guilty of geno-
cide against the Cham
for insufficient evidence,
though he was convict-
ed of genocide against
the Vietnamese under
the principle of joint
criminal
enterprise,
which holds individuals
responsible for actions
attributed to a group to
which they belong.
AP PHOTO/JEFF WIDENER, FILE
Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, under Pol Pot, sought to eliminate all traces of bourgeois life
In this undated file photo, a man cleans a skull near a mass grave at the Chaung Ek torture camp run by
the Khmer Rouge in this undated photo. The last surviving leaders of the communist Khmer Rouge regime
that brutally ruled Cambodia in the 1970s were convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war
crimes Friday, Nov. 16, 2018, by an international tribunal.
Among the large crowd
of spectators at Friday’s
session was 65-year-old
Sum Rithy, who said he
had been jailed for near-
ly two years under the
Khmer Rouge, who ac-
cused him of being a spy
for the CIA. His life was
spared only because he
was a skilled mechanic
who could maintain en-
gines and generators for
his captors.
Rithy said three of his
siblings were killed, also
accused of being CIA
spies, while his father
died of starvation.
“Today, I am very hap-
py that both the Khmer
Rouge leaders were sen-
tenced to life in prison.
The verdict was fair
enough for me and other
Cambodian victims,” he
said. “Last night, I could
not sleep because I was
afraid that Nuon Chea
and Khieu Samphan
could die before this ver-
dict was announced.”
Nuon Chea suffers
heart problems and was
allowed to move from the
hearing room to a sepa-
rate holding room. Khieu
Samphan was present for
the entire hearing and
with the help of two secu-
rity guards stood as his
sentence was read, show-
ing no obvious emotion.
Lawyers for Nuon Chea
said they would appeal,
and Khieu Samphan was
expected to do the same.
Both men have suggest-
ed they were targets of
political persecution.
The tribunal in 2010
also convicted Kaing
Guek Eav, known as
Duch, who as head of
the Khmer Rouge prison
system ran the infamous
Tuol Sleng torture cen-
ter in Phnom Penh.
Read the rest of this story at
TheSkanner.com
TICKETS
33R D A N N UA L
.
R
J
,
G
N
I
K
R
MARTIN LUTHE
T
S
A
F
K
e
A
E
v
R
B
r
e
s
e
r our RED LION JANZTEN BEACH
y ts
9
1
0
2
a
,
1
2
.
e
N
A
J
s
Reserve your table today!
TICKETS
TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT TheSkanner.com