Thursday’s decision in the appeal by Khieu Samphan, 91, the former head of state of the 1975-1979 “Democratic Kampuchea” government, marks the court’s final ruling and ends 16 years of work by the UN-backed war crimes tribunal. The rejection of the appeal that sought to acquit Khieu Samphan of the genocide of Cambodia’s Muslim Cham and Vietnamese minorities also closes the book on one of the regime’s French-educated intellectuals who had claimed he was unaware of the crimes of mass murder committed. from his colleagues. Of the Khmer Rouge’s two million victims, 100,000 to 500,000 were Muslim Chams and about 20,000 were Vietnamese. Reading the verdict in Phnom Penh, the court’s judges rejected – point by point – Khieu Samphan’s numerous arguments to appeal his genocide conviction. “The vast majority of Khieu Samphan’s arguments are baseless,” Judge Kong Srim said during a lengthy reading of the judgment. Thursday’s ruling is expected to be the last by the court, which has brought just five senior Khmer Rouge leaders to justice – including one who died during the proceedings and another who was found unfit to stand trial – at a cost of more than 330 million dollars. Khieu Samphan – who is now the regime’s only remaining leader behind bars – was once known as ‘Mr Clean’ of the Khmer Rouge, a hard-line communist regime under which two million people perished in less than four years . He had received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris in the late 1950s and had a reputation for incorruptibility. But in the late 1960s, he joined the Khmer Rouge revolutionary movement and became Pol Pot’s loyal lieutenant, known as Brother No. 1 and the leader of the group. Pol Pot died in 1998 and was never tried. Khieu Samphan (right) at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Thursday, September 22, 2022 [Nhet Sok Heng/Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia via AP]
Status symbol
Although Khieu Samphan and his legal team were unable to convince the judges that he was innocent of genocide, he appeared to have convinced himself – despite being found guilty of crimes against humanity in a separate case before the court in 2014. Launching his appeal against his genocide conviction last year, white-haired Khieu Samphan was too weak to express his personal remarks to the judges, so he appealed his conviction from his seat. a compelling 18 minutes of slow and sharp pleas for his innocence. Guilt, Khieu Samphan said, was assigned to him as a symbol of the regime and not for his actions as an individual. “I’m being judged symbolically,” he said. “I categorically deny the accusation and the belief that I had the intent to commit the crimes, regardless of the time or when they were, any crimes, crimes against humanity in any form,” he said. Khieu Samphan in the Malai region of Cambodia in 1980 [J Kaufman/Courtesy of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia] Cambodia’s despotic leaders—past and present—have often seen the truth “as a practical, not a moral commodity,” wrote Philip Short, author of several acclaimed biographies, including Pol Pot. When he interviewed former Khmer Rouge officials for his book, Short found that when his questions became too direct, the interviewees responded with clearly fictitious answers. “This was even more true of Western-educated leaders like Khieu Samphan than of illiterate peasants,” Short wrote. “There was no embarrassment about the lie: it was the answer such a question deserved.” One truth was that Khieu Samphan deeply trusted Pol Pot. As Short notes, Khieu Samphan was one of only two Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot ever singled out for praise. Khieu Samphan’s defense team had argued that while their client held a senior position, he was not privy to the communication and meetings of senior leaders and was unaware of the mass crimes committed during the regime’s rule. International co-prosecutor Brenda Hollis argued, however, that Khieu Samphan attended the most high-level meetings of the group’s leadership and “either by silent ascent or active support” participated in mass crimes. “So he did more than sit back and let others make decisions,” Hollis said at the appeal hearing last year.
Genocide in Cambodia
Genocide was clearly committed in Cambodia, and if Khieu Samphan’s conviction had been overturned, it would have raised questions about the credibility of international legal mechanisms designed to prosecute the ultimate crime, Youk Chhang, director of the Cambodia Documentation Center (DC- CAM). he told Al Jazeera. “He is already doomed – in the minds and hearts of the survivors. it is doomed,” said Youk Chhang, whose research institute has meticulously documented the ruthless Khmer era, educated the public and worked with survivors. Khmer Rouge expert, author and most recently Harvard academic Craig Etcheson said the decision to uphold the genocide charge was extremely important for Cambodia and for international justice more broadly. “I think it is important to the Cambodian people and historically it is important. There have been so few convictions for genocide in history,” said Etcheson, who had spent four decades investigating, exposing, documenting and holding accountable those responsible for crimes during the Pol Pot regime. From 2006-2012, Etcheson was also an investigator with the office of the co-prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal — officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Commenting on Khieu Samphan’s apparent inability to admit his role in the regime’s crimes, Etcheson said it would be difficult and potentially “treacherous” to try to ponder what was going on in Kheiu Samphan’s mind. “He believes he is being accused of other people’s crimes. He has an extremely selective memory,” Etcheson told Al Jazeera. “He was right in the middle… in charge of hunting down traitors in the organization.” While the court’s effectiveness will be debated for years, Etcheson said he felt a “sense of accomplishment” knowing justice had been served in the case of the convicted Khmer Rouge leaders and that the investigation “put the fear of god” into them. were identified as war criminals, but their cases did not go to trial. “It was definitely an attack on the impunity of the Khmer Rouge that had endured for a long, long time,” Etcheson told Al Jazeera. The regime’s former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, was indicted by the court but died before his trial concluded in 2013. His wife, Ieng Thirith, a former minister of social action during the regime, was charged but later found unfit to stand trial. to be tried on mental health grounds. He died in 2015. Khmer Rouge torture chief Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, was convicted of crimes against humanity in 2010 for his role in the S21 death camp where more than 14,000 people were imprisoned and tortured before being sent for execution. He died in 2020. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the regime’s “No. 2 brother,” were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity in 2014. Nuon Chea died in 2019 while appealing his conviction – along with Khieu Samphan – for genocide. There is still a lot of work to be done, Etcheson said, in terms of continuing education that allows each generation to understand what happened not so long ago. Support was also needed for the thousands of Khmer Rouge survivors and victims who joined the tribunal as civil parties – a first for a war crimes tribunal – and provided testimony. “That’s why so much money has been spent on achieving individual accountability,” Etcheson said. “A lot of people have done bad things, but not everyone is equally guilty. It was the big bosses who dreamed this nightmare and made it happen,” he said.
‘Success with qualifications’
War crimes scholar and researcher Peter Maguire, author of Law and War and Facing Death in Cambodia, has been a close observer and vocal critic of the tribunal’s proceedings. Maguire wrote in 2018 that the tribunal was “like most UN war crimes trials since the end of the Cold War … partly good, partly bad and partly ugly”. He pointed out that it took $300 million and more time for a Cambodian court to convict three Khmer Rouge leaders than it took the United States, United Kingdom and France to try 5,000 war criminals after World War II. Commenting on the conclusion of the tribunal’s work this week, Maguire said he stood by his earlier criticism of the “slow and overpriced proceedings”. But, he said, the court was “a success.” Especially “for the remarkable work their researchers did in documenting the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge,” Maguire said. As he explained, the court made it “clear for everyone to see, in painstaking detail, who did what to whom” during the regime. “This is the important legacy,” Maguire told Al Jazeera. The court presented what Maguire described as “an empirical record that can never be revised or challenged.” Asked who would have an interest in reviewing what had happened during the Pol Pot regime and what was revealed by the war crimes tribunal, Maguire said: “Well, I think, of course, the government of China and Cambodia.”
Review of history
Investigators have long feared that the court’s database — an unparalleled treasure trove of documentation and testimony…
