Khmer Rouge leaders guilty of genocide in landmark verdict

Phnom Penh, November 16

Two top leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime were found guilty of genocide on Friday, in a landmark ruling almost 40 years after the fall of a brutal regime that presided over the deaths of a quarter of the population.

The Khmer Rouge’s former head of state Khieu Samphan, 87, and “Brother Number 2” Nuon Chea, 92, are the two most senior living members of the ultra-Maoist group that seized control of Cambodia from 1975-1979.

The reign of terror led by “Brother Number 1” Pol Pot left some two million Cambodians dead from overwork, starvation and mass executions, but Friday’s ruling was the first to acknowledge a genocide. The defendants were previously handed life sentences in 2014 over the violent and forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975.

But the judgment at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) also found Nuon Chea guilty of genocide against the ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslim minority group, among a litany of other crimes.

Both parties were sentenced to “life in prison”, merging the two sentences into a single term, Nil Nonn said. Hundreds of people, including dozens of Cham Muslims and Buddhist monks, were bussed to the tribunal located in the outskirts of Phnom Penh to attend the hearing.

“The verdict is essentially the Nuremberg judgment for the ECCC and thus carries very significant weight for Cambodia, international criminal justice, and the annals of history,” said David Scheffer, who served as the UN Secretary General’s special expert on the Khmer Rouge trials from 2012 until last month.

The revolutionaries who tried to recreate Buddhist-majority Cambodia in line with their vision of an agrarian Marxist utopia attempted to abolish class and religious distinctions by force.

The verdict read out by Nil Nonn presented a society where minorities were targeted and killed, Buddhist monks forcibly defrocked and groups of people executed, while men and women were coerced into marriages and forced to have sex to produce children for the regime.

Los Sat, a 72-year-old Cham Muslim man who attended the verdict hearing with his wife, said he had lost “too many” family members under the regime. “I am really satisfied with the sentences,” he said, beaming as he left the court.

The hybrid court, which uses a mix of Cambodian and international law, was created with UN backing in 2006 to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Only three people have been convicted by the court, costing more than $300 million. — AFP