Cambodian court upholds life sentence for last Khmer Rouge leader

A UN-backed international court in Cambodia on Thursday reaffirmed the life sentence for genocide against Khieu Samphan, the last living leader of the Khmer Rouge, the communist group that in a few years in power massacred a quarter of the population.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
25 September 2022 Sunday 17:47
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Cambodian court upholds life sentence for last Khmer Rouge leader

A UN-backed international court in Cambodia on Thursday reaffirmed the life sentence for genocide against Khieu Samphan, the last living leader of the Khmer Rouge, the communist group that in a few years in power massacred a quarter of the population. .

His ruling today puts an end to the work of the court, which in 16 years of activity has spent more than 300 million dollars to end up prosecuting five leaders, of whom only three were convicted.

Dressed in white, with a mask and in a wheelchair, the former head of state listened impassively at 91 years old as the judge reaffirmed one by one those crimes for which he was already convicted in 2018 and maintained the life sentence for genocide of the Vietnamese and ethnic Cham minorities.

The former president of the state of Democratic Kampuchea, present-day Cambodia, "had direct knowledge of the crimes and shared the intent to commit them with the other participants in the common criminal enterprise," Judge Kong Srim said. The accusations against him are associated with "some of the most heinous acts" of the ultra-Maoist dictatorship, he added.

Samphan was born in 1931 into a wealthy family in the country and received his doctorate in Economic Sciences in Paris with an anti-capitalist thesis. As an active militant, he outlined the agrarian policy of the Khmer Rouge headed by Pol Pot and, over the years, ended up becoming its intellectual voice, spokesperson and official representative. After the seizure of power by arms in 1975, he was sworn in as president of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, a post he held until Vietnamese troops ousted them from power in 1979.

In the process, Khieu Sampan denied having any real say in the policies of the Khmer Rouge, who were trying to establish a utopian agrarian society and had killed between 1.5 million and 2 million people through executions, hunger, forced labor and inadequate medical treatment.

However, in 2014 he was already sentenced by this court to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity for the forced evacuation of the capital, Phnom Penh, and the forced disappearance of thousands of people, a sentence that was ratified on appeal two years later. In 2018, he reimposed a life sentence against himself for genocide, a punishment confirmed today after his appeal.

More than 500 people, including relatives of victims, Buddhist monks and diplomats, attended the hearing for a "historic day", according to court spokesman Neth Pheaktra.

The court, made up of Cambodian and international judges, began the process in 2006, and has since served as a space for national healing and to offer some sense of justice to the victims of that atrocity.

Still, its work has also been criticized for its slow pace, high cost - $337 million, mostly covered by international donations - and vulnerability to interference from the government of Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge who serves as prime minister and absolute leader of the country for more than three decades.

In addition to Khieu Sampan, the other two convicted by this court are Kaing Guek Eav (alias Duch), director of the main interrogation and execution center during the regime (the infamous Tuol Sleng prison), who died in 2020; and the "number 2" of the regime, Nuon Chea, who died in 2018.

There were also two other defendants whose trials were not completed. They were former Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, who died in 2013, and his wife, former Social Affairs Minister Ieng Thirith, declared incapable of standing trial due to dementia in 2011 and who died in 2015. Four other suspects, middle managers of the regime, they avoided being prosecuted due to differences between the jurists of the court.

The head of the regime, Pol Pot, known as "Brother Number One", never faced justice because he died in 1998 before the court was installed.

Having completed its active work, the court now begins a three-year period focused on rearranging its files and disseminating information about its work for educational purposes, but it will no longer hold trials.

Craig Etcheson, a specialist in the Khmer Rouge who directed the investigations of the court's prosecution between 2006 and 2012, told the AP agency that the court leaves "an extraordinary documentation of these crimes (...) that will educate young Cambodians about the history of their country and will frustrate any attempt to deny the crimes of the Khmer Rouge."