Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal releases former Khmer Rouge leader

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age, Alzheimer's, Cambodia, Genocide, healthcare, justice, Khmer Rouge, massacre, Torture, Tribunal, War Crimes

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal releases former Khmer Rouge leader

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal set free a former leader of the Khmer Rouge on Sunday, upholding a decision that has outraged survivors seeking an explanation of the mass killings committed more than 30 years ago.

Ieng Thirith, 80, who has been declared mentally unfit for trial, was driven out of the UN-backed tribunal’s compound by family members. She made no comment to reporters.

The Sorbonne-educated Shakespeare scholar served as social affairs minister during the Khmer Rouge’s rule from 1975-79, during which an estimated 1.7 million people died of execution, medical neglect, overwork and starvation.

The tribunal initially announced its decision to free Ieng Thirith on Thursday, saying medical experts had determined there was no prospect for her to be tried due to a degenerative mental illness that was probably Alzheimer’s disease.

Prosecutors then delayed her release by filing an appeal demanding that conditions be set to restrict her freedom.

On Sunday, the tribunal’s supreme court said it had accepted the appeal, which is expected to be heard later this month. In the meantime, it set three provisional conditions on her movement.

The tribunal said Ieng Thirith must inform the court of her address, must turn in her passport and cannot leave the country, and must report to the court whenever it summons her.

Ieng Thirith was the Khmer Rouge’s highest-ranking woman and also a sister-in-law of the group’s top leader, Pol Pot, who died in 1998.

She is accused of involvement in the “planning, direction, co-ordination and ordering of widespread purges,” and was charged with crimes against humanity, genocide, homicide and torture.

Three other senior Khmer Rouge leaders are on trial, including her husband, 86-year-old Ieng Sary, the regime’s former foreign minister; 85-year-old Nuon Chea, its chief ideologist and second-in-command; and 80-year-old Khieu Samphan, a former head of state.

The tribunal said earlier that Ieng Thirith’s release did not mean the charges against her were being withdrawn and was not a finding of guilt or innocence. It plans to consult annually with experts to see whether future medical advances could render her fit for trial, although that is considered unlikely given her age and frailty.

Survivors of the Khmer Rouge called Ieng Thirith’s release shocking and unjust. They said they had waited decades for justice and found it hard to feel compassion for her suffering.

“It is difficult for victims and indeed, all Cambodians, to accept the especially vigorous enforcement of Ieng Thirith’s rights taking place at the [tribunal],” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a group that researches Khmer Rouge atrocities.

In a statement on Sunday,, he noted the irony of Ieng Thirith receiving “world class health care.” As social affairs minister she was “personally and directly involved in denying Cambodians even the most basic health care during the regime’s years in power,” he said.

The tribunal began in 2006 – nearly three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge – following years of wrangling between Cambodia and the UN. The lengthy delays have been costly and raised fears that the former leaders could die before their verdicts come.

Khmer Rouge jail chief gets life for his ‘factory of death’

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Cambodia, Genocide, Khmer Rouge, Torture, Tribunal, War Crimes

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/khmer-rouge-jail-chief-gets-life-for-his-factory-of-death-6358883.html

Comrade Duch, the head of a notorious Khmer Rouge prison, was ordered to spend the rest of his life in jail after a tribunal ruled yesterday that he had overseen a “factory of death”.

In a decision that surprised many observers, the upper chamber of Cambodia’s genocide tribunal, which is backed by the United Nations, said the 35-year sentence the prison chief received two years ago did not match the scale and gravity of his crime.

Duch, 69, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, stood up to hear the verdict but reportedly showed no emotion.

“The penalty must be harsh to prevent similar crimes, which are undoubtedly among the worst in human history,” said Judge Kong Srim, president of the court. “The crimes of Kaing Guek Eav were of a particularly shocking and heinous character based on the number of people who were proven to have been killed.”

Duch oversaw Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, a former school that was converted into a torture and interrogation centre for members of the regime itself, who were accused of various spurious crimes. It is estimated that up to 16,000 prisoners were kept there before being sent for execution at “killing fields” on the edge of the city. Barely a dozen sent to the jail survived.

In the summer of 2010, Duch, a former maths teacher who became one of the regime’s most loyal members, was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. His 35-year sentence was immediately commuted to 19 years because of time he had already served and other reasons. That ruling drew an emotional outcry from the families and friends of his victims.

Yesterday’s decision was largely welcomed by those following the trial. Chum Mei, a former car mechanic and one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng, or S-21, told The Independent he was still not completely happy because he felt that Duch had not sufficiently confessed his guilt. However, he added that he was pleased by the ruling.

“I am very satisfied, and so are more than 90 other civil parties,” he said. “[It] is right to give him life imprisonment because the crime he committed was so grave, and he deserves it.”

The white-haired Chum Mei, who was beaten, tortured and given electric shocks while he was in the jail, added: “We hope that the rest of the former senior Khmer Rouge leaders will get the same trial. Today really marked the end of a culture of impunity in Cambodia.”

Khmer Rouge survivor’s tale helps Cambodia confront its brutal past

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Cambodia, Genocide, Khmer Rouge

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/24/khmer-rouge-survivor-film-cambodia

It took her 33 years to put pen to paper and write the screenplay that would change everything. But for Khmer Rouge survivor Khauv Sotheary, producing a film about her mother’s experience of the brutal period instead of her own has allowed the 47-year-old professor to understand her family’s past even more profoundly.

Lost Loves is Cambodia‘s first feature film about the Khmer Rouge for more than 20 years, and coincides with a key hearing at the UN-backed war crimes court. This is the first time in 30 years that the regime has been discussed so much and so openly. And that, experts say, proves that Cambodia is truly on the road to reconciliation.

“We’ve grown up far from the story [of the regime] because so much time has passed, but the memory – of the pain, the starvation, the separation – is always there,” says a soft-spoken Sotheary from a cafe in her native Phnom Penh. “Even though we live in peace now and have food on the table, we have to keep this story alive. We have to communicate it.”

Lost Loves focuses on Sotheary’s mother, who lost seven members of her family – including her father, husband and four children – during the hardline communist regime of 1975-79, which killed about 2 million people. With its all-Cambodian cast and crew, including Sotheary as the protagonist, the film premiered in 2010 at the Cambodian international film festival to a riveted audience, and last week finally appeared in city cinemas. Critics have called it “groundbreaking” and “beautiful”.

Relying heavily on traditional Cambodian drama, the film depicts everyday life under the Khmer Rouge in striking but emotionally provocative ways. In one scene, Amara, stripped of her “capitalist” identity and clad in revolutionary, communist black, drags a fellow farmer to hospital as she suffers a miscarriage from overwork in the rice paddies, her blood staining the emerald grasses where they eat, sleep and toil.

“This is the only way to really bring the story to the people here,” explains director Chhay Bora, 49, who lost two brothers at the hands of the regime and says that a documentary would have had a less profound effect. “A docu-drama actually brings you to the experience by making you feel like you’re in it. You become emotionally engaged.”

Sotheary – who survived the regime despite chronic malnutrition and a permanent state of despair – says she commends her mother for her “strength and resolve to survive what she did”.

“As a mother now, I don’t know if I’d have the same strength,” she adds.

Bora and Sotheary – both university professors – chose Cambodia’s youth as the film’s target audience and have provided discounted tickets to schools and universities to encourage students to watch it. The couple aim to screen the film in provinces beyond the capital. “Children need to see history with their eyes to understand what they read,” says Bora. “A film like this helps them understand their textbooks better.”

The film-makers are aided, in part, by a recent movement to teach the history of the genocide to students and the public at Cambodia’s most famous torture prison, S-21, or Tuol Sleng (whose former director, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, was convicted of war crimes in 2010and sentenced to 35 years in prison). Organised by the country’s leading Khmer Rouge research group, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), the bi-weekly lectures discuss the rise and fall of a government that considered education a disease of the elite and converted many of the country’s schools into prisons and warehouses.

While the genocide is required teaching from grades nine to 12 in Cambodia, many students doubt the extent of the atrocities committed and some teachers are loth to address the issue in class, “in part because they don’t understand the period and how to integrate it into the curriculum”, says oral historian and S-21 lecturer Farina So.

“Many parents and grandparents don’t like to discuss what happened, because it is such a painful and sensitive issue,” she says. “But if we don’t talk about it at home, and we don’t talk about it in our communities, how can kids understand the history? This is about solace, about reconciling the past with the present and future.”

DC-Cam has trained some 3,000 teachers to approach the genocide, partly through its independently funded guidebooks that encourage teachers to ask students questions such as “What would life be like today if money and free markets were abolished?” and “How has the regime affected life in Cambodia today?”.

But the organisation knows it has an uphill battle on its hands. “I believe some of what you say happened, but not everything,” says high school student Luy Srey Mech, 17, at a recent S-21 lecture. “My great-grandparents were killed during the revolution, but it was a long time ago. I guess now that I see these pictures, these videos, I start to understand it a little more.”

Youk Chhang, a leading researcher on the Khmer Rouge, says it would be easy to get discouraged by such seemingly disaffected youth – but that would be a great mistake.

“Genocide is very difficult to express in words. Forcing or expecting people to ‘believe’ it happened is unfair and perhaps too obsessed with the past,” he says, noting that the most important development to come out of this newfound dialogue is “the communication itself”.

“This dialogue that we are seeing today did not exist 15 years ago,” he says. “The tribunal has finally put the Khmer Rouge into the public sphere, creating a public debate that is nationwide. Everywhere there is shared joy, suspicion, sorrow, hope. It’s the single issue that has encouraged a culture of dialogue that has not yet existed in Cambodian society – and that means that the debate on the ground is more constructive than the debate in the court. People are finally defining and reflecting on the meaning of justice and the notion of reconciliation.”

For Sotheary and her mother, that reconciliation could not come soon enough.