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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – Many Khmer Rouge foot soldiers remain in remote areas of Cambodia, each chronicling the horrifying years in which Pol Pot and his communist followers turned the country into a deadly laboratory of death. # 39; agronomy. totalitarianism.
Mea Chrun, a former Khmer Rouge bodyguard, lives in the hills choked by the jungle of northern Cambodia, in Anlong Veng. There is no doubt about the weight of the mbadacre. "I think that a million people have been killed," he said. "Do not say three million".
Friday morning, four decades after the fact that at least 1.7 million people, a fifth of the Cambodian population, were mbadacred by execution, overwork, disease and starvation . For the first time, the Khmer Rouge had committed genocide against the Cham Muslim minority and the Vietnamese ethnic group
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million. Nuon Chea was found guilty of genocide against the Cham and Vietnamese and Mr. Khieu Samphan against the Cham only. Both men were found guilty of various crimes against humanity and serious violations of the Geneva Conventions. And they were sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence identical to that handed down in a previous trial.
In an arid legal prose that did not camouflage the violent clbad struggle waged by the Khmer Rouge, the verdict resumed certain terms: murder, extermination, slavery, imprisonment, torture, persecution for political motives and other acts inhuman acts undermining human dignity.
Detailed cases of forced labor, such as the construction of dams and dikes under threat of death, have been enumerated, as well as forms of torture up to suffocation by plastic bags to the extraction of the nails of the feet and nails.
Muslims were forced to eat pork. Officials were executed by electrocution using telephone cables.
At the time of reading the verdict, Mr. Nuon Chea had armored eyes, oversized dark glbades and his lips collapsing into a mouth, missing teeth, to which he was allowed to listen. the procedure in a detention cell rather than in the glazed hearing room.
For some, the verdict resembled a marginal note of a murderous history that made Cambodia synonymous with genocidal mania.
", said Iam Yen, 52, who testified in court about his years of imprisonment in a children's camp under the Khmer Rouge. "But I will never have peace."
Nevertheless, a genocide verdict in Cambodia, as slow as it is in its scope, has implications for future prosecutions of crimes against humanity, as in the case of Sudan or Myanmar.
"We must show the world that even if it takes a long time, we can deliver justice," said Ly Sok Kheang, director of the Anlong Veng Peace Center and researcher in the field of reconciliation and peace efforts. 19659007] For more than a decade, the UN-backed court, called the Extraordinary Chambers of the Cambodian Courts, has examined hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, called hundreds of witnesses and heard so exhaustive The Khmer Rouge managed in their battlefields.
The overall operation cost more than $ 300 million.
Yet, the court sentenced only three senior Khmer Rouge officials for crimes against humanity: Mr. Nuon Chea, Mr. Khieu Samphan and Mr. Kaing. Guek Eav, better know n as Duch, who commanded a prison camp where at least 12,000 people were tortured and sentenced to death.
Only five of the top Khmer Rouge leaders were arrested and brought to justice. But as the court's deliberations continued, the other two older defendants died.
With the ruling delivered on Friday, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said he would prefer the court to cease its prestigious work. But others would like the trials to extend to many lower-ranking officials who allegedly committed some of the most horrendous crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge.
Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge cadre who ruled Cambodia for more than three decades, opposed the establishment of the tribunal. Rather than judge MM. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, he said that in 1998, they should be greeted with "bouquets of flowers, not with prisons and handcuffs".
"This trial has often been a shame and a joke," said Sophal Ear, a professor of diplomacy and international affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles, whose family fled the Khmer Rouge. "The message is that you can be held responsible if you live long enough."
Mr. Khieu Samphan, chief of state during most of the Khmer Rouge period, and Mr. Nuon Chea, aide-de-camp and chief political strategist of Pol Pot, were arrested in 2007 after living freely for years. years in the north of the country. [19659007] When handed down life sentences in 2014, at a previous trial for other crimes against humanity, the two men denied any responsibility for the brutality of the regime, even though they figured among its highest leaders.
"Do you really think that's what I wanted to happen to my people? Asked Mr. Khieu Samphan after the verdict four years ago. "In reality, I had no power."
Khieu Udom, his son, who runs a service station in Anlong Veng, dismissed the charges against his father. "My dad was targeted so that they could do what they want with him," he said.
Bun Ratana, Khieu Samphan's daughter-in-law, called him "a good man who would never beat a dog or a cat".
His 6-year-old son, sitting next to him, was bent over a notebook containing the word "teacher". The word and language in which it was written could have condemned him when his grandfather was at the head of the state of Kampuchea, as Cambodia was known at the time of the Khmer Rouge
Friday's genocidal conviction comes more than 40 years after the Khmer Rouge was imposed on his reign of terror over Cambodia In 1975, Pol Pot and his communist forces entered Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, and declared it "Year zero."
The goal was a clbadless agrarian society.People were executed for the slightest crime: wearing glbades, speaking French or liking ballet.
Many of the Khmer Rouge's most ardent ideologues had been educated abroad, Khieu Samphan studied political science at the Sorbonne, while Nuon Chea went to university in Thailand. The support that However they got came from the young Cambodian rural base, which had suffered many years of civil war and American bombing while the Vietnam War was full of the border.
Cambodia is again a young country. Most of the population was born long after the Vietnamese invaders removed power from the Khmer Rouge authorities in 1979. Although many families lost family members during the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, few national introspection took place.
Yun Bin, 63, said he was driven into one of the Khmer Rouge 's death fields, hacked to the ax and emptied into a well with others. To make sure nobody lives, the soldiers threw grenades into the well, he said. Mr. Yun Bin alone survived. To honor those who died in the well, he added his name as a civil party in the Khmer Rouge trials.
"I do not want people to forget what happened," he said. "Today, people care about business and money and want to move forward."
Even at Anlong Veng, which has remained a Khmer Rouge stronghold for years , while the ultra-communists created a fief near the Thai border, a burgeoning capitalism. arrived.
Pol Pot's dismal grave, who pbaded away in 1998, receives only a few visitors a day. But on the other side of the street, a huge casino with fountains and statues attracts Thai and local guests, even though the game is illegal for Cambodians.
The most diligent visitors to Pol Pot's cemeteries are the burning casino employees. false funds to ensure the good continuation of the game room, said the guardian of the grave.
Many former Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng claimed that they were totally unaware that a verdict of genocide is imminent in Phnom Penh. Divide the Cambodian population into good and bad halves is impossible, they said.
"We are all victims," said Panh Sam Onn, who hid his past as a teacher to avoid being persecuted by the Khmer Rouge. He was soon enlisted in the Khmer Rouge and pbaded from infantryman to district chief
. Panh Sam Onn recognized the excesses that occurred under his leadership: forced labor, the separation of children from their families, famine that could have been prevented by a rational agricultural policy.
The Khmer Rouge trials in a custom-built courthouse in the suburbs of Phnom Penh were a good idea, he said, because justice had to be done.
But sitting on his porch in a village populated by ancient Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng, Mr. Panh Sam Onn dismissed the idea that
"They should only judge the highest leaders and stop there ", did he declare. "Otherwise, it will be too fragile for society. Where will he end? "
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