Khmer Rouge

Three defendants were present in court on Monday to hear the array of charges read out against them: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

They looked on impassively Monday as the prosecution presented harrowing stories of execution, rape, torture and suffering.

In effect the defendants are accused of devising the policies that led to the deaths of as many as 2.2 million people during the Khmer Rouge's rule of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.

'No parallel in the modern era'

During his opening statement, international co-prosecutor Andrew Cayley said the proportion of the population that died under the Khmer Rouge - one in four people - had "no parallel in the modern era."

Cayley told the bench of five judges that the defendants would likely try to blame the late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, who died in 1998, for the "terror" of their rule. He said the same had happened at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after the Second World War when the defendants blamed Hitler.

"None of the accused here ever soiled his own hands with blood, but each of them, either alone or together with others long dead (devised policies) that unleashed an ocean of blood in this country," he said. "These three men were actors with Pol Pot, they planned and schemed for years with Pol Pot as to what they would do when they took control of the country."

Until a week ago, the charge roster held four names, but last Thursday, in a long-expected decision, the court ruled that the former social affairs minister Ieng Thirith was suffering from dementia and was unfit for trial.

Impassive defendants

The three remaining defendants are Nuon Chea, known as Brother Number Two and considered the movement's chief ideologue; Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, who was head of state.

Cambodian co-prosecutor Chea Leang told the court that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge had "enslaved the entire Cambodian nation" when they forcibly emptied all cities and towns, and drove the population into rural areas to grow rice and build dams and canals.

The crimes, she said, were "among the worst horrors inflicted on any nation in modern history."

"Cambodia became an open-air prison in which the prisoners were continually watched. Men, women and children performed labor in absolute silence. The working conditions were appalling."

Chea Leang also spoke of crimes such as forced marriage, religious persecution and countless instances of murder and torture in more than 200 security centres maintained around the country by the increasingly paranoid movement.

The Khmer Rouge, she explained, had "simply stripped human life of any value," adding that the leaders of the movement - including the accused - were fully aware of the killings and abuses happening at the grassroots level, and that those acts were carried out on their orders.

On Monday, the prosecution outlined five core policies of criminality: the forced movement of the urban population to rural areas; the enslavement of the entire population; the use of violence to eliminate its enemies; targeting specific groups including Buddhist monks, Cham Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese; and using forced marriage to boost the population.

A series of mini-trials

Last month, the court ordered that the proceedings be divided into a series of mini-trials. The first, which began Monday and is expected to last two years, will mainly focus on the forced movement of two million urban residents into rural areas in 1975, and then the forced movement later that year of hundreds of thousands of people around Cambodia to worksites.

The prosecution says tens of thousands died during those two campaigns, which are considered a crime against humanity and which the tribunal says "affected virtually all victims of the Democratic Kampuchea regime."

The judges rejected a request by the prosecution to have the first mini-trial look at a broader, more representative array of charges. They did leave the door open, however, to add more charges during the first mini-trial "where circumstances permit."

There is a risk that some of the most serious crimes might not be heard should the defendants die prior to the completion of the full trial or should the court run out of donor money.

Author: Robert Carmichael
Editor: Anne Thomas