The trial of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan not only delivered a measure of justice for millions of victims, but also delved deep into the history, ideology and authority structure of the Khmer Rouge. Senior prosecutor Tarik Abdulhak, responsible for the case against Khieu Samphan, explains why the verdict is a historic one.
On August 7, the Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) rendered its judgment in Case 002/01. Five judges (three Cambodians and two internationals)sentenced Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, political persecution and other inhumane acts. The pronouncement of the verdict was a truly historic event, both for Cambodia and for the international community. This was the first judgment by a court of law on the responsibility of senior Khmer Rouge leaders for some of the most heinous crimes committed since World War II.
The Khmer Rouge rise to power
Khmer Rouge (‘Red Khmers’) was the name given by Prince Norodom Sihanouk to the Cambodian communist movement in the 1960s. The party’s formal name was the Communist Party of Kampuchea (‘CPK’). From 1963 the CPK was headed by Saloth Sar, a man whose position as communist leader was kept secret from the Cambodian public for another 14 years. In 1970, Saloth Sar adopted his revolutionary name, Pol Pot. The same year, Prince Sihanouk was deposed as head of state by the Cambodian National Assembly in a bloodless coup orchestrated by Prime Minister Lon Nol and Prince Sirik Matak. Norodom Sihanouk, who was outside Cambodia at the time of the coup, proceeded to form a coalition with his former adversaries, the CPK/Khmer Rouge. For the next five years, Sihanouk nominally presided over a coalition government (formally known by its French acronym, Grunk) from Beijing. However, real power was vested in the CPK leaders who conducted the civil war against Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic regime.
The Khmer Rouge leaders established a highly disciplined and effective military force, quickly gaining the upper hand on the battlefield and achieving successive victories against the Khmer Republic. They launched a final offensive on Phnom Penh on 1 January 1975, effectively placing the capital under siege. By March, defences around the city were collapsing and on April 1 Lon Nol fled Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge forces entered the city in the morning of 17 April 1975 and the Khmer Republic forces surrendered the same day.
Khmer Rouge atrocities
The CPK ruled Cambodia from 17 April 1975 to 6 January 1979. This period of three years, eight months and 20 days is remembered as the darkest phase in Cambodia’s history.
The CPK unleased a system of widespread terror and abuse on the Cambodian population. The new authorities immediately emptied all of the country’s cities and urban centres, enslaving the entire civilian population in cooperatives and forced labour camps. All private property was confiscated and human rights abolished. Civilians were forced to write biographies which were used to weed out and eliminate those deemed to be enemies of the revolution. Families were separated. Courts of law, schools and universities were closed down. The new authorities also abolished television, radio, theatres and music, replacing them with publications and revolutionary songs extolling the new regime’s virtues. In January 1976, the Khmer Rouge set up the state of Democratic Kampuchea, which was ruled from the shadows by the CPK leadership. Sihanouk, who had returned to Cambodia in late 1975, was placed under house arrest while numerous members of his extended family were killed or disappeared.
Every aspect of people’s lives in Democratic Kampuchea was controlled by Khmer Rouge cadres – what they ate, where they worked and slept, even when they were allowed to speak. Disobedience, recalcitrance and perceived laziness were punishable by beatings, arrest and, in many cases, death. Ordinary people were turned into units of production, reduced to mere subsistence in an all-encompassing system of ill-treatment. The regime subjected thousands of young people to forced marriages, which resulted in countless rapes.
The Khmer Rouge set up hundreds of security centres throughout the country, in which perceived enemies were imprisoned, ‘re-educated’, tortured and executed. They also carried out extermination campaigns against minorities, including the Vietnamese, Chams and the Khmer Krom (ethnic Khmers with their origins in present-day southern Vietnam). The number of deaths from starvation, disease, ill-treatment and executions under CPK rule is estimated at between 1.75 and 2.2 million – one quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time.
Roles of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan
Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were members of the CPK’s top echelon. Nuon Chea (original name: Lao Kim Lorn)was deputy secretary of the Khmer Rouge and the second-most senior leader after Pol Pot. Khieu Samphan held a number of senior positions, including President of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) from 1976 to 1979, and a senior member of Office 870, an executive body which oversaw the implementation of CPK decisions.
Both Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were members of the CPK Central Committee, which was responsible for implementing the ‘party political line’ and instructing Khmer Rouge authorities throughout the country. The two men lived together with other party leaders in a high-security compound in Phnom Penh, only blocks away from the infamous S-21 prison. They formed part of an inner circle of leaders together with Pol Pot, an arrangement that spanned more than 25 years of their lives (1970 – late 1990s).
Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were sent to trial before the ECCC together with two other former Khmer Rouge leaders: Ieng Sary, the DK Minister for Foreign Affairs and a member of the CPK Central Committee; and Ieng Thirith, Sary’s wife and the DK Minister for Social Affairs.
Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, the chief of S-21, was indicted and tried separately in 2009 in Case 00. Duch was found guilty of the imprisonment and extermination of more than 12,200 victims. On 3 February 2012, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court Chamber, the ECCC’s appeal court.
The case against the senior leaders
No court of law could ever hope to deal with all of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. The judicial investigations, which the co-prosecutors initiated in 2007, focused on 27 crime sites and mass crime events, including 11 security centres, six forced labour camps, three forced movements of civilian populations, forced marriage, persecution of Buddhists, and the extermination of Vietnamese and Cham minorities. The investigations were conductedby the co-investigating judges, who, on 15 August 2010, issued an indictment sending the four former leaders to trial on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
To ensure a judgement could be rendered on at least some of these charges within the lifetime of the accused, the Trial Chamber divided the case up into a series of separate, consecutive trials. The first trial – Case 002/01 – focused on the forced evacuation of more than two million people from Phnom Penh in April 1975, executions of soldiers and officials of the Khmer Republic regime, and a second forced transfer of more than 300,000 people: the specific events for which Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were convicted and sentenced on August 7 this year.
The trial opened on 27 June 2011, but Ieng Thirith was found unfit to stand trial due to a diagnosis of progressive dementia. A course of court-ordered medical treatment failed to reverse the deterioration of her mental condition and she was released from detention in December 2012 (she remains under judicial supervision). Her husband, Ieng Sary, died in March 2013 while the first trial was still in progress. The trial continued against the remaining accused, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, concluding with closing oral arguments in October 2013. The chamber had sat for a total of 222 trial days and heard the testimonies of 92 witnesses, victims and experts. More than 103,000 people attended the proceedings, an attendance record that far exceeds all other mass crime tribunals.
The trial of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan was extremely significant, not only because it delivered a measure of justice for millions of victims, but also because it delved deep into the history, ideology and authority structure of the Khmer Rouge regime. The Trial Chamber’s 670-page judgment provides an important and detailed judicial account of these facts.
Evidence of evacuations and mass executions
The evacuations and mass executions which were the focus of the first trial were in some ways emblematic of the regime as a whole. Philip Short, author of a highly acclaimed biography of Pol Pot, testified before the Trial Chamber as an expert witness, explaining how the forced evacuations of the cities in 1975 formed a paradigm for the abuses that followed:
“[T]he ruthlessness, and single-mindedness, and the lack of concern for human values, for human suffering, for individual values that were shown during the evacuation…in everything the same approach, and in many cases the same finalities – that is, large numbers of dead along the way – were how those programmes were characterised. And you find all that in the very first step, which was the evacuation of the cities.”
The Chamber also heard heart-wrenching testimonies from victims forced out of their homes. Nou Hoan described the suffering and death during the evacuation:
“There was a huge crowd of people en route and it was in the middle of the dry season and the weather was very hot. People were shocked. They did not bring much belongings with them… Some of them lost their children and their families and the situation was chaotic… And there were flies, flies were everywhere like a cloud of bees… Some people died and [were] left along the street. And those who were sick could not seek any help from anyone. And we were forced by Angkar to just keep going, so some of us would have to leave their sick family members behind.”
On 17 April 1975, four reporters – three Americans (Sydney Schanberg, Al Rockoff and Jon Swain) and one Cambodian (Dith Pran) – were captured by Khmer Rouge forces as they emerged from a hospital where they had been taking account of the day’s casualties. In the tense moments that followed, Pran’s pleas saved his three American colleaguesfrom almost certain execution. Schanberg, Swain and Rockoff were allowed to stay in the French embassy compound, where hundreds of foreigners were gathered up before being expelled by the Khmer Rouge to Thailand. Pran was forced into the countryside together with millions of his compatriots.
The story of Dith Pran and his colleagues inspired the movie The Killing Fields, which helped focus the world’s attention on the plight of the Cambodian people in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. In 1976, Schanberg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his articles on Cambodia (he and Dith Pran reunited in 1979 and remained close friends until Pran’s death in 2008).
Tragically, Dith Pran didn’t live to see the trial of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, but in June 2013, 38 years after the events of April 1975, Schanberg testified before the Trial Chamber. He described the Khmer Rouge’s brutality, giving a vivid account of the rivers of people being forced out of the city:
“[W]e saw people… being pushed on beds and all kinds of things with bottles of serum hanging from the bed and they were all being forced out of the city. And the avenue that we came out on was scattered with the shoes and sandals that people had lost as they were forced to walk quickly in these huge crowds… I saw it in many parts of the city… They were just driving them out like cattle… [Hospital patients] no matter how sick they were, they were taken out of the hospitals.”
During Mr Schanberg’s testimony, I asked him to describe the achievements for which he was awarded the Pulitzer. He said:
“It was awarded for foreign reporting at great risk and I accepted it on behalf of my assistant and brother, Dith Pran, as well as for myself, because without him I would never have been able to do the work that I did.”
Schanberg spoke gently and with love about the Cambodian man to whom he owed his life. His testimony was touching and profound because it was a reminder of the brave and generous Cambodian spirit that all foreigners who visit this country experience.
Testimonies of victims before the ECCC brought to life the utter helplessness of those who were left to the mercy of the Khmer Rouge. Some of the victims described how, during the evacuation of Phnom Penh, soldiers simply executed those who refused to comply with their orders. Yim Sovann told the court:
“I saw, in O’Russei Market, one of the houses was locked when I returned from the market. When they knocked the door and the door was not open…they shot the lock, and when the people came out, they shot the people to death, and I ran away from the scene.”
Many evacuees were subjected to acts of brutality that defy comprehension. Chheng Eng Ly described for the court the killing of a baby who was crying over his mother’s dead body:
“Crossing Monivong Bridge, I saw a crying baby. He was actually crawling over the dead body of his mum. I wanted to carry that baby. I wanted to take the baby. From the time when I wanted to carry the baby and the soldier carried this baby was so brief that I could not actually do anything. But all of a sudden when the soldier carried this baby, they just tore the baby apart. It was a very horrifying scene. I could not imagine any human being who would do that.”
The second transfer, of at least 300,000 to 400,000 people from Kandal, Kampong Thom, Kampong Cham, Takeo, Kampong Speu, Kampong Chhnang, Prey Veng and Svay Rieng provinces to Kampong Thom, Preah Vihear, Battambang and Pursat provinces, began in September 1975. Another 30,000 were transferred to Kratie and a number of other provinces. Many of the evacuees were forced out of their villages and cooperatives. Others agreed to be transferred as they were misled by the Khmer Rouge into believing that conditions of life in the northwest were significantly better. The evacuees were transported in a variety of ways, including by truck, boat, train and on foot, and were kept under armed guard and given little or no food or medical assistance. For part of the journey, thousands of people were transported on cargo trains. Many died from exhaustion, illness and starvation. Some drowned when boats capsized due to strong currents. Others were executed.
In her evidence before the Trial Chamber, Pech Srey Phal, a victim, testified:
“Nobody could run away because they guarded the door of the wagon and they used wooden pole to block the door as well. Some people died in the wagon because they were too exhausted and the wagon was too packed. Although they died, the train did not stop for them to be removed and placed outside. When someone died on the wagon, then the soldiers would push the dead body off the wagon because, to them, it was just a waste.”
Sokh Chim, a railway worker in Pursat, buried bodies of evacuees along the railway tracks en route to Battambang. He testified:
“No one could leave as they were guarded, and those who were sick would die there… I, myself, buried the dead bodies because dead bodies along the railway tracks decomposed. The corpses that I buried were those who died along the track and because of the stink we could not work, so we had to bury those bodies. But for those other corpses further from the track, we did not bury those bodies. I saw several of those corpses further from the tracks. They were covered along the rice dykes or along the road.”
The third event for which Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan stood trial was an execution of at least 250 Khmer Republic officials, soldiers and officers at Tuol Po Chrey (in Kandieng, Pursat) in late April 1975. The execution was carried out by Khmer Rouge forces under the command of Ruos Nhim, chief of the CPK’s Northwest Zone. Nhim was Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan’s fellow member of the CPK Central Committee.
The Trial Chamber concluded the above crimes were committed as part of a joint criminal enterprise – a criminal plan created by the senior members of the Khmer Rouge, including Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. For example, it found on the basis of eyewitness accounts and documentary evidence that the decision to evacuate Phnom Penh was made by the Khmer Rouge leaders in June 1974 and early April 1975, at meetings attended by both Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. The second forced transfer was also the direct result of decisions made by the CPK leadership to distribute people for the purposes of forced labour and in order to continue a ‘class struggle’ against those evacuees it distrusted (former officials of the Khmer Republic, intellectuals, landowners,capitalists, feudalists and the ‘petty bourgeoisie’).
In determining the sentence of life imprisonment for both accused, the Trial Chamber stated:
“The Trial Chamber has found that a minimum of 250 Lon Nol officials were murdered at TuolP o Chrey and, as a minimum, between 2,330,000 and 2,430,000 people were victims of crimes committed during the first two phases of forced population movement. The number of victims is among the highest of any decided case concerning international crimes. The crimes were committed across the whole of Cambodia during an almost two-year period.”
The gravity of the crimes is further demonstrated by their serious and lasting impact upon the victims and their relatives and Cambodia in general. For the victims who died as a result of the crimes, the consequences were absolute. Many of those who survived suffered ongoing physical trauma, as well as mental and psychological disorders. The grave impact of these crimes on the victims and their relatives is both devastating and enduring.
The chamber’s sentence is not only justified, it is the only sentence that can reflect the sheer gravity of the crimes and their impact on the victims.
It is important, however, to note that the judgment is subject to appeal to the Supreme Court Chamber, and both Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan’s defence teams have indicated their intention to appeal.
Significance of the judgement
I referred above to the importance of this judgement in providing a measure of justice for the victims and important insights into the ideology and functioning of the Khmer Rouge regime. The judgment also puts the Khmer Rouge atrocities of 17 April 1975 and the months following in an important historical context.
Citing extensive evidence, including witness accounts, expert testimony and the CPK’s own internal documents, the Trial Chamber traced the development of Khmer Rouge ideology well before 1975. It found the Khmer Rouge had adopted and implemented policies of capturing, forcibly moving and collectivising civilian populations in the early 1970s. For example, Khmer Rouge forces evacuated villages in Kampong Cham in 1973, setting villagers’ houses on fire, executing commune chiefs and moving people to the forests. A similar pattern occurred in March 1974 when Khmer Rouge forces overran the city of Oudong, forcibly moving 15,000 to 20,000 people to rural areas, while executing scores of Khmer Republic officials.
David Chandler, a leading historian and expert on the Khmer Rouge, testified before the Trial Chamber that the repetitive pattern of forced evacuations reached its climax in the emptying of Phnom Penh and other cities in April 1975. He testified that, as at April 1975, people in the cities were considered intrinsically disloyal and had to be removed. The CPK leaders had concluded that city dwellers would remain politically and ideologically corrupt if they were allowed to stay in the cities, and would be difficult to control.
Similarly, the Trial Chamber’s judgment demonstrates that the use of violence had its origins in CPK leaders’ decisions and actions many years before 1975. The leaders decided to use ‘revolutionary violence’ against their perceived enemies as early as 1960. By 1971, when they were engaged in the civil war against the Khmer Republic, they began to institutionalise their use of extra-judicial imprisonment, torture and executions of perceived spies and other enemies. By 1973, the enemies being executed in security centres included captured soldiers and officers of the Khmer Republic regime. Evidence included the following accounts by Duch, who ran security centre M-13 from 1971 to 1975:
“The people who were sent by the soldiers to M-13 for interrogation and smash, they were part of the party’s policies. No matter if they… were poor or rich, they would be sent to M-13 and they were accused… as spies and they were later to be smashed.”
In this period, Duch received instruction in torture methods from Vorn Vet, a member of the CPK Central Committee and a man who was himself later executed at S-21:
“Vorn Vet, himself, instructed me the way to torture those people. The best way he liked… was to use a plastic bag to cover the heads of those people. He said: ‘You, comrade, need to look at their neck and see if it’s shaking or it’s vibrating… if it was vibrating very strongly… they would be considered as spies. At M-13, we were allowed to first beat the prisoners; secondly, used the telephone – electric telephone as the method of torturing; and water-boarding and plastic bag to cover the detainees face to suffocate them.”
This evidence is important because it sets a coherent record of the origins and development of CPK policies which resulted in the crimes that were committed by the Khmer Rouge once they were in power.
The findings on the functioning of the Khmer Rouge leadership are just as important. The Trial Chamber dispels one of the myths that some associate with the Pol Pot regime: that the CPK operated as a one-man dictatorship. Relying on extensive evidence, including CPK statutes and statements by both Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, the judges found that the party leadership operated on the basis of collective decision-making. ‘Democratic centralism’, a key principle of the Khmer Rouge, required that all decisions be made collectively and that subordinate bodies defer to central leadership – resulting in a pyramidal leadership structure. The myth of a lone dictator imposing his will unilaterally on all those around him is simply inconsistent with the overwhelming evidence of the collective functioning of the party leadership.
The chamber specifically did not deal with the implementation of those policies which will be covered in the next trial (Case 002/02), such as killings of enemies in security centres and operation of forced labour sites in the 1975-1979 period. These policies, and the crimes which they allegedly involved, will be examined on the basis of evidence already admitted (including more than 5,800 exhibits and 28,000 pages of transcript), as well as witnesses and documents yet to be considered.
Final thoughts
The judgement against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan is a milestone for Cambodia and for international criminal justice. Senior leaders of one of the most brutal regimes in modern history have finally been judged by a court of law. Perhaps the most eloquent articulation of the importance of this case was given before the rendering of the verdict. Huo Chantha, who lost 22 members of her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, made the following statement to the Trial Chamber:
“Today I am so excited that I am given the opportunity by this international court, who crossed the oceans in order to come here to find justice for them and for the Cambodian people who died unjustlyunder that regime. Today this is the day that I have been waiting for more than 30 years with anxiety.
“Today I would like to summon the spirit of my parents, my uncles, grand-uncles, aunts and all the relatives totalling 22 who died under the regime, to be here with me in order to hear the prosecution by this court of the murderers and to find justice for you all. And I know to be sure that they will be judged when they die.
“My respect to the court. I would like to make a request to you or your honours, which is the international court, to judge fairly and justly in proportion to the gravity of the crimes that they have committed inhumanly against the nation and the people withtheir torture and other cruel acts.”
Ordinary Cambodians greeted the judgment with overwhelming approval. It was a humbling moment for us in the prosecution team to shake the hands of the victims in the courtroom and to witness the relief in their eyes.
It has taken 35 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime for this milestone to be achieved and much work remains to be done. The accused are entitled to appeal the Trial Chamber’s judgment. A second trial, on important additional charges, has already been opened. In that trial, as in the last, the accused are entitled to confront the evidence against them and to present their defences.
But the dignity and sense of justice which this verdict provides for the millions who suffered should not be underestimated.