PHNOM PENH: Former Khmer Rouge ideologue Nuon Chea and foreign minister Ieng Sary were both charged with genocide this week for their roles in the communist regime’s killing of ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslims.
Both are also charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity as key members of the 1975 to 1979 movement’s central committee, which oversaw the deaths of up to two million people through starvation, overwork and execution.
Now aged 83 and a secretive cadre even by the standards of one of the world’s most paranoid political movements, Nuon Chea was Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot’s most trusted deputy.
According to researchers, he was also a key architect of the regime’s death machine.
It is unknown how many of the Khmer Rouge’s victims were killed outright, but it is clear to researchers that the regime most likely systematically eliminated its “enemies” on Nuon Chea’s orders.
“There is substantial and compelling evidence that Nuon Chea, commonly known as ‘Brother Number Two,’ played a leading role in devising the... execution policies,” wrote genocide scholars Stephen Heder and Brian Tittemore in their book “Seven Candidates for Prosecution.”
“There is also substantial evidence that he played a central role in implementing those policies.”
Since surrendering to the government in 1998 under a deal that doomed the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea has acknowledged the deaths that took place under the regime but denies that he was in a position to stop the disaster that unfolded.
“I don’t know who was responsible” for the deaths, he told AFP before his 2007 arrest, describing himself as a nationalist who tried to guide Cambodia through the Cold War struggle for Indochina.
Ieng Sary, 84, was a young French university radical before he emerged as one of the few public faces of the Khmer Rouge during its brutal rule.
He has repeatedly denied knowledge of the mass executions that define the Khmer Rouge regime, yet researchers say he came as close as any senior official to publicly describing it policy of killing perceived traitors.
“Ieng Sary appears to have contributed to the perpetuation of atrocities in (Cambodia) by encouraging the Party’s execution policies,” said researchers Stephen Heder and Brian Tittemore in their book “Seven Candidates for Prosecution.”
In addition to being its foreign minister, Ieng Sary was also a member of the Khmer Rouge standing committee. In that position he was copied messages directed to Nuon Chea requesting what to do with Vietnamese prisoners of war.
Those messages, researchers say, mention torching civilian targets in Vietnam and “smashing” Vietnamese civilians on Vietnamese territory.
As foreign minister, he also oversaw the 1975 return of Cambodian diplomats under the guise of rebuilding their battered country. This policy would, however, deteriorate into the wholesale purging and slaughter of intellectuals, many of them taken from Ieng Sary’s foreign ministry with his knowledge. In 1979 Ieng Sary fled to Thailand after Vietnamese troops and Khmer Rouge defectors swept through Cambodia.
He was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced in absentia to death by a Vietnamese-backed war crimes tribunal hastily convened that year.
Amid moves against his ally Pol Pot and accusations from his former comrades that he had plundered millions of dollars of timber and gems, Ieng Sary defected to the new government in 1996 with thousands of Khmer Rouge fighters.
His lawyers have argued that the royal pardon he received in exchange for his surrender should exclude him from prosecution.
However he has been detained at Cambodia’s UN-backed court since 2007 along with his wife, former Khmer Rouge social affairs minister Ieng Thirith.
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