Top Khmer Rouge leader to appeal genocide conviction

[geovalin]

The last surviving senior Khmer Rouge leader will next week begin an appeal against his life imprisonment for his role in the genocide committed by the regime in Cambodia more than four decades ago. The Khmer Rouge, led by "Brother Number 1" Pol Pot, left some two million Cambodians dead from overwork, starvation and mass executions from 1975-79.

 

The regime's former head of state Khieu Samphan, 90, will on Monday challenge his 2018 conviction for genocide against ethnic minority Vietnamese. He was convicted alongside "Brother Number 2" Nuon Chea and jailed for life for genocide and a litany of other crimes, including forced marriages and rapes.

 

The pair were previously handed life sentences by the UN-backed court in 2014 for crimes against humanity over the violent forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975, when Khmer Rouge troops drove the population of the capital into the countryside.

 

read more https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210812-top-khmer-rouge-leader-to-appeal-genocide-conviction

[olfu]

Life sentence too harsh?

Lets ask victim's relatives opinions.

[milesinnz]

11 hours ago, olfu said:

Life sentence too harsh?

Lets ask victim's relatives opinions.

and from someone in the USA, who dropped 3 1/2 times more bombs on Cambodia than they did on Japan in WW2.. and this was a country that the USA was not even at war with.. oh the utter hypocrisy.. who in the USA ever went to prison for this ? oh, and what about Agent Orange which still affects people today... ??? you want to comment or run for it ?

Edited August 13, 2021 by milesinnz

[Card]

43 minutes ago, milesinnz said:

and from someone in the USA, who dropped 3 1/2 times more bombs on Cambodia than they did on Japan in WW2.. and this was a country that the USA was not even at war with.. oh the utter hypocrisy.. who in the USA ever went to prison for this ? oh, and what about Agent Orange which still affects people today... ??? you want to comment or run for it ?

I agree. Some of the recent USA presidents are some of the worst war and civil criminals. Take Reagen, Johnson, Nixon, The Bushes, Trump, and even Kennedy and you have a cabal of them. Note that most of them belong to that odious GOP.

Edited August 13, 2021 by Card

[Sydebolle]

Khieu Samphan should have been given the Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu treatment; remember last Romanian dictator and his wife? The Romanians closed this nasty subject of their more recent history and executed them on the spot. 

As far as the coward departure of the USA from Cambodia is concerned; John Gunther Dean (born Dienstfertig) - the last US Ambassador prior to the collapse was the only one to this very date who admitted the genocide sins and the systematic destruction of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger. The last war criminal is still alive; William Shawcross's book "Sideshow" is possibly the best write-up on the subject. 

[Tropposurfer]

2 hours ago, Card said:

I agree. Some of the recent USA presidents are some of the worst war and civil criminals. Take Reagen, Johnson, Nixon, The Bushes, Trump, and even Kennedy and you have a cabal of them. Note that most of them belong to that odious GOP.

I agree with you entirely.

The double standard and assumed arrogant white-power privilege is most evident when looking at the disparity of justice in other nations when focusing on the wests opinion and prosecution in both comment and punishment of those outside the power-cliques within the US.

Sadly history is littered with human rights atrocities, not confined to only the Caucasian or Christian races I might add.

However we look at this regime period I would suggest that what took place in Cambodia might have been spurned from the trauma of the Vietnam and covert wars in Cambodia and Laos, It was undoubtably a war crime of unspeakable intensity, longevity, and brutal execution. 

I can't venture an hypothesis on whether this was fertilised the ground for Pol Pt to flourish in. His particular brand of despotic radical communism did have features previously known and practised by Communist regimes in Asia.

Whatever others have done in Indochina the Khmer Rouge era was a very dark one. There's little doubt the Pol Pt regime had many complicit mass murderers and sociopath/psychopaths amongst its ranks, and what they perpetrated agains their own people was truly heinous and barbaric. I, when visiting there a few times in the last 15 years or so sensed a darkness, a shadow present which I found particularly disturbing.

[Scott Tracy]

16 hours ago, geovalin said:

The last surviving senior Khmer Rouge leader...

Are we sure he's the last one? Aren't Battalion commanders senior leaders?

[MrJ2U]

What a wired time in Cambodian history.

 

Fascinating books on the "Killing Fields".

[Nojohndoe]

5 hours ago, milesinnz said:

and from someone in the USA, who dropped 3 1/2 times more bombs on Cambodia than they did on Japan in WW2.. and this was a country that the USA was not even at war with.. oh the utter hypocrisy.. who in the USA ever went to prison for this ? oh, and what about Agent Orange which still affects people today... ??? you want to comment or run for it ?

Add Laos to that. 20 million bombs dropped which 30% never exploded at the time but are still killing and maiming every year on top of the 50,000 who died at the time. 98% were civilians.

The Pol Pot regime genocide activities were abominable and deservedly held to account where possible. But it was in their own back yard. Other instances of gross infliction have been more often in someone else's.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-12-25/deadly-debris-us-legacy-unexploded-remnants-war

 

 

 

[placnx]

6 hours ago, milesinnz said:

and from someone in the USA, who dropped 3 1/2 times more bombs on Cambodia than they did on Japan in WW2.. and this was a country that the USA was not even at war with.. oh the utter hypocrisy.. who in the USA ever went to prison for this ? oh, and what about Agent Orange which still affects people today... ??? you want to comment or run for it ?

I was surprised to discover that Cambodia was more bombed than Laos (2.7mn tons vs 2mn tons). Here's a good analysis which suggests that the bombing contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/what-the-us-bombing-of-cambodia-tells-us-about-obamas-drone-campaign/273142/

On Laos bombing:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37286520

Cluster bombs are a terrible legacy to this day.

 

[placnx]

4 hours ago, Sydebolle said:

As far as the coward departure of the USA from Cambodia is concerned; John Gunther Dean (born Dienstfertig) - the last US Ambassador prior to the collapse was the only one to this very date who admitted the genocide sins and the systematic destruction of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger. The last war criminal is still alive; William Shawcross's book "Sideshow" is possibly the best write-up on the subject. 

Around 20 years ago I arrived early at a dinner for the American Library in Paris. Another of the few around then asked me something like where I was from, to which I replied "American, but I live in Thailand". He introduced himself: John Gunther Dean. He recounted mostly his experiences as ambassdor to Thailand, which was a while after his duty in Cambodia. It was fascinating and went on about half an hour. Sadly, from about the middle, people were arriving at the cocktail hour and it got really noisy, his voice was gravelly, too, so I could make out less and less of what he was saying. I regret that I didn't get him to sit with us at dinner. One of my friends there wrote a travel memoir of his time going around Afghanistan in 1975. It could have made for some interesting conversation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gunther_Dean

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/obituaries/john-gunther-dean-dead.html

An impressive individual: ambassador to Cambodia, Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India!

[milesinnz]

1 hour ago, placnx said:

I was surprised to discover that Cambodia was more bombed than Laos (2.7mn tons vs 2mn tons). Here's a good analysis which suggests that the bombing contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/what-the-us-bombing-of-cambodia-tells-us-about-obamas-drone-campaign/273142/

On Laos bombing:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37286520

Cluster bombs are a terrible legacy to this day.

 

yes, I know the bombing led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.. before the US started bombing Cambodia, Pol Pot were just a rag bag band of bandits in the North East.. Pol Pot said he fought for the Vietcong, but all he was was a cook... when the B52's dropped from above cloud, the farmers didn't hear them and the next thing that happened was bombs were going off around them, not surprisingly they literally <deleted> themselves.. and were ready recruits for the Khmer Rouge.. I am not sure if by population or land area, Laos by I think at least one of these measures was the most heavily bombed country... there are some pseudo real time videos of the bombing missions over the period of time.. you can see how they start off small and isolated and then progress rapidly to the whole country.. I did read when it all started that the B52 crew were not given their co-ordinates until they were in the air... so they didn't really know they were bombing Cambodia, that must have been early on when they were trying to take out the Ho Chi Minh Trail - which was the original justification... so that if American factories make bombs and sold to someone, and those bombs are used against some other enemy, does that give a right to this other enemy to come and bomb America ?

Edited August 13, 2021 by milesinnz