Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan sentenced to life imprisonment

[geovalin]

Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan sentenced to life imprisonment

Senior Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea deny the charges against them

 

Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes tribunal is to deliver its verdict in the trial of the last two surviving top Khmer Rouge leaders.

 

Nuon Chea, 88, and Khieu Samphan, 83, are charged with crimes against humanity.

 

The verdict comes more than three decades after the Maoist regime's fall.

 

Up to two million people are believed to have died under the Khmer Rouge - from starvation and overwork or executed as enemies of the state.

 

To date, no top-level leader has faced justice. The Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998.

 

Prosecutors are seeking life imprisonment for the pair.

 

The case against the men has been split into two trials to speed up proceedings because of their age. A separate trial, for genocide, has just got under way.

 

 

Khmer Rouge rule brought four years of starvation, torture and fear to Cambodians

Experts hope that the verdict will deliver justice and bring some closure to Cambodia

 

The Khmer Rouge was in power from 1975-1979. Driven by Maoist ideology, it sought to create an agrarian society.

 

Cities were emptied and their residents forced to work on rural co-operatives. Many were worked to death while others starved as the economy imploded.

 

During four violent years, the Khmer Rouge also killed all those it perceived as enemies - intellectuals, minorities, former officials - and their families.

 

Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's second in command, was seen an ideological driving force within the regime. Khieu Samphan was its official head of state.

 

Prosecutors have argued that they formulated policy and were complicit in its brutal execution.

 

Both men denied the charges against them. In closing statements last year, they expressed remorse but said they had neither ordered deaths nor been aware of them.

 

Unfit for trial

 

Over three years the court has heard from some of those who lost entire families to the regime.

 

"My anger remains in my heart,'' Suon Mom, 75, whose husband and four children starved to death, told the Associated Press news agency.

 

"I still remember the day I left Phnom Penh, walking along the road without having any food or water to drink ... Hopefully the court will sentence the two leaders to life in prison."

 

Two other former Khmer Rouge ministers were to be tried along side them.

 

Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister, died in March 2013. His wife Ieng Thirith, who served as the regime's social affairs minister, has been ruled unfit to stand trial.

 

Former prison chief Duch is the only senior Khmer Rouge leader who has been held to account for the regime's crimes.

 

He was jailed in 2010 for running the Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of people defined as enemies of the regime were tortured and killed.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28670568?OCID=twitterasia

[geovalin]

Tribunal finds Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea guilty

Thu, 7 August 2014

Stuart White

The Khmer Rouge tribunal today handed down guilty verdicts for crimes against humanity to Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan – the two most senior surviving members of the Democratic Kampuchea regime.

Based on their involvement in a joint criminal enterprise whose plan was to implement a “rapid socialist revolution through a great leap forward by any means necessary,” the chamber pronounced the two guilty of committing crimes against humanity in the course of two phases of forced transfers of the population, and executions at Tuol Po Chrey.

Of the evacuation of Phnom Penh – the first phase of forced transfers – the trial chamber found that two million were forced out of the city “under terrifying and violent circumstances,” and “rejected any suggestion that it was necessary or proportionate in the circumstances to empty virtually the entire city”.

On the second phase of forced transfers, which began months later, the chamber found that conditions of the transfers were deplorable, and given the humanitarian crisis that many of those transferred were facing, even the decisions of those who agreed to be transferred “cannot be seen as a legitimate exercise of choice”.

Tuol Po Chrey, they found, was the continuation of a policy to eradicate potential resistance to the new Khmer Rouge regime by eliminating the remnants of its precursor.

The verdict comes almost three years after opening statements in Case 002/01, the first sub-trial in the court’s flagship case against Chea and Samphan, and more than 30 years after the Khmer Rouge’s bloody rule was brought to an end by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979.

Born in 1926 in Battambang province, Nuon Chea was deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge’s central organizing body. Known as Brother Number 2, Chea was second only to Pol Pot – the regime’s autocratic head – and was accused of being instrumental to the regime’s decision-making.

Khieu Samphan was born in 1931 in Svay Rieng province. A prominent member of government under King Norodom Sihanouk, Samphan was widely respected for his perceived incorruptibility, earning him the nickname “Mr Clean”.

Forced into hiding, Samphan reportedly joined with the Khmer Rouge in 1970, finally being appointed as head of state of Democratic Kampuchea. Samphan and his defence long maintained that he was unaware of the crimes committed under the Khmer Rouge, and that he was left out of all high-level planning.

Some 1.6 million people are believed to have been killed under Democratic Kampuchea through executions, disease, starvation and overwork during the regime’s nearly four-year rule.

 

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/tribunal-finds-khieu-samphan-nuon-chea-guilty

 

[webfact]

Court jails Khmer Rouge leaders for life for crimes against humanity

PHNOM PENH, August 7, 2014 (AFP) - Two former Khmer Rouge leaders were jailed for life Thursday after being found guilty of crimes against humanity by Cambodia's UN-backed court, the first-ever sentences for leaders of the murderous regime.

 

"Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea, 88, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83, were "guilty of the crimes against humanity, of extermination... political persecution, and other inhumane acts," said judge Nil Nonn.

 

The pair are entitled to appeal the verdict, but the judge said the gravity of the crimes meant they "shall remain in detention until this judgment becomes final".

 

Prosecutors had sought life terms for the defendants -- the most senior surviving ex-Khmer Rouge officials -- for their roles in a regime which left up to two million people dead during the "Killing Fields" era from 1975-1979.

 

The verdict, after a two-year trial, is likely to bring a measure of justice to those who survived the Khmer Rouge years, three decades after the regime's fall.

 

The era saw a quarter of Cambodia's population killed or die from starvation and overwork.

 

A few dozen survivors, many travelling from far-flung rural provinces, arrived early to join some 900 Cambodians at the Phnom Penh-based court to watch the verdicts.

 

The defendants had throughout the trial denied knowledge of the regime's crimes during the era.

 

But both eventually expressed a level of remorse for the suffering inflicted on the Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge.

 

The complex case against them was split into a series of smaller trials in 2011 for reasons including their advanced age and the large number of accusations.

 

Led by "Brother Number One" Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the Khmer Rouge dismantled modern society with regime atrocities affecting virtually every family in Cambodia.

[afp]2014-08-07[/afp]

[NeilSA1]

Disgusting that they (and others) were allowed to live at home with family and friends for over 30 years before (hopefully) being punished. At their ages, 'life' is a paltry sentence - they should have been locked up years ago.  

[EnzoRippo]

Do we know if they will be jailed in Prey Sar or in the 3 stars UN prison where they stay at this moment? Just a candid question.

[tracker1]

Like I stated previously the UN paper tiger working at its usual pace SLOW and the accused

still have the appeal process, better hope they live to be 100 or more

[wabothai]

Death penalty would have been more appropriate taken what they are responsible for even at their old age. No mercy !

[belg]

take all their belongings, and give them to charities

 

 

[honcho]

hun sen should be there with them...

[rlopes]

As late as it is, it's great to have they judged and sentenced, so there's no doubt in history to glorify them later.