Tribunal upholds Khmer Rouge’s Khieu Samphan’s life sentence

Cambodia’s last surviving leader of the Pol Pot regime will die in jail after his convictions were upheld on Thursday.

Former Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan’s image is shown on a live video feed during closing statements of his trial in Phnom Penh in June 2017. Picture: AFP

The last surviving leader of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, will die in jail after a UN-backed and Australian-funded tribunal upheld his life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Hundreds of Cambodians packed the Phnom Penh special courtroom on Thursday to hear the verdict, which marks the end of a 16-year process designed to aid national reconciliation in a country which lost a quarter of its population to the murderous Pol Pot regime.

The ultra-communist regime’s former head of state Khieu Samphan, now 91, was convicted in 2018 of genocide and crimes against humanity by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) for his role in the Khmer Rouge’s mass atrocities including the extermination of 20,000 ethnic Vietnamese.

The French-educated intellectual, who served as the public face of the regime to the world and was once known as “Mr Clean” for his alleged incorruptibility, never disputed his leading role within the Maoist regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 but always denied genocide.

Ex-Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, centre, sits in the courtroom at the Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh on Thursday. Picture: AFP

Khieu Samphan claimed he was not included in meetings between more senior leaders and was unaware of the mass atrocities being committed by the regime.

“I categorically refuse the accusation and the conviction that I had the intention to commit...crimes against humanity in any forms,” he told the court last year, insisting the regime’s atrocities were a regrettable but not inevitable consequence of its revolution.

But on Thursday he sat hunched and frail in his wheelchair as the tribunal’s judges ruled the “vast majority of Khieu Samphan’s arguments are unfounded”.

“The Supreme Court chamber finds no merit in Khieu Samphan’s arguments regarding genocide, and rejects them,” Chief Judge Kong Srim said in a lengthy ruling which also upheld his conviction for crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, enslavement, and mass rape.

As many as two million Cambodians died from starvation, torture, forced labour and mass execution under the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge regime, which sought to install an agrarian utopia but whose repressive policies instead led to famine and oppression.

Monks arrive to attend the verdict of ex-Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan on Thursday. Picture: AFP

Yet only three top leaders, including Khieu Samphan, have ever been convicted by the special court, which was set up with international backing in 2003 but has been dogged by accusations of Cambodian government interference.

Pol Pot was put under house arrest by some of his former allies in 1997, but died in his sleep the following year denying millions affected by his brutal regime the chance to bring him to justice.

Hundreds of thousands of educated and middle-class Cambodians were tortured and executed in special centres as Pol Pot sought to take his country back to ‘Year Zero’ by abolishing money, private property, religion, and executing anyone thought to be an intellectual.

That category included teachers, people who wore glasses or spoke a foreign language.

One of the most notorious of those sites was the S21 concentration camp in Phnom Penh, where Australians David Scott and Ron Dean were among thousands tortured and killed and which is now a museum displaying thousands of black and white photos of murdered detainees.

A vehicle transporting ex-Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan arrives at court in Phnom Penh on Thursday. Picture: AFP

S21 prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, was the first to be sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for overseeing the torture and murder of more than 17,000 men, women and children.

Those who survived the torture at S21 were eventually murdered in the “killing fields” outside of the capital, sometimes after digging their own mass graves. Fewer than a dozen S21 prisoners lived to tell the tale.

Duch died in prison, aged 77, in 2020.

Nuon Chea, second in command to Pol Pot and known as “Brother Number Two”, was convicted alongside Khieu Samphan in 2014 of crimes against humanity and then in 2018 of genocide. He died in 2019.

Two other Khmer Rouge cadres also died during their trials.

Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen – a former Khmer Rouge commander himself – opposed the trial of three other Khmer Rouge leaders for fear it could lead to instability and even civil war.

Cambodian Khmer Rouge guerrilla faction leader Khieu Samphan, right, shakes hands with Hun Sen, prime minister of the Hanoi-backed Cambodian government in 1990. Picture: AFP

The legal process – which the Hun Sen government insisted should be a sovereign court run by Cambodian and international judges and limited to prosecuting only the most senior Khmer Rouge leaders – has cost more than $500m. Australia has been its third largest donor.

The tribunal will spend the next three years determining how much of the huge trove of evidence can be declassified, and who will ultimately be custodian of those records.

Despite criticisms of the process, survivors of the regime and those who have documented its horrors say the court’s biggest achievement has been to help a traumatised nation discuss its brutal history.

Close to a quarter of a million people have attended the hearings, which have taken evidence from more than 300 witnesses, civil parties and experts.

Sydney University International Criminal Law expert Rosemary Grey said while there was “no world in which there would be a perfect court in Cambodia given the government’s strong interest in controlling the process”, the trials had generated an important national conversation.

“Prior to this it was uncommon for Cambodian students to learn about that terrible time in their history, or for people to talk about it,” Dr Grey told The Australian.

“I think it will take decades (to understand) its full ramifications, but I think there will greater rule of law in Cambodia and, hopefully, it can deter future atrocity crimes.”

For Chum Mey, one of only a handful of survivors of the S21 torture prison, no trial can ease the trauma of losing his wife and children at the hands of Khmer Rouge butchers.

But, said the 91-year-old; “The most important point is that the court prosecuting the Khmer Rouge leaders makes people know nationwide … about the killings by Pol Pot, so they won’t let this happen again.”

Additional reporting: AFP