Former Khmer Rouge leader accused of genocide

A UN-BACKED tribunal in Cambodia has accused the Khmer Rouge’s former head of state, Khieu Samphan, of genocide.

The allegation is the latest charge against a senior member of the communist regime responsible for the deaths of nearly two million people during its 1975-79 reign of terror.

Trials against the leadership of the regime that implemented Cambodia’s “Killing Fields” have been long delayed, but this week has seen the tribunal level charges against some of the chief architects of Khmer Rouge terror.

The Khmer Rouge ran a bloody agrarian revolution under the leadership of Pol Pot, who died in 1998. After the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17th, 1975, fired by dreams of a communist ideal, they ordered the evacuation of all cities and towns into the countryside to work the fields.

In all over 1.7 million people perished – thousands through starvation during the evacuation, many more through overwork, torture and execution.

Analysts say the trials may never proceed in a meaningful way, as the defendants have been living in Cambodia for years, effectively under the stewardship of Cambodia’s current leadership.

Mr Khieu, a French-educated guerrilla leader, was arrested in 2007 although he had lived in Cambodia since 1998.

The publisher of a left-wing newspaper in the 1950s, he was arrested by the police, undressed and photographed in public, a huge humiliation which many believe informed his later zealotry, although he did co-operate with Prince Sihanouk’s Sangkum government a few years later. He has sought to portray himself as a virtual prisoner of the regime and denied knowledge of any atrocities.

As well as the 78-year-old Mr Khieu, the group’s top ideologist, “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea, and the former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, were all charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as homicide and torture. They are being held in the tribunal’s jail with two other defendants and are expected to be tried in 2010.

Earlier this year, the tribunal tried its first defendant, prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, who ran the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where up to 16,000 people were tortured and taken away to be killed. A verdict is expected early next year.

The tribunal is also trying to determine whether one of the other Khmer Rouge leaders in custody, former social affairs minister Ieng Thirith, the wife of Ieng Sary, would also be charged with genocide.