Khmer Rouge ‘Brother No 3′ Dies While on Trial in Cambodia
Posted by Stephen Cook on March 14, 2013 / Comments OffCategory: Despotic regimes Tags: Khmer Rouge
Ieng Sary during his trial in Cambodia for atrocities. He has died aged 87. Photograph: Mark Peters/EPA
Khmer Rouge ‘Brother No 3′ Dies While on Trial in Cambodia
Stephen: Pol Pot was known as Brother No. 1, Nuon Chea as Brother No. 2 and Ieng Sary as Brother No. 3. Together they led the tyrannical Khmer Rouge, which was responsible for an estimated 1.7 million deaths in Cambodia some 40 years ago.
Associated Press in Phnom Penh, The Guardian – March 14, 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/14/khmer-rouge-brother-dies-cambodia
Ieng Sary, a co-founder of Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge movement in the 1970s, has died while on trial for atrocities. He was 87.
He had been on trial with two other former Khmer Rouge leaders by a joint Cambodian-international tribunal. He had been in declining health and tribunal spokesman Lars Olsen confirmed he died on Thursday morning.
Ieng Sary founded the Khmer Rouge with its leader, Pol Pot, who was his brother-in-law.
The communist regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, claimed it was building a pure socialist society by evicting people from cities to work in labour camps in the countryside. Its radical policies led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from starvation, disease, overwork and execution.
Ieng Sary was foreign minister in the regime and as its top diplomat became a much more recognisable figure internationally than his secretive colleagues. In 1996, years after the overthrown Khmer Rouge retreated to the jungle, he became the first member of its inner circle to defect, bringing thousands of foot soldiers with him and hastening the movement’s final disintegration.
The move secured him a limited amnesty, temporary credibility as a peacemaker and years of comfortable living in Cambodia, but that vanished as the UN-backed tribunal built its case against him.
The Khmer Rogue came to power through a civil war that toppled a US-backed regime. Ieng Sary then helped lure hundreds of Cambodian intellectuals to return home from overseas, often to their deaths.
The returnees were arrested and put in “re-education camps” and most were later executed, said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, an independent group gathering evidence of the Khmer Rouge crimes for the tribunal.
As a member of the Khmer Rouge’s central and standing committee Ieng Sary “repeatedly and publicly encouraged, and also facilitated, arrests and executions within his foreign ministry and throughout Cambodia”, Steve Heder says in his co-authored book Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Heder is a scholar on Cambodia who later worked with the UN-backed tribunal.
Known by his revolutionary alias as Comrade Van, Ieng Sary was a recipient of many internal Khmer Rouge documents detailing torture and mass execution of suspected internal enemies, according to the Documentation Centre of Cambodia.
“We are continuing to wipe out remaining [internal enemies] gradually, no matter if they are opposed to our revolution overtly or covertly,” read a cable sent to Ieng Sary in 1978. It was reprinted in an issue of the centre’s magazine in 2000, apparently proving he had full knowledge of bloody purges.
“It’s clear that he was one of the leaders that was a recipient of information all the way down to the village level,” Youk Chhang said.
Ieng Sary was arrested in 2007. He was tried with Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologist, and Khieu Samphan, an ex-head of state, in months-long proceedings that began in late 2011 on charges including crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.
Ieng Sary’s wife, former minister for social affairs Ieng Thirith, also had been charged but was ruled unfit to stand trial because she suffered from a degenerative mental illness, probably Alzheimer’s disease.
Only one other former Khmer Rouge official has been put on trial: the former prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, who was sentenced to life in prison.
Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, has openly opposed additional indictments of former Khmer Rouge figures, some of whom have become his political allies.
Pol Pot died in 1998 in Cambodia’s jungles while a prisoner of his own comrades. Ieng Sary declined to participate in his trial, demanding that the tribunal consider the pardon he received from Cambodia’s king when he defected in 1996. The tribunal, formally known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, previously ruled that the pardon does not cover its indictment against him.
He denied any hand in the atrocities. At a press conference following his defection, he said Pol Pot “was the sole and supreme architect of the party’s line, strategy and tactics”.
Ieng Sary was born Kim Trang on 24 October 1925 in southern Vietnam. In the early 1950s he was among many Cambodian students who received government scholarships to study in France, where he also took part in a Marxist circle.
After returning to Cambodia in 1957 he taught history at an elite high school in Phnom Penh while engaging in clandestine communist activities.
He, Ieng Thirith, Pol Pot and Pol Pot’s wife eventually formed the core of the Khmer Rouge movement. Pol Pot’s wife, Khieu Ponnary, also was Ieng Thirith’s sister; she died in 2003.
Pol Pot was known as Brother No. 1, Nuon Chea as Brother No. 2 and Ieng Sary was Brother No. 3.
A Vietnamese-led resistance overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and after years on the run he struck a peace deal with Hun Sen and days later led a mutiny of thousands of Khmer Rouge fighters to join the government, which was a prelude to the movement’s total collapse in 1999.
As a reward Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia almost unchallenged for the last two decades, secured a royal amnesty for Ieng Sary from then-King Norodom Sihanouk, who himself was a virtual prisoner and lost more than a dozen children and relatives during Khmer Rouge rule. The government also awarded Ieng Sary a diplomatic passport for travel.
Between his defection and arrest Ieng Sary lived a comfortable life, dividing time between his opulent villa in Phnom Penh and his home in Pailin, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in north-western Cambodia.
He and some of his former aides in the Khmer Rouge – intellectuals who were in a second generation of the group’s leadership – made a short-lived attempt at forming a legal political movement.
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3/14/2013
Khmer Rouge ‘Brother No 3′ Dies While on Trial in Cambodia
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