By Kim Do-yeun
Three Khmer Rouge leaders accused of taking part in the 1970s massacre of 1.7 million civilians in Cambodia stood trial on Monday.
Hundreds of watchers, including survivors of the genocide and students, gathered that morning at the U.N.-backed tribunal.
The three accused were Nuon Chea, 85, Khieu Samphan, 80, and Ieng Sary, 86, who had worked directly under Pol Pot, the late leader of the Khmer Rouge regime. Ieng Thirith, wife of Sary, who was a Khmer Rouge minister and was often called the First Lady of the regime, had also been accused but could not stand trial because she has Alzheimer’s disease.
The defendants have been denying the charges, which include genocide, religious persecution and torture. Chea Leang, the co-prosecutor, will lay out the full details of the offences as the trial progresses this week.
Leang has already given an overview of the principal charges, including “the enslavement of millions of people in forced labor camps, the smashing of hundreds of thousands of lives in notorious security centers and the killing fields, and the extermination of minorities, the countless deaths from disease, abuse and starvation,” which were “among the worst horrors inflicted on any nation in modern history.”
The regime had aimed to create an agrarian socialist society by forcing Cambodians into labor camps and purging the middle classes and intellectuals.
This trial is likely one of the most important trials of the century after the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi war criminals in 1945 and 1946, and it has been stirring much emotion among people who had known the brutal Cambodian regime in the late ‘70s.
However, there has also been much criticism surrounding the joint tribunal between the U.N. and the Cambodian government, as it has done little since being set up in 2006. One case involving Kaing Guek Eav, a chief jailer at a torture center, was completed in 2010, with a 35-year jail sentence — later deduced to 19 years — for Eav’s role in torturing and killing more than 14,000 people. The verdict had outraged watchers for being too forgiving.
Further, due to the age of the defendants and their health conditions, many speculate that the long trial process will not see them serve whichever punishment awaits them.