Its mind-boggling to me that the Khmer Rouge leaders, almost thirty years after the fall of the regime, still haven’t been brought to justice.
Isn’t it bizarre that if you kill one person you face court within days, but if you kill almost 2 million people you can have your punishment delayed for decades, if not indefinitely. As death counts go, that’s murder almost on a Nazi scale (and even more bizarre given that it was of their own people).
The defense for Ieng Sary are arguing that because after Vietnam’s take-over of Cambodia and the dismantling of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 the King of Cambodia awarded Ieng Sary a pardon for bringing his supporters across to the new Government.
“When you look at Ieng Sary today, in spite of the past history, the royal decree … was not given lightly. They (the government and former king) recognize him as an agent of peace, as someone who would be able to stop the war, and that’s why it was granted,” said Michael Karnavas, an American defense lawyer.
Say again, ahem, an “agent for peace“. Has there been some kind of mistake? The 1979 Nobel Peace Prize went mistakenly to Mother Theresa over Ieng Sary. It must have been rigged!
The fact that he came across to the government means nothing. That just proves he is cold-hearted Machiavellian survivor who would desert his equally evil friends if it means possibly escaping an inevitable reprimand.
For what’s it worth I say throw the book at him. I visited the Tuol Sleng (S21) torture prison in Phnom Penh while I was there. The blood stains are still on the floor where they tortured you for wearing glasses like one of dem deesident tinkin’ people. If they didn’t kill you there you inevitably took the short trip out of town to the Killing Fields where they just killed you upon arrival and threw you in whatever ditch wasn’t already full.
I was fascinated that in Cambodia the don’t call them “a regime”, they call them by the French word “a clique”:
A clique (IPA
‘klɪk/ in America, /’kliːk/ elsewhere) is an exclusive group of people who share interests, views, purposes, patterns of behavior, or ethnicity. A clique is a subset of individuals from a larger group, who are more closely identified with one another than the remaining members of the group, and who exchange something among themselves, such as friendship, affection, or information.[1]
A clique has an informal structure, and it is composed of more than two people. All the members of the group have some type of relationship with one another, and thus the group is tightly knit together as a type of social network.
The “Khmer Rouge clique” is a very good summation of who these guys where. Prior to their ascendancy in 1975 they were a small rebel group of Communists. I heard one estimate of the original party membership of the KR as being less than 4000 people.
The leadership of the Khmer Rouge remained largely unchanged from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. The leaders were mostly from middle-class families and had been educated at French universities.
This was no Communist Utopia where the people rise up and overthrow their rulers. The tightly controlled “cliche” effectively recruited soldiers, workers, and bureaucrats at the brutal end of gun. To not participate meant death .
An Orwellian recipe for killing a third of nation’s population in four short years if ever I heard one.
And that brings me back to Ieng Sary. After “Brother Number 1″ Pol Pot, Ieng Sary was “Brother Number 3″ – Foreign Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and brother-in-law to Pol Pot himself. Was he part of the KR “clique”? Of course he was. The whole corrupted system was run completely from the top inner circle.
So throw the book at him. He has the blood of millions of people on his hands.
