Dealing with the past

Nuon Chea, who is widely regarded as the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologue, has so far proven to be the most talkative of the three defendants at the United Nations-backed tribunal in Phnom Penh.

Fellow defendant Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister, addressed the court only to say that he will not answer any questions. The third accused, Khieu Samphan, who was head of state, has held the line that he had no political power.

In the last week of testimony in 2011, Khieu Samphan again stressed that stance.

"I was appointed as the deputy prime minister of nothing, as the minister of defense of nothing, as the commander of forces of nothing," the 80-year-old defendant told judges. "I did not participate in any decision-making process."

In a two-hour address, Khieu Samphan also said he had had no involvement with devising policies such as the decision to abolish money and private property, or the forcible eviction of every urban resident to rural collectives.

The prosecution maintains the forced eviction of Phnom Penh in April 1975, after the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, cost thousands of lives. That event and a subsequent mass movement of people across the country later that year constitute the key charges in this first mini-trial. (The court has divided the trial into a series of smaller cases as the case against the three accused is very complex.)

Brother Number Two

Despite his age (85), Nuon Chea gave hours of testimony to the tribunal. He repeatedly blamed Vietnam for the deaths of up to 2.2 million Cambodians, and he made headlines again when he denied the Khmer Rouge's well-documented efforts to crush the Buddhist religion.

During Pol Pot's rule, the Khmer Rouge forcibly defrocked all monks (and executed those who resisted), destroyed texts and sacred objects, and turned pagodas into prisons and execution centers.

Nuon Chea, however, claimed the Khmer Rouge never had a policy to eradicate Buddhism, and said those who accused it of doing so "don't understand the real meaning of religion."

In testimony, which was of great relevance to the first mini-trial, Nuon Chea blamed zone committees for the decision to forcibly evacuate the urban population across the nation.

But he did concede that a secret defense unit had been empowered to "smash" enemies of the revolution. He said the unit had targeted spies and Cambodians who had been deemed unable to be re-educated.

Response

Youk Chhang, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge period, heads the Phnom Penh-based genocide research organization called the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam).

Youk Chhang says the last two weeks of testimony indicated that Nuon Chea genuinely believes his own testimony. (Whereas the same could not be said for Khieu Samphan.)

Youk Chhang says proceedings have also shown that Nuon Chea simply won't consider the terrible consequences from the Khmer Rouge's rule of the country, of which he, as deputy, was at the heart.

"And now we understand that Nuon Chea hasn't changed at all – after all these years he hasn't changed a bit. He's still the same old comrade of 40 years ago, (and it's) the same with Khieu Samphan, the same with Ieng Sary," says Youk Chhang.

Changing the message

Nuon Chea told the court recently that he did not want future generations to think that the Khmer Rouge "are bad people, are criminals."

Youk Chhang has noticed that the message put out by the defendants changes depending on the audience in the 500-seater auditorium. Hundreds of students attended the trial, and at those times, he says, Nuon Chea in particular spoke of an untainted ideology that did not tolerate corruption.

"When there are a lot of young people in the audience, all we hear from Nuon Chea and the others are good things about the Khmer Rouge," says Youk Chhang. "The ideology is very good, very pure, but Nuon Chea says nothing about the consequences."

That message, as seductive as it sounds to onlookers, simply does not cut it for those who experienced the Khmer Rouge regime.

Youk Chhang says that for him the last fortnight of testimony highlighted the court's fundamental importance: To try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge and expose the consequences of their ideology to the younger generation who have no first-hand knowledge of what went on during the Khmer Rouge rule and what followed.

"Because if you allow such an ideology to stay alive, genocide can be repeated; we fail to understand so we fail to stop it," he says. "And that's why this court is so important, because (the defendants) haven't changed their attitude, the way they think, and the way they view their own population."

Author: Robert Carmichael
Editor: Sarah Berning