"I consider this court a battlefield fight between patriots and invaders. I will not allow anyone defeat me," the former communist revolutionary Nuon Chea says

Putting the Khmer Rouge on Trial
Thursday, Jul. 26, 2007 By KEVIN DOYLE/PHNOM PENH

At 82, Nuon Chea's eyesight is failing and most days he sports large,
dark sunglasses. What remains of his white hair is slicked back in
strands and though his breath labors painfully at times, he can still
sit upright and at full attention for hours when discussing his role
in Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime. A former chief lieutenant to
leader Pol Pot, Nuon Chea is the highest-ranking Khmer Rouge member
still alive - and the key figure in a coming courtroom showdown that
international and Cambodian prosecutors hope will hold the remnants of
the regime accountable for the estimated 2 million deaths that
occurred during their bloody reign in the late 1970s.

It's a trial that has long been coming. After Cambodia appealed for
international assistance in setting up a genocide tribunal in 1997, it
took another nine years of governmental foot-dragging and tortuous
negotiations with the United Nations over the shape and structure of
the court before prosecutors and judges were sworn in last July. Since
then, the proceedings have encountered months of legal wrangling and
administrative delays, leading to concerns that the few surviving
Khmer Rouge leaders could die of old age before being brought to
justice.

This month, however, seems to mark a point of no return. On July 18,
prosecutors submitted the names of five possible suspects to the
court's investigating judges. That list has not been released to the
public, though it's widely assumed to consist of elderly regime
leaders like Nuon Chea, who have lived in quiet retirement since
abandoning their movement in the late 1990s after reaching a peace
deal with the government.

For his part, Nuon Chea is sure his name is at the top of the list.
With the death of Pol Pot in 1998, he admits that he is now
"responsible for everything that happened."

"I consider this court a battlefield fight between patriots and
invaders. I will not allow anyone defeat me," the former communist
revolutionary says, speaking from his small wooden house in Pailin on
the Thai border in northwest Cambodia. If called before the court, he
plans to explain that the killings were "not a policy" of the regime,
a line all former Khmer Rouge leaders have stuck to. Nuon Chea rejects
the idea that the fanatical legions of young Maoist rebels he led
during the 1970s executed thousands and dumped them in mass graves, or
that hundreds of thousands more were worked to death, succumbing to
starvation and disease in the countryside after being forced to labor
day and night to build the Khmer Rouge's vision of an ideologically
pure agrarian society. Publicly he will only say that "mistakes" were
made under the Khmer Rouge, and still speaks proudly of his former
boss, Pol Pot. He has hinted that the skulls and bones in Cambodia's
thousands of mass graves could merely be those of Cambodians killed by
U.S. bombing during the civil war of the 1970s or the Vietnamese
incursion of 1979.

Nuon Chea is the most outspoken of the former Khmer Rouge leaders;
other likely targets of the tribunal have taken a lower-key approach.
Khieu Samphan, 76, the former Khmer Rouge head of state, lives near
Nuon Chea in Pailin but has had little to say on the speculation that
he is one of the five defendants. Ieng Sary, 78, the regime's former
foreign minister, and his wife Ieng Thirith, 75, the former minister
of social affairs, have also avoided the media. A young man who
answered the door at their large house in a quiet neighborhood in
central Phnom Penh said the couple had recently gone to Bangkok, where
they frequently travel for medical treatment. Kang Kek Iev, 63, known
as Duch when he headed the S-21 torture center in Phnom Penh where
thousands were imprisoned and executed, is the sole regime member in
prison. Now a born-again Christian, Duch has been held in pre-trial
detention since 1999 after being discovered working for a local
humanitarian organization.

With the names of the five suspects now in the hands of the
investigating judges, the evidence will be analyzed - prosecutors have
submitted 14,000 pages of documentation, including interviews with 350
witnesses - and a decision taken on whom to charge. That could happen
as early as January 2008, with the first trials soon after, officials
at the tribunal said. All that's needed now is just a little more
patience, according to Youk Chhang, Cambodia's foremost researcher on
the Khmer Rouge and head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
"This is a lesson we can learn from. Not just for Cambodia, but
globally, as genocide seems to happen everywhere now," he says. "It's
time for us to solve this and move on."

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