Khmer Rouge Leader Suffers Stroke
Cambodia Tribunal Watches as Free Leader Hospitalized
Ageing Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan, facing potential indictment by an atrocity crimes tribunal, was whisked to a Phnom Penh hospital following a stroke this week.
A hybrid international tribunal in Cambodia has indicted four former Khmer Rouge leaders for atrocity crimes and genocide, but a free fifth leader, Khieu Samphan, was flown to a hospital Wednesday following an apparent stroke at his rural home the day before. He has not been indicted, but it is widely expected he will be next.
Family reported to international media Tuesday Khieu Samphan complained of feeling ill before collapsing unconscious for a short period at his home in the jungles of northwest Cambodia. On Wednesday, the Cambodian government sent a helicopter to the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin, to carry Khieu Samphan to a Phnom Penh hospital.
"Surrounded by officials and soldiers armed with automatic weapons, the Khmer Rouge's former head of state appeared frail as he walked on his own from a vehicle into a building that houses the hospital's CAT Scan machine," Agence France-Presse reported.
Prime Minister Hun Sen, once a Khmer Rouge cadre but later a sworn opponent of the regime, said following the airlift he did not want the government blamed for the aging man’s ill health.
Khieu Samphan's stroke is important for several reasons.
First, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the official name for the UN-supported Khmer Rouge tribunal, was sharply criticized for delays last year. Critics feared aging leaders of the regime, under which as many as 2 million people died of overwork, starvation or out-right execution, would die before seeing a day in court.
Second, his arrest would bring to completion a first round of indictments, creating a full-house hand for tribunal prosecutors and investigators and setting the stage for closure for some 14 million Cambodians, who have waited a long time to make sense of their brutal past.
The collapse of Khieu Samphan stirred fears that he will escape justice. It was a reminder, too, how old most of the former leaders had become. Most are now in their late 70s .
Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok died in custody last year. Four more aging cadre—former foreign minster Ieng Sary, his wife, Ieng Thirith, chief ideologue Nuon Chea, and Tuol Sleng torture center chief Kaing Khek Iev, alias Duch—are all being held in a tribunal jail awaiting trials on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Duch, under whose watch up to 16,000 people were tortured and executed, has been held by Cambodian authorities since 1999. Nuon Chea was arrested in September this year, following a lifetime of freedom living in the mountains near Khieu Samphan, among victims and supporters both, far from the capital.
Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith were just arrested Monday, a day before Khieu Samphan’s stroke.
Time Magazine reported their arrest: “Gendarmes and police special forces sealed off the area around the couple's large villa down a leafy side street in Phnom Penh, where they had lived as macabre local celebrities since striking surrender deals with the Cambodian government in 1996.”
None of them has seen trial, and Nuon Chea suffered high blood pressure under questioning by tribunal judges in September.
The Khmer Rouge regime rose as in insurgency in the early 1970s, finally overtaking the Phnom Penh government in April 1975. It promptly marched the populace into rural work camps in an effort to form an agrarian utopia, but mismanagement and eventual brutal purges led to one of the worst genocides of the 20th Century. Some historians have called this an auto-genocide. The Khmer Rouge held power until the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia, in 1979.
