Historical figure
Khieu Samphan
Khmer Rouge leader and head of state of Democratic Kampuchea, convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide and serving a life sentence.
Khieu Samphan (born 1931) is a former Khmer Rouge (ខ្មែរក្រហម) leader who was head of state of Democratic Kampuchea as President of its State Presidium.[1][2] The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted him of crimes against humanity in 2014 and of genocide in 2018, and he is serving a life sentence.[1][3]
Early life and politics
He was born in 1931 in Chek/Rumchek commune, Rumduol district, Svay Rieng province.[1] In 1951 he finished Preah Sihanouk School, where Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot, was also a pupil. He then worked as a teacher and started law studies in Phnom Penh.[1]
A government scholarship took him to France in 1953 to go on with law. There he joined the Marxist Circle with Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, Hou Youn and Son Sen, and in 1955 he became a member of the French Communist Party.[1] He was among the founders of the Cambodian communist movement, which grew out of student meetings in Paris in the 1950s.[4] From 1956 to 1959 he worked on a doctorate in economics in Paris and chaired the Union of Khmer Students (Union des Étudiants Khmers).[1] His 1959 doctoral thesis on Cambodia's economy argued strongly for self-reliance.[4]
Back in Cambodia in 1959, he started L'Observateur, a newspaper in French.[1] In 1960 he was arrested and held, and the government shut the paper along with other leftist titles.[1]
In 1962 he won a National Assembly seat for Saang district in Kandal province as a member of Sangkum Reastr Niyum, and he was made Secretary of State for Commerce.[1] In March 1963 Norodom Sihanouk (នរោត្តម សីហនុ) put him on a list of 34 "leftists"; he lost his ministry but kept his seat, and he won a second term in 1966.[1] In April 1967 Sihanouk accused him of stirring up a peasant revolt in Samlaut, and he left Phnom Penh to shelter under the protection of Ta Mok.[1]
Khmer Rouge leadership
He was formally admitted to the party in 1969.[1] Between May and August 1970 he became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defence of GRUNK and Deputy Chairman of FUNK.[1] The party's Third Congress made him a candidate member of its Central Committee in 1971, and its Fourth Congress gave him full membership in 1976.[1]
From around October 1975 he worked at Office 870.[1] In 1976 he represented Democratic Kampuchea at a summit of the Non-Aligned Countries in Sri Lanka.[1] On March 30, 1976, the Central Committee appointed him President of the State Presidium, and the People's Representative Assembly confirmed him in the post on April 11 to 13.[1]
In January 1979, as Vietnamese forces advanced on Phnom Penh, he fled the city and met Nuon Chea, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in Pursat.[1] In 1985 he formally succeeded Pol Pot as leader of the movement, and he held that role until he surrendered to the government in 1998.[4] He gave himself up with Nuon Chea in December 1998.[1] At the time he called on Cambodians to "let bygones be bygones".[4]
Trials
On November 19, 2007, he was arrested and detained on the order of the court's Co-Investigating Judges.[1] The French lawyer Jacques Vergès took on his defense.[5] The Co-Investigating Judges indicted him on September 15, 2010.[1]
Case 002/01
The first trial of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea opened in November 2011 and dealt with the evacuation of Cambodia's cities and towns in 1975.[6] On August 7, 2014, a Trial Chamber of three Cambodian and two international judges convicted both men of crimes against humanity and sentenced them to life imprisonment.[6][1] The judges found that he had lacked the authority to order the crimes directly, but that he took part in planning them and belonged to a joint criminal enterprise with the regime's top leaders.[6][1] Among those crimes was the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, in which tens of thousands of civilians died.[6] The Trial Chamber also found that he knew at least some officials of the Khmer Republic were being executed at Toul Po Chrey.[1]
On November 23, 2016, the Supreme Court Chamber upheld the life sentence on appeal. It overturned the convictions for extermination tied to the evacuation of Phnom Penh.[2][1]
Case 002/02
On November 16, 2018, the Trial Chamber convicted him in Case 002/02 of genocide, of crimes against humanity and of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. It sentenced him again to life imprisonment, a term merged with the first.[1][7] The genocide conviction was for the killing of members of the Vietnamese group.[1][8] On the count of genocide against the Cham, the court acquitted him because the evidence was insufficient.[7]
The Trial Chamber found that through Office 870 he had an important role in the regime's economy.[1] He helped draw up the 1977 economic plan for farm output, the allocation of labor and the sorting of the population into categories.[1] It found that he contributed to setting up and running cooperatives and worksites where shortages of food and medical care caused more than 20,000 deaths.[1] The Supreme Court Chamber found him responsible for sexual violence against men and women under the party's regulation of marriage across the country.[1]
On September 22, 2022, the Supreme Court Chamber upheld the genocide conviction and the life sentence, along with convictions for crimes against humanity that included murder, torture and enslavement.[8][3] It reversed murder and persecution convictions for two specific locations.[8] The ruling ended more than 13 years of hearings at the court, and he was the last surviving leader of the regime.[3]
His own account
In the preface to Khieu Samphan's memoirs, published in 2004, Vergès wrote that his client had never taken a direct part in the crimes.[5] In interviews that year Khieu Samphan said he had been shocked to learn of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, and told the interviewers: "today I am very clear that there was genocide".[4]
Days before his arrest in 2007 he published Reflection on Cambodian History from Ancient Times to the Era of Democratic Kampuchea, which defends the regime and calls Pol Pot a patriot.[5] In it he accepted that people had died but denied that the regime had any policy of starving people or of mass killing.[5]
At his trials he said he had known nothing of crimes committed by other Khmer Rouge leaders, and he and Nuon Chea suggested that they were the targets of political persecution.[3][7] On appeal in 2022 he argued that the Khmer Rouge had only been a political movement working to improve Cambodians' lives; the Supreme Court Chamber rejected that argument and his arguments on genocide.[8]
References 8
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29 1.30 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Khieu Samphan (undated)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 UN News, Cambodia: UN-backed court upholds life sentences for former Khmer Rouge leaders (November 23, 2016)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 UN News, Cambodia: UN-backed tribunal ends with conviction upheld for last living Khmer Rouge leader (September 22, 2022)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Al Jazeera, Key leaders of the Khmer Rouge (November 20, 2007)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Al Jazeera, Ex-Khmer Rouge president charged (November 20, 2007)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 International Justice Monitor, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan Found Guilty of Crimes against Humanity (August 7, 2014)
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Voice of America, Last Khmer Rouge Leaders Found Guilty of Genocide (November 16, 2018)
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 JusticeInfo.net, Cambodia Khmer Rouge court upholds conviction in final ruling (September 22, 2022)
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