20 year rule: I know Comrade Duche (Kang Kek Lew) does only today and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 but the actions of the Khmer Rouge were concentrated from 1975-79 and on in to the 80s/90s so hopefully this is allowed!
So - following the announcement that Comrade Duche died today while serving a life sentence, I did a little research in to him and the Khmer Rouge generally. According to the Guardian, Comrade Duche was the first Khmer Rouge official to be held accountable by a court, and that was in 2010, nearly 30 years after he committed many of his atrocities.
Comrade Duche claimed to be responsible directly for the loss of at least 12,380 lives as head of Tuol Seng prison, where only 12 prisoners ever survived.
From my understanding he is one of only three Khmer Rouge figures to be sentenced for crimes against humanity, and an additional two were sentenced for Genocide.
Why were so few of the Khmer Rouge leadership ever indicted, I know that some will have died, but it appears to me that some have also had cases thrown out and some continue to live in relative peace despite standing arrest warrants. Is this due to ongoing support within Cambodia, a typical outcome of crimes against humanity proceedings, a reluctance to punish those responsible or is it something else related to the historical role the Khmer Rouge played?
Apologies for the poor formatting and phrasing, I’m writing the question at work on my mobile!
TL;DR: Why did so few of the Khmer Rouge ever face trial for crimes against humanity, despite killing a quarter of the population?
Edit: I forgot to mention, Khmer Rouge numbers are estimated to have been around 40,000 - 60,000 which is why I was so shocked only 5 have been imprisoned!
The question of ‘justice’ in relation to periods of widespread, sustained, government sponsored mass killings is complex. Particularly in the case of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia. Duch’s death (pronounced like ‘doik’) highlights many issues and raises questions, like those you have asked. Why have so few Khmer Rouge convicted? Why has it taken so long?
You could also see this answer for more information.
The ECCC (Khmer Rouge tribunal) is a fairly unique ‘take’ on a trial for these kinds of crimes. A ‘hybrid’ court, consisting of international judges as well as Cambodian ones, attempting to bring ‘closure’ to the events that occurred in the nation called Democratic Kampuchea (DK), run by the all-powerful Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), that occurred more than forty years ago. The trial has been hampered by a variety of factors, ranging from the hostility of the Cambodian government to a lack of proper administration, funding and the length of time between the crimes themselves and the attempt to prosecute people for them.
So why has it taken so long? Well, one reason should be made clear at the outset, and this is that despite the fall of DK, the Khmer Rouge were still ‘active’, still ‘fighting’, well into the 1990s. There are reasons for that, mostly revolving around Cold War realpolitik, but the point is that it was not a simple task to just go and arrest people like Pol Pot. However since his death in 1998, and the general disintegration of the Khmer Rouge (including defections to the Cambodian government), the opportunity to prosecute in some manner - as well as the national and international political ‘will’ to do so – only really matured in the early 2000’s.
Tracing that development goes some way in answering the questions of the ‘scope’ of the eventual tribunal, as well as why it didn’t occur earlier.
In 1979, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (the Vietnamese sponsored state of Cambodia following the fall of DK), in an attempt to distance themselves from the Khmer Rouge and deny their socialist credentials, sentenced the ‘Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique’ to death in absentia. But the Khmer Rouge remained encamped on the country’s north-western border with Thailand, hassling the government and maintaining what was essentially a civil war for the better part of two decades. So, again, hard to prosecute people while a war was still ongoing.
This was a period of time where the Cambodian people were left to reconcile what had happened to them during the miserable horror of DK. Some former Khmer Rouge who had defected to Vietnam became part of the Cambodian government, while others just returned to the community, victims and perpetrators living side by side.
The current Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was himself part of the CPK and one of those who defected to Vietnam in the late 1970s. While some measure of credibility should be meted out to his government for allowing the tribunal to go ahead at all, he does have a vested interest in keeping the scope of the trials to a minimum. There is apparently no clear evidence that he himself would have been implicated in the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, but there is a reason the tribunal was designed to only prosecute the surviving ‘top officials’, and those ‘most responsible’, and Duch as the commandant of S-21 represented an easy place to start. Even though he tried to make the case that he was not a senior leader and was not therefore within the jurisdiction of the tribunal.
The Hun Sen government could argue that keeping the scope of the trial to ‘senior members’ of the movement would be in the interest of national unity and reconciliation, and that can be understood. But the recent dismissal of the cases against that ‘lower rung’ of officials probably indicates that there was little interest to dig too deep into the movement as a whole, for fear of what may turn up.
Duch’s death, the fourth to occur out of the five who had been brought to trial in some manner, does highlight some of the issues with the tribunal. However, the way it has demonstrated the criminality of the CPK to the Cambodian people, as well as the wealth of documentation that it has produced, it has been a useful process.
I realise this is a little old now but if you are interested I recently interviewed Dr Craig Etcheson, a leading researcher of the Khmer Rouge and a former investigator for the prosecution at the ECCC. We go into a few things in the conversation that tie in with the kinds of questions you had so if you would like to check it out it can be found on all podcast platforms or you can look at specific links here https://audioboom.com/posts/7686752-bonus-episode-extraordinary-justice-at-the-khmer-rouge-tribunals-with-dr-craig-etcheson