KHMER ROUGE: WHERE JUSTICE MEETS HORROR

Fifty years ago, on 17 April 1975, the triumphant Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh. What followed was four years of ruthless dictatorship and a deadly ideology determined to reshape Cambodian society by eradicating all that opposed it.

Almost thirty years after the collapse of Pol Pot’s regime, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was established to investigate these events and to bring the principal surviving Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. Jean-Marc Lavergne, who served as a trial judge at the ECCC from 2008 to 2018, reflects for Asie Reportages on this delicate yet essential work.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED AND WRITTEN BY A. BESSON

How is it possible that an entire nation was swept up so quickly and utterly by a deadly ideology, held in the hands of only a few?

Cambodia ranks among the very few nations to have undergone such abrupt and violent upheaval. The Khmer Rouge’s first and most staggering act of brutality was to evacuate every city and keep the country hidden from foreign scrutiny for nearly the entire duration of three years, eight months, and twenty days.

The Khmer Rouge believed they would achieve the impossible: a revolution more radical than any before, including Mao’s. They recognised no limits. Their plan depended on erasing the past entirely — the root cause of the violence and suffering that followed. For them, destruction was both means and end.

Failure meant only one thing: destruction had to intensify. This sparked a deep paranoia among the leaders, who hunted “internal enemies” wherever they could. The weaker the revolution became, the more enemies appeared — and with them, rising violence and suspicion. Cambodia suffered terribly under the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979 — but the aftermath was no less bleak. For years, most Cambodians were consumed by the basic need to survive. The Vietnamese administration that followed was harsh in its own way, marked by further abuse and violence.

The fall of the communist blocs and the Paris Agreements shifted the balance, prompting the Vietnamese withdrawal and, in time, the emergence of the tribunals and a process of reckoning — though not without difficulty or political negotiation.

Haunting images from S-21 prison, once under the command of Nuon Chea.

The entrance to S-21 prison (Toul Sleng).

Here is where the Khmer Rouge tortured the regime’s enemies.

Hundreds of prisoners were detained at Toul Sleng.

According to the ECCC, some 18,000 people were held prisoner — of whom only eight men and four children survived.

AN UNPRECEDENTED TRIAL

Were there many volunteers willing to testify?

Sadly, many people had died before they could speak. Even so, a good number of accounts were recorded – often in difficult circumstances, as some villages were still home to former Khmer Rouge officials. For many Cambodians, though, justice is not expected in this life, but in the next.

Does that tend to diminish the role justice plays?

For many, it was not a priority. Yet the first trial altered mindsets and captured widespread attention. It was the trial of Kang Kek Leu, known as Duch, the head of Tuol Sleng (S-21), the notorious Khmer Rouge prison. Unlike most, Duch admitted much of the guilt and spoke openly. He exposed the brutal reality of Pol Pot’s ideological regime — a system that erased all sense of individual worth.

The children were prime targets, blank slates for ruthless indoctrination.

One of the most striking and frightening aspects was how children were targeted to rebuild a new society—treated as blank slates to be shaped and indoctrinated.

It led to truly harrowing events. In a system that stripped people of their humanity, justice plays a vital role: it recognises crimes for what they are. At the most recent ECCC trial, the Court addressed the issue of forced marriage and found Nuon Chea, Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and Khieu Samphân, President of the State Presidium, guilty of crimes against humanity. This ruling formally recognised forced marriage as a form of cruel and inhuman treatment. Determined to outnumber their Vietnamese enemy, the regime set out to increase the population by orchestrating forced marriages and exerting control over couples to ensure they had children. For years, this reality remained a taboo in Khmer society, leaving deep and enduring scars. Along with the trauma of children encouraged to turn against their own relatives, these wounds continue to affect Khmer society today.

During this trial, the Khmer Rouge’s actions were officially labelled genocidal—but in a very specific sense. Genocide was recognised only in relation to violence against the Cham minority and the Vietnamese population. As for the Khmer people, the Court ruled that the atrocities did not constitute genocide, as they were rooted in political and ideological persecution rather than in ethnic or religious hatred. They were not killed for being Khmer.

A GENOCIDE

That does not mean, however, that the persecution was any less brutal, does it?

On the contrary, the persecution was every bit as brutal. Educated people, for example, were persecuted and systematically killed because they no longer fit into the new society the Khmer Rouge wanted to build. They were viewed as a threat and eliminated in order to build a society stripped of individual identity.

Why does such persecution not fall within the legal definition of genocide?

While there is no such thing as political genocide, this does not make it any less serious. Genocide is widely regarded as the ultimate crime.

Nuon Chea, former leader of the Khmer Rouge movement

That is a deeply flawed view. Some crimes against humanity are far worse than genocide. Calling these acts crimes against humanity rather than genocide does not make them any less or more serious. In the case of the Cambodian people, the crimes committed were, in both scale and severity, profoundly shocking. They were more significant than the crimes committed against the Vietnamese. However, it is difficult to establish a clear benchmark. Many Cambodians were executed because they were suspected of being internal enemies—what Pol Pot described as “a Vietnamese head on a Cambodian body.”

… AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

How was the approach to justice and remembrance received between 2008 and 2018?

Cambodian society is predominantly young. As a result, many Cambodians did not live through the Khmer Rouge era and seldom speak of it. When I arrived in Cambodia, I discovered that the school history curriculum ended in 1970, the year Lon Nol staged his coup against Sihanouk. The years that followed, including the Khmer Rouge regime, remained a taboo subject. One of the first achievements of the ECCC was to open up conversations about these tragic events and their aftermath, even though much remains to be done in terms of education and remembrance. I was often struck by how little young people knew about the harsh conditions under which the country’s vast reservoirs were built, and how many lives were lost in the process. Parts of the first trial were broadcast on national television, helping to break the silence around these issues, although later trials attracted less attention. The judicial process itself was fairly complex, involving three working languages—Khmer, English, and French—and a rather distinctive form of jurisdiction.

BRINGING THE KHMERS ROUGE TO JUSTICE

What was the scope of the ECCC’s jurisdiction? Was it intended to prosecute all the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge?

No, the ECCC was a hybrid court, made up of both Cambodian and international components. It was not an ad hoc tribunal set up by the UN Security Council, which would have given it the status of a fully international tribunal. This was partly due to strong opposition at the time, particularly from China. Additionally, the Cambodian government wished to remain deeply involved in the judicial process. The main reasons were national pride and wanting to keep control of the justice process. Because of this, the tribunal faced criticism for holding only a few trials. A key challenge lay in the difficulty national and international judges had in reaching agreement, especially when deciding if more suspects should go to trial.

Did the international community intend to pursue more investigations and prosecutions?

From the outset, there was a strong resolve to prosecute all those in significant positions of responsibility within the Khmer Rouge, including division commanders and civilian officials responsible for many deaths. The aim was not to limit prosecutions to only the most obvious suspects. Unfortunately, this ambition clashed with Phnom Penh’s reluctance to prosecute Khmer Rouge members who had pledged allegiance to the new government after the regime’s fall in 1979. This omission continues to cast a shadow over the tribunal’s legacy. It is therefore a mixed legacy. However, the very positive aspects of the ECCC should not be overlooked, particularly its ongoing mission to gather and digitise a vast collection of testimonies and documents from that period, making them available to both researchers and the wider public.

The aim is to prevent any attempt to rewrite history — a temptation that remains strong, particularly among former Khmer Rouge supporters. This was notably the stance of the Khmer Rouge defence, who claimed that the atrocities against the Khmer people either did not happen or were the work of Vietnamese agents.

Educating young people and nurturing their critical thinking is our strongest defence against repeating the mistakes of history.

Top right : Jean-Marc Lavergne.

In February, denying the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge became a criminal offence—a clear sign that the government is actively working to stop history from repeating itself. But what more remains to be done?

Educating the younger generation and fostering their critical thinking is the most powerful safeguard against repeating the mistakes of the past. I firmly believe this critical element was sorely lacking in Cambodia during the rise of the Khmer Rouge. The regime deliberately sought to suppress independent thought, reflection, and judgement—qualities essential for resisting manipulation. This may well explain how it managed to carry its radical social revolution to such brutal extremes.

HISTORIA SPECIAL ISSUE: CAMBODIA —FROM THE GLORY OF ANGKOR TO THE KHMER ROUGE REIGN OF TERROR

Does dedicating a special issue to Cambodia mean focusing solely on Angkor and the Khmer Rouge? Of course not. However, when Historia embarks on a journey through the land of Apsaras and Angkor, it certainly deserves a closer examination.