Day: August 16, 2021

The last living leader from the inner circle of Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime launched his courtroom appeal Monday, seeking to convince a long-running international tribunal to overturn his conviction on charges of genocide.

Khieu Samphan, 90, was the former head of state for the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist regime that ruled Cambodia with an iron fist from 1975-1979 and was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people.

His defense team is seeking to overturn a 2018 verdict finding him guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, questioning the evidence and arguing there were procedural mistakes.

Kong Sam Onn told the judges of the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC, that his client had been given inadequate time to prepare an initial defense, and that the original panel failed to provide the grounds for its ruling in a timely fashion, among other things.

“It should be null and void, and so I am requesting the Supreme Court chamber to … reverse the judgment,” he said.

Khieu Samphan sat in a chair behind his attorneys, appearing to listen intently as they addressed the court. Kong Sam Onn said his client would address the chamber at the end of the four days of hearings.

Observers say it’s unlikely for the conviction to be overturned, and even if it is, he is already serving a life sentence for a 2014 conviction of crimes against humanity connected with forced transfers and disappearances of masses of people. That conviction was upheld on appeal in 2016.

“The appeal hearing is quite important for both sides, the Cambodian victims and the accused,” said tribunal spokesman, Neth Pheaktra.

The verdict won’t come until next year.

Under the leadership of the late Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge sought to eliminate all traces of what they saw as corrupt bourgeois life, destroying most religious, financial and social institutions, and forcing millions out of cities to live in the countryside.

Dissent was usually met with death in the Khmer Rouge’s notorious “killing fields” or elsewhere, while starvation, overwork and medical neglect took many more lives.

Only when an invasion by Vietnam finally drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979 did the magnitude of the killings become truly known.

Khieu Samphan’s 2018 conviction was largely connected to crimes committed against Vietnamese and Cham minorities in Cambodia.

He was found not guilty of genocide against the Cham, a Muslim ethnic minority whose members had put up a small but futile resistance against the Khmer Rouge, for lack of evidence. But he was found guilty of genocide of the Vietnamese under the principle of joint criminal enterprise, under which individuals can be held responsible for the actions of a group to which they belong.

His crimes against humanity conviction covered activities at work camps and cooperatives established by the Khmer Rouge. They included murder, extermination, deportation, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, persecution on political, religious and racial grounds, attacks on human dignity, forced marriages and rape.

He was “found to have encouraged, incited, and legitimized criminal policies and to have made a significant contribution to crimes committed” by the Khmer Rouge.

The breaches of the Geneva Convention governing war crimes included willful killing, torture and inhumane treatment.

During his trial, Khieu Samphan claimed the allegations against him were “Vietnamese propaganda” and said that while he had been aware of accusations of suffering under the Khmer Rouge, “the term murderer I categorically reject.”

After being ousted from power in 1979, the Khmer Rouge waged guerrilla warfare for another two decades before disintegrating. Pol Pot died in the jungle in 1998, and on Christmas Eve that year, Khieu Samphan surrendered along with Nuon Chea, the movement’s chief ideologue and its second-highest official.

Nuon Chea was convicted alongside Khieu Samphan in 2018 and died the following year.

The ECCC tribunal was established at Cambodia’s behest to bring to justice the leaders of the Khmer Rouge during its time in power.

Since the first judges and prosecutors took up their duties in 2006, however, the court has only successfully convicted three people in prosecutions that have cost some $300 million.

In addition to Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, the only other leader convicted was Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who as head of the Khmer Rouge prison system ran the infamous Tuol Sleng torture center in Phnom Penh. He died in 2020 while serving a life prison term for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

After the conviction of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea in 2018, the government of autocratic Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a midlevel Khmer Rouge commander before defecting while the group was still in power, declared no more cases would go forward, saying they would cause instability.

Human rights attorney Theary Seng, who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide herself but lost her parents, criticized the trials as “political theatre” where Hun Sen and others have been “allowed, backed with U.N. insignia, to try themselves.”

Still, she said she planned to attend the opening of the appeal to see the case against Khieu Samphan to its conclusion.

“I have forgiven Khieu Samphan, as I have no intention for revenge, but that is not the same as holding him responsible,” she told The Associated Press in an email.

“I hold Khieu Samphan directly responsible for the murders of my mom and dad, and for taking my childhood away from me in forcing me into a living hell.”

 

Source: Voice of America

Thailand’s boisterous youth movement is linking up with the kingdom’s most enduring pro-democracy force — the “Red Shirt” protest veterans — posing the most serious threat yet from the street to Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s grip on power.

But experts say as long as the former army chief retains the support of Thailand’s core interest groups, the monarchy, the military and big business, he is unlikely to fall, no matter how many push for his removal from office.

Almost daily protests, spurred by the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and an unprecedented economic crunch, are swelling. By dusk parts of Bangkok are covered in choking swirls of tear gas while fires rage, set by a hard core of young protesters clashing with police.

The violence, experts warn, could lead to the army coming out and a deepening of the political crisis engulfing the turbulent nation.

Tens of thousands of people joined loud, colorful convoys of “car mobs” across the country Sunday, calling on Prayuth to resign. The convoys rode through Bangkok and the “Red Shirt” rural heartlands of north and northeastern Thailand.

At the helm in the capital was Nattawut Saikuar, a former Red Shirt hero, who pulled out his old followers as leader of the new “Oust Prayuth Network” alongside thousands of young “Gen Z” protesters.

“This is a synergy between two generations fighting a common enemy,” Nattawut told VOA.

The Red Shirt movement began in 2008 in outrage at an appointed government which followed a coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

A few years later, their protests were put down with a bloody army crackdown led by Prayuth.

In 2014 as army chief, Prayuth led another coup against another elected government, this time led by Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s younger sister. The Reds were forced into retreat.

“These young people have taken up the baton,” Nattawut added.

New political wisdom

Thailand’s Gen Z, angry, articulate and armed with social media, have challenged Thailand’s power pyramid like never before, calling for Prayuth to resign and a new constitution to unplug the army from politics for good and, crucially, reform of the all-powerful monarchy.

“Frankly, before Prayuth’s coup I was just a normal school kid,” a 25-year-old protester who gave her name as Pop said, as she daubed “Prayuth Get Out” on a road in spray paint.

“But as time goes by you realize politics affects us all. That’s when I took to the street and joined the movement demanding this government fall.”

Experts say Thailand’s arch-royalist establishment sees Prayuth as an integral part of the hierarchy that has been carefully constructed to keep populist civilian leaders like the Shinawatras out, while leaving the monarchy above reproach and tycoons to dominate the economy.

“Prayuth is now not only protecting his position, but also protecting the advantages of an establishment that has benefited from the past few years,” political scientist Kanokrat Lertchoosakul told VOA News.

And that means, no matter how bad things get on the street — with a coronavirus pandemic claiming scores of lives each day, low vaccination rates and the economic growth forecast to be rubbed out for the year — Prayuth is unlikely to budge.

“The elite need to keep him in power,” prominent historian Nidhi Eoseewong said during Sunday’s car mob.

“Prayuth knows all too well that it’s not up to him to step down or not, it’s up to the powers behind him who will decide.”

Undeterred, the young protesters have gone after him for more than a year.

They are also filling up rooms on the Clubhouse app, for chats hosted by the 72-year-old Thaksin from his self-exile abroad, even though most are too young to remember the enigmatic billionaire.

His youth appeal has raised prospects of a remarkable comeback of sorts, especially as the economy sinks further and the government runs out of cash and ideas.

But unlike the loyalties of the past, “Gen Z” has a “new political wisdom,” warns Kanokrat, explaining they will not back leaders who play old power games at the expense of their demands.

“If we don’t listen and turn them into a very high potential human resource for the future, we are turning them into the state enemy,” Kanokrat said.

 

Source: Voice of America

JAKARTA— Indonesia’s most active volcano Mount Merapi erupted Monday, belching a cloud of ash into the air as red lava flowed down its crater.

 

The early morning explosions spewed clouds as far as 3.5 kilometres from the rumbling volcano, blanketing local communities in grey ash.

 

There were no evacuation orders or reports of casualties.

 

Merapi, close to Indonesia’s cultural capital Yogyakarta on Java island, has been particularly active in recent months and authorities raised its danger level late last year.

 

Residents were told to avoid the area within a five-kilometre radius of the rumbling volcano, Indonesia’s geological agency said.

 

“Residents should avoid volcanic ash and they’ve been warned about potential lava flows in the area surrounding Merapi,” it added.

 

Mount Merapi’s last major eruption in 2010 killed more than 300 people and forced the evacuation of around 280,000 residents from surrounding areas.

 

That was its most powerful eruption since 1930, when around 1,300 people were killed, while another explosion in 1994 took about 60 lives.

 

The Southeast Asian archipelago nation has nearly 130 active volcanoes.

 

Indonesia experiences frequent seismic and volcanic activity due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide.

 

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK