The United Nations-backed war crimes court in Cambodia this week wrapped up its work for 2011 in its case against three surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, who have all denied charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Meanwhile, the tribunal’s new co-investigating judge is still waiting for the Cambodian government to confirm his appointment after his controversial predecessor quit in October.

By Robert Carmichael, Phnom Penh

If there is a consistent theme emerging after a fortnight of evidence, it is that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge claim they were unaware or not responsible for what was happening in Cambodia during their government’s 1975-79 rule.

Nuon Chea, the 85-year-old deputy leader of the Khmer Rouge movement, has regularly blamed Vietnam for the ills of the regime, and this week claimed the Khmer Rouge had no policy against Buddhism (one of the charges to be heard involves the Khmer Rouge’s alleged efforts to destroy the Buddhist faith).

This week Nuon Chea also said that it was not leaders like him who decided to force all urban residents into the countryside after victory in April 1975. Instead, he claimed, that was up to the committees that headed Cambodia’s “zones”, or provinces.

This complex trial, which is known as Case 002, has been divided into a series of smaller trials. The forced movement of people constitutes the centrepiece of this first mini-trial, and the prosecution contends that the defendants were indeed to blame for that decision in which tens of thousands died.

On the stand

To date Nuon Chea has proved the most talkative of the defendants. This week he admitted that enemies of the revolution could be “covertly smashed” by Khmer Rouge security, but said those who were condemned were spies and people who could not be “re-educated”.

The tribunal estimates that as many as 2.2 million people, or one out of every four Cambodians, died under the Khmer Rouge’s rule. Around 800,000 of those deaths were violent; the rest are attributed to starvation, disease and overwork.

Youk Chhang heads the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), a genocide research organization in Phnom Penh. He was a teenager when the Khmer Rouge took power and lost several members of his family over the following three years and eight months of Pol Pot’s rule.

Youk Chhang says the last fortnight’s hearings indicate that Nuon Chea believes his own testimony and has shown that Brother Number Two – as the chief ideologue of the Khmer Rouge is known – has utterly failed to see the consequences of the regime in which he was such a key player.

“That’s why this court is so important, because they haven’t changed their attitude, the way they think, and the way they view their own population,” he says.

Deputy Prime Minister of Nothing

The two other defendants also spoke this week: Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister, addressed the bench briefly to say he would not answer questions for the duration of his trial.

Former head of state Khieu Samphan reiterated his long-held stance that he lacked effective power.

“I was appointed as the deputy prime minister of nothing, as the minister of defence of nothing, as the commander of forces of nothing,” the 80-year-old Khieu Samphan told judges. “I did not participate in any decision-making process.”

Khieu Samphan also denied responsibility for some of the Khmer Rouge’s most egregious policies, saying his doctoral thesis on political economy from the Sorbonne showed he had not advocated the abolition of money and private property or the movement of urban residents to rural collectives.

The tribunal will resume hearing evidence in January. The first mini-trial is expected to take two years.

Investigating judge in limbo

Away from the Trial Chamber, controversy continued this week at the Office of the Co-Investigating Judges, the tainted court body whose function is to examine allegations of criminality against suspects.

Earlier this year the foreign co-investigating judge Siegfried Blunk quit following repeated accusations of judicial misconduct. Blunk, a German, was accused of doing the government’s bidding by working with his Cambodian counterpart, You Bunleng, to scupper Case 003, in which two senior military officers are accused of tens of thousands of deaths and of undermining the final case, known as Case 004.

(Blunk claims to have quit over political interference. Phnom Penh has said repeatedly it will not permit Case 003 or Case 004 to go ahead.)

Earlier this month, Blunk’s replacement – Swiss reserve judge Laurent Kasper-Ansermet – arrived in Phnom Penh to take up his post. However, Kasper-Ansermet has been unable to do any investigative work because the government’s judicial appointments body has yet to convene to approve him.

On Friday the Cambodia Daily newspaper quoted a senior official at the Ministry of Justice as saying that no such meeting was planned, and that the UN had not requested one (something the UN says it did last month).

Ieng Thirith’s continued custody

Also this week the court’s Supreme Chamber reversed the Trial Chamber’s November order to release Ieng Thirith, the former social affairs minister and the fourth defendant named in Case 002.

Prosecutors had appealed her release, saying Ieng Thirith – who has dementia – ought to remain in custody and be re-assessed in six months time to determine whether ongoing medical treatment has rendered her fit for trial.

In a six-to-one decision, judges at the tribunal’s highest body agreed broadly with the prosecution and ordered the 79-year-old’s continued detention. Ieng Thirith’s mental state will be reviewed again in six months, by which time the first mini-trial in the Khmer Rouge genocide hearings will be well underway.