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Wednesday, Dec. 30, 1998

2 Khmer Rouge leaders apologize for slayings

Human rights group decries promise not to try revolutionaries for massacre of millions in '70s

Associated Press

   PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Two top Khmer Rouge leaders apologized Tuesday for the deaths of as many as 2 million people during their regime in the 1970s and asked Cambodians to forget the past.
   Yet, even though Prime Minister Hun Sen has promised not to try them for genocide, neither of the elderly revolutionaries accepted personal responsibility for the massacres during their rule.
   Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were flown by helicopter from a former rebel stronghold to the capital to, in effect, surrender to Hun Sen after he pledged they would not face trial for crimes against humanity.
   At a news conference, they were asked by journalists -- many of them Cambodians who lost family members -- if they felt any remorse for causing the deaths of as many as 2 million of the nation's 8 million people.
   "Yes, sorry, very sorry," Khieu Samphan said, looking red and sullen.
   "We would like to apologize and ask our compatriots to forget the past so our nation can concentrate on the future," Khieu Samphan said. "Let bygones be bygones."
   The Maoist revolutionaries won a civil war in 1975 and forced the population into slave labor camps, where many died of overwork, starvation, disease and executions. Many Americans began to grasp the horror of the era when portrayed in the 1984 movie, "The Killing Fields."
   Khieu Samphan called the situation, laid out in his doctoral thesis as a communist student in Paris in 1959, a "historical experiment."
   The Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion, but spent two decades waging civil war. Stalemate ended in 1996 when the government began offering pardons to leaders and guerrillas to get them to make peace. With the movement all but extinct, calls are being heard for someone to finally be held accountable.
   The defections of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea have no bearing on the military situation. Only one leader, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as "The Butcher," remains at large with an estimated 100 loyalists.
   Amnesty International expressed shock at Hun Sen's reversal of previous support for a tribunal and the warm reception given the Khmer Rouge leaders.
   "It's a black day for the Cambodian people and a black day for international justice," Demelza Stubbings, a representative of the human rights group said.
   Khieu Samphan was the nominal Khmer Rouge leader, though he has been viewed as a front man for Pol Pot and others who held real power. Nuon Chea was considered Pol Pot's second-in-command and chief theorist. Pol Pot died in April of a heart attack.
   Neither accepted personal responsibility Tuesday at the news conference before as hostile an audience as they ever are likely to face now that a trial has been ruled out. Some reporters shouted demands for personal apologies to the families of those who perished.
   Nuon Chea, asked who was to blame for the massacres, said: "Let's consider that an old issue. I cannot clarify that."
   "We are very sorry, not just for the human lives, but also animal lives that were lost in the war," Nuon Chea said.
   The United Nations recently sent a team of experts to weigh the possibility of trial abroad by an international tribunal.
   "Please let the Cambodian people resolve this problem," Khieu Samphan said. "If we have to say who was wrong and who was right, etc., etc., we cannot have national reconciliation. . . . We cannot put an end to the war."
   Neither looked well after months on the run when rebel areas came under government control. Nuon Chea, 71, walked with a cane. Khieu Samphan, 67, needed help up the stairs.
   Khieu Samphan's normally white hair was dyed black in an apparent attempt at disguise.
   In the five-hour meeting with Hun Sen, they were joined by leading members of the Cambodian People's Party. Like Hun Sen, many were once Khmer Rouge cadres before fleeing murderous purges in the late 1970s.
   The pair later called on Prince Norodom Ranariddh, president of the National Assembly and son of King Norodom Sihanouk. Hun Sen says that both have approved the defections.
   Nuon Chea was making his first visit to the capital since the 1979 Vietnamese invasion that overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Khieu Samphan came to Phnom Penh in 1991 after a peace treaty -- later broken by the Khmer Rouge -- was signed. He was stoned by a mob of Hun Sen loyalists.
   

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  © 1998 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.