A war crimes tribunal in Cambodia on Thursday rejected a former Khmer Rouge leader's appeal against his conviction for genocide.
Khmer Rouge is the name of the members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. The party ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.
The former leader Khieu Samphan, 91, was reportedly found guilty of crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the Geneva conventions, and the genocide of ethnic minority Vietnamese.
Khieu Samphan is said to be the last surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge.
The rejection of the appeal that sought to clear Khieu Samphan of the genocide of minority Cham Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia also closes the book on one of the regime’s French-educated intellectuals who had argued that he was unaware of the crimes of mass murder perpetrated by his colleagues, reports Al Jazeera.
Of the two million victims of the Khmer Rouge, 100,000 to 500,000 were Cham Muslims, and an estimated 20,000 were ethnic Vietnamese, says the report.
Reading out the ruling in Phnom Penh, the tribunal’s judges rejected – point after point – Khieu Samphan’s numerous arguments appealing his conviction for genocide.
The “vast majority of Khieu Samphan’s arguments are unfounded”, Judge Kong Srim said during the lengthy reading of the decision, adds the report.
Under the Khmer Rouge regime, the court heard, “the civilian population was denied basic freedoms and subjected to widespread acts of extreme cruelty. A culture of fear prevailed through mass killings, torture, violence, persecution, forced marriage, forced labour and forced disappearance and other inhumane treatment,” reports The Guardian.
Khieu Samphan had earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris in the late 1950s and had a reputation as incorruptible. But in the late 1960s, he joined the Khmer Rouge revolutionary movement and became a faithful lieutenant to Pol Pot, known as Brother No 1 and the group’s leader, according to Al Jazeera.
Pol Pot died in 1998 and never stood trial.
According to the Associated Press, the international court convened in Cambodia to judge the Khmer Rouge for its brutal 1970s rule ended its work Thursday after spending $337 million and 16 years to convict just three men of crimes after the regime caused the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people.