The People's Revolutionary Tribunal (Khmer : តុលាការប្រជាជនបដិវត្តន៍) was a tribunal established by the People's Republic of Kampuchea in 1979 to try the Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia for genocide. [1]
The tribunal began seven months after the overthrow of Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea and was staffed by both Cambodian and international lawyers. The tribunal was held at Phnom Penh's Chaktomuk Theatre and transcripts of the proceedings were made available in Khmer, French and English. The court heard testimony from 39 witnesses over five days. The verdict, handed down on August 19, 1979, found the two leaders of the Khmer Rouge guilty of genocide, sentenced them to death and ordered the confiscation of their property. [1]
At that time many Western countries led by the United States dismissed the People's Republic of Kampuchea as a puppet of Vietnam and the tribunal as a show trial. [2]
Ieng Sary was granted a royal pardon by King Norodom Sihanouk in 1996 in exchange for his defection to the government. Pol Pot died in 1998 shortly after he was placed in house arrest by his deputy Ta Mok. [1]
The Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and by extension to the Democratic Kampuchea through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.
Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary, politician and dictator who ruled Cambodia as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea between 1976 and 1979. Ideologically a Maoist and a Khmer ethnonationalist, he was a leading member of Cambodia’s communist movement the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981, his rule converted Cambodia into a one-party communist state. He perpetrated the Cambodian genocide of which from 1975 to 1979 between 1.5 and 2 million people died, approximately a quarter of Cambodia's entire population. His iron rule ended when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978, occupying the whole country in two weeks, ending the genocide, toppling the Khmer Rouge and establishing a new Cambodian government.
Ta Mok, also known as Nguon Kang, was a Cambodian military chief and soldier who was a senior figure in the Khmer Rouge and the leader of the national army of Democratic Kampuchea. He was also known as "Brother Number Five" or "the Butcher". He was captured along the Thailand-Cambodia border in March 1999 by Cambodian government forces while on the run with a small band of followers and was held in government custody until his death in 2006 while awaiting his war crime trial.
The Kingdom of Cambodia, also known as the First Kingdom of Cambodia, and commonly referred to as the Sangkum period, refers to Norodom Sihanouk's first administration of Cambodia, lasting from the country's independence from France in 1953 to a military coup d'état in 1970. Sihanouk continues to be one of the most controversial figures in Southeast Asia's turbulent and often tragic postwar history. From 1955 until 1970, Sihanouk's Sangkum was the sole legal party in Cambodia.
Son Sen, alias Comrade Khieu (សមមិត្តខៀវ) or "Brother Number 89", was a Cambodian Communist politician and soldier. A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea/Party of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge, from 1974 to 1992, Sen oversaw the Party's security apparatus, including the Santebal secret police and the notorious security prison S-21 at Tuol Sleng.
Khieu Samphan is a Cambodian former communist politician and economist who was the chairman of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as Cambodia's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, although Pol Pot remained the General Secretary in the party.
Ieng Sary was the co-founder and senior member of the Khmer Rouge and one of the main architects of the Cambodian Genocide. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot and served in the 1975–79 government of Democratic Kampuchea as foreign minister and deputy prime minister. He was known as "Brother Number Three", as he was third in command after Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. His wife, Ieng Thirith, served in the Khmer Rouge government as social affairs minister. Ieng Sary was arrested in 2007 and was charged with crimes against humanity but died of heart failure before the case against him could be brought to a verdict.
The Cambodian–Vietnamese War was an armed conflict between Democratic Kampuchea, controlled by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The war began with repeated attacks by the Kampuchea Revolutionary Army on the southwestern border of Vietnam, particularly the Ba Chúc massacre which resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 Vietnamese civilians. On 23 December 1978, 10 out of 19 of the Khmer Rouge's military divisions opened fire along the border with Vietnam with the goal of invading the Vietnamese provinces of Đồng Tháp, An Giang and Kiên Giang. On 25 December 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Kampuchea, occupying the country in two weeks and removing the government of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from power. In doing so, Vietnam put an ultimate stop to the Cambodian genocide, which had most likely killed between 1.2 million and 2.8 million people — or between 13 and 30 percent of the country’s population. On 7 January 1979, the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh, which forced Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to retreat back into the jungle near the border with Thailand.
Nuon Chea, also known as Long Bunruot or Rungloet Laodi, was a Cambodian communist politician and revolutionary who was the chief ideologist of the Khmer Rouge. He also briefly served as acting Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. He was commonly known as "Brother Number Two", as he was second-in-command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, General Secretary of the Party, during the Cambodian genocide of 1975–1979. In 2014, Nuon Chea received a life sentence for crimes against humanity, alongside another top-tier Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan, and a further trial convicted him of genocide in 2018. These life sentences were merged into a single life sentence by the Trial Chamber on 16 November 2018. He died while serving his sentence in 2019.
Ieng Thirith was an influential intellectual and politician in the Khmer Rouge, although she was neither a member of the Khmer Rouge Standing Committee nor of the Central Committee. Ieng Thirith was the wife of Ieng Sary, who was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Democratic Kampuchea's Khmer Rouge regime. She served as Minister of Social Affairs from October 1975 until the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.
Democratic Kampuchea was the official name of the Cambodian state from 1976 to 1979, under the totalitarian dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge's capture of the capital Phnom Penh in 1975 effectively ended the United States-backed Khmer Republic of Lon Nol.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, commonly known as the Cambodia Tribunal or Khmer Rouge Tribunal (សាលាក្ដីខ្មែរក្រហម), was a court established to try the senior leaders and the most responsible members of the Khmer Rouge for alleged violations of international law and serious crimes perpetrated during the Cambodian genocide. Although it was a national court, it was established as part of an agreement between the Royal Government of Cambodia and the United Nations, and its members included both local and foreign judges. It was considered a hybrid court, as the ECCC was created by the government in conjunction with the UN, but remained independent of them, with trials being held in Cambodia using Cambodian and international staff. The Cambodian court invited international participation in order to apply international standards.
The People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was a partially recognised state in Southeast Asia which existed from 1979 to 1989. It was a satellite state of Vietnam, founded in Cambodia by the Vietnamese-backed Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, a group of Cambodian communists who were dissatisfied with the Khmer Rouge due to its oppressive rule and defected from it after the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot's government. Brought about by an invasion from Vietnam, which routed the Khmer Rouge armies, it had Vietnam and the Soviet Union as its main allies.
The National Day of Remembrance, formerly called the National Day of Hatred, which falls on 20 May, is an annual event in Cambodia. It commemorates the Cambodian genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled the country between 1975 and 1979. It became a national holiday in 2018.
The Democratic National Union Movement (DNUM) was a Cambodian political party founded after senior Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary's defection from the Cambodian National Unity Party in August 1996. A magazine entitled Phka Rik is associated with it. It was created primarily to facilitate Ieng Sary's reentry into civilian political life, claiming neutrality and that he had broken away from the Khmer Rouge and from the "fascism and cruelty of Pol Pot's regime," naming Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Son Sen and Yun Yat as Pol Pot's cohorts and "mass murderers of Cambodia." He stated that he was a supporter of "limited democracy"; he named Thailand, Singapore, and Japan as examples.
Stuart Robert Glass was a Canadian adventurer and yachtsman killed by the Khmer Rouge in August 1978 while sailing a little yacht named Foxy Lady through Cambodian waters. One of nine "Western" yachtsmen known to have been seized by the Democratic Kampuchean regime between April and November 1978, he was the sole Canadian victim of the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), also known as the Khmer Communist Party, was a communist party in Cambodia. Its leader was Pol Pot, and its members were generally known as the Khmer Rouge. Originally founded in 1951, the party was split into pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions as a result of the Sino–Soviet split with the former being the Pol Pot faction, and the latter adopting a more revisionist approach to Marxism. As such, it claimed that 30 September 1960 was its founding date; it was named the Workers' Party of Kampuchea before it was renamed the Communist Party in 1966.
The Cambodian genocide was the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodian citizens by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly 25% of Cambodia's population in 1975.
Samdech Preah Mahā Somethea Dhipati Huot Tat, Dharma name: Vajirapañño, was the fifth Supreme Patriarch of the Maha Nikaya order of Cambodia.
The Sweden–Kampuchea Friendship Association was a Swedish Maoist pro–Khmer Rouge Kampuchea friendship organization.