Old, ugly and bad. That’s how I describe the four defendants in the second trial of the Extraordinary Chambers set up by the UN at the Cambodian Tribunals to pass judgement on the crimes committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
They are the surviving leaders of the Angkar, “the organisation” that between 1975 and 1979 turned Cambodia into hell on earth. In “those 3 years, 8 months and 20 days”, as that period is defined, roughly two million people died in Cambodia, either from starvation or exhaustion, or directly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. About three million were forced to leave the cities to work in the fields. Tens of thousands simply disappeared into death camps.
These old men are: Khieu Samphan, 79, still the official head of the Democratic Kampuchea; Nuon Chea, 84, Khmer Rouge’s ideologist; Ieng Sary, 85, the foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, 79, the social affairs minister.
The list of charges they face is chilling: crimes against humanity, genocide, execution, slavery, deportation, racial and religious persecution, torture…as well as “other inhumane acts”.
All have entered not guilty pleas. Sary, because he was granted a pardon by King Norodom Sihanouk in 1996. Samphan and Thirith, because they affirm that in their position they were not able to properly understand what was happening. Nuon Chea is mounting a defence on the basis that you cannot judge those events outside of their historical context: American bombings, threats from Vietnam. Also known as “Brother Number Two”, he maintains “I was pursuing the dream of an egalitarian agricultural society. It is the Empire that should stand accused, not me”. In pursuit of that dream, Sary admitted, although in secret, that the Khmer Rouge aimed to cut the Cambodian population from 7 million to 1, to attain perfect equilibrium. That was the theory worked out years earlier by Khieu Samphan. That dream came about in the project hatched by Saloth Sar, known as Pol Pot, or “Brother Number One” of the Khmer Rouge: an extreme hybrid of Marxism, Maoism and archaic ultra-nationalism. “Individual rights were not sacrificed for the common good; they were simply abolished. All expression of human individuality was condemned. Individual conscience was systematically demolished”, writes historian Philip Short in his book Pol Pot.
The preliminary hearings were held last week, but the trial will only begin in earnest in a few months’ time and may go on for years: there are almost 4000 plaintiffs and legal processes amount to over 450,000 pages. In this trial old age is an advantage: it doesn’t absolve you, but it may get you off serving the sentence.
One man who will perhaps outlive his sentence is the man found guilty at the first trial of the Extraordinary Chambers of Cambodia, which concluded last year. Kaing Guek Eav, 68, known as “Comrade Duch”, was first deputy and then director of Tuol Sleng, the prison and interrogation centre of S-21, the Angkar security service. Twelve thousand three hundred and eighty people were imprisoned there. Fifteen survived. Duch was sentenced to 35 years, subsequently reduced to 19.
I saw him in the flesh during the trial. I observed him to see if he had the tell-tale signs of moral yellowness (in italian only, sorry), a sign of evil. I didn’t spot anything, or only in my imagination. Now I continue to look at the photos and videos of these four old men. In the end, they don’t look all that ugly, they don’t seem to give off any malign vibrations. But I am beginning to understand the meaning of what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil". The German philosopher claimed that evil meted out in the name of politics is not a means to an end. It is an end in itself. There are no laws in history or in nature that can justify it. It nourishes itself like a cancer. That’s the best response, if any were needed, to Nuon Chea’s “defence”.
“Totalitarian regimes have discovered, without knowing it, that there are crimes that men can neither punish nor pardon. When the impossible has been made possible, it has become absolute evil, unpunishable and unforgivable", wrote Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. However, unpunishable does not mean that it must not be punished; rather that no worthy punishment exists.

A video of the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor. It features the reactions of citizens to a proposal to release the defendants on bail ahead of sentencing. Watch it: it is an exercise in human nature. At the beginning you can see those four old men and judge them for yourself. Signs of evil can be seen, as well as many of indifference or stupidity. There is also a nice old man who, in my view, stands on the side of the Good.

Cambodian Citizens React to ECCC Hearing on Application for Release of Indicted Khmer Rouge Officials from Cambodia Tribunal Monitor on Vimeo.

For details and updates on the trial, click here and here.