He was serving life in prison after convictions by the U. But Nuon Chea never admitted his guilt. For decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea lived quietly with his family in a wooden house in Pailin, a former guerrilla stronghold near the border with Thailand.
But I had my ideology. I wanted to free my country. I wanted people to have well-being. Three decades after his accused crimes, Nuon Chea took the stand as an old man with white hair and sunken cheeks.
Frail from a variety of health problems — including high blood pressure, heart problems and cataracts — he peered over eyeglasses as he defiantly defended the regime he served.
I don't want them to believe the Khmer Rouge are bad people, are criminals," Nuon Chea testified in at the age of One of them was Cambodia's current prime minister, Hun Sen. Nuon Chea's fellow defendants also denied any wrongdoing: Khieu Samphan, the regime's former head of state, who also told the court he bore no responsibility for atrocities, and Ieng Sary, the regime's former foreign minister. Ieng Sary died before the trials concluded, but Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were found guilty in the tribunal's final verdicts in November At one point before his arrest, Nuon Chea told journalists that he had become an adherent of Buddhism — an irony for the man who served a regime that abolished religion and turned Buddhist monasteries into sites for torture and execution.
Nuon Chea was born on July 7, , to a wealthy Sino-Cambodian family in Battambang province in northwestern Cambodia. He studied law at Thammasat University in Thailand. In an interview with government agents a year after his surrender in , Nuon Chea said he joined the communist movement in Thailand in Our team of experts maintain a vigil on the quality of the products. Every single piece of work is ensured with proper quality assurance. Since our inception, we are continually improving our quality to serve our clients better.
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Don't miss the opportunity of expanding your business worldwide with genuine and potential trade counterparts for your products! Get free overseas buyers for your products View Details. Global company directory. It repeated that success in the commune elections. Many Cambodians, as is common in other countries after long periods of authoritarian rule, simply yearn for change. Hun Sen has responded by suggesting that engaging in opposition politics or criticizing him, the CPP or the government is a form of treason.
In his time in power, hundreds of opposition figures, journalists, trade union leaders, and others have been killed in politically motivated attacks. Although in many cases those responsible for the killings are known, in not one case has there been a credible investigation and prosecution, let alone conviction.
In some cases, triggermen or fall guys have been prosecuted; higher-ups have been left untouched. Many other critics have been arrested, beaten, harassed and intimidated, including human rights workers, labor leaders, activists and members, land rights activists, and members of a rising generation of bloggers and others expressing their views online.
CPP-controlled courts have convicted hundreds of people on trumped-up charges or other politically motivated grounds. While Hun Sen has orchestrated repression, he has remained in power by creating a cadre of ruthless members of the security forces to implement his vision and orders.
He has done this by promoting people based on loyalty to him instead of the institutions they formally serve, such as the military, gendarmerie, and police. This report details the responsibility of 12 of these senior security force officers for human rights abuses in Cambodia from the late s until the present:.
These 12 men are the backbone of an abusive and authoritarian political regime over which an increasingly dictatorial Hun Sen rules. Each has throughout his career served in government jobs paying relatively modest salaries, yet each has amassed large amounts of unexplained wealth. He is now a Senior Minister for Special Missions. Peou Heng. Ek Sam-aun. Kirth Chantharith. Sar Thet. Although each of the 12 has a legal responsibility to represent the state instead of a political party—and to carry out their duties in an impartial and neutral manner—all act in an openly and highly partisan manner.
Members of the Central Committee are required to carry out all party policies. This conflicts with international human rights standards, which protect the rights of members of security forces to be members of a political party, vote, and privately express their personal opinions, but requires them not to be politically partisan in carrying out their professional duties or otherwise be seen to favor members of one political party over others.
The abuses in which the 12 are implicated include violations of human rights, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed from the s to the present. Most of the 12 have been implicated in the use of unnecessary, excessive, and sometimes lethal force against protests about unfree and unfair elections, land confiscations, labor abuses, and low wages.
Many have also been involved in non-political abuses against the ordinary population, such as land takings, murder, torture, and arbitrary detention. Each of the 12 is part of a kind of Praetorian Guard for Hun Sen. All 12 owe their senior positions in the security forces to personal links to Hun Sen dating back two decades or more, and their willingness to abuse human rights. Pol Saroeun, who arrived in Vietnam in , was also a significant player in the Vietnamese-backed opposition at that time.
Sao Sokha, Chea Man, and Choeun Sovantha were either aides to Hun Sen in or became members of the small number of armed forces units he set up at that time.
The two generals with the longest known records of human rights abuses are Pol Saroeun and Kun Kim. While in power, the Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths from execution, starvation, and disease of an estimated 1. The policies and practices of the Khmer Rouge devastated Cambodian society and created conditions for the success of the Vietnamese invasion in December and the creation of the PRK in January The new government incorporated not only Pol Saroeun and Kun Kim, but also many other former Khmer Rouge at various levels.
Among them was Hun Sen, another one-time member of the Khmer Rouge military-security apparatus who, during his time as a Khmer Rouge commander, played an unclear role in areas where crimes against humanity were committed. The PRK was opposed by the Khmer Rouge, which reformed and fought an almost continuous guerrilla war against the Cambodian government from to , the year Pol Pot died amidst the collapse of the Khmer Rouge movement.
A one-party state, the PRK established and enforced its rule through widespread political imprisonment without charge or trial and a system of torture of thousands of political detainees, many of whom died from such ill-treatment and abysmal detention conditions.
Ten of the 12 officials profiled here are implicated in these abuses via their service in various PRK and SOC successor to the PRK political, military, intelligence, and police units, the institutional bases from which they rose to their current prominent security force positions.
Abuses committed during repression of rising popular dissatisfaction with the PRK and its reliance on Vietnamese backers include arbitrary political detention and routine torture in a provincial prison run under the authority of Pol Saroeun when he was governor there; in the municipal prison of the capital, Phnom Penh, when Neth Savoeun was a senior police officer there; and in the political security apparatus of the Ministry of Interior when Sok Phal was an important cadre there.
The numbers in the report understate the extent of the violations because UNTAC could not investigate all cases or specify who was responsible in all of the cases it did investigate. The different titles meant little, as each had the same legal powers. The coalition arrangement lasted until July , when Hun Sen ousted Prince Ranariddh in a coup. The killings sent opposition politicians and activists into exile in fear for their lives.
Although most politicians returned under a deal brokered by Japan, the United States, and the UN to participate in elections in July , the electoral process was violent and fundamentally flawed. In social terms, they were increasingly manifest in protests against loss of land and housing and mostly trade union-led strikes for better pay and working conditions. These elections were characterized by systemic irregularities and were neither free nor fair.
Hun Sen and the CPP are increasingly reliant on the 12 commanders — and many other senior security personnel in the army, gendarmerie, and police — who are the subject of this report. This trend was confirmed and highlighted by a significant increase at the CPP Congress of the number of security force officers and other government officials with security responsibilities in the CPP Central Committee see Appendix 1.
At the CPP Congress in January , held to adopt party plans for the national elections, there was another large insertion of security force personnel, among whom are 64 military officers, mostly of lieutenant general rank, according to documents seen by Human Rights Watch. This danger should be viewed both in light of their long records of violating human rights and in the context of the national elections and those scheduled for The elections were followed by peaceful mass protests against CPP-orchestrated fraud and a new wave of large-scale strikes by workers for higher wages.
Aggressive attempts by the security forces to deter and suppress such gatherings sometimes precipitated social unrest, to which the security forces responded with excessive violence, including unnecessary lethal force resulting in the deaths of at least seven people in early This report begins with a detailed history of the three main components of the contemporary Cambodian security forces—the army, gendarmerie, and police—tracing the development of their chains of command.
This is followed by 12 individual profiles. The report concludes with recommendations for security sector reform in Cambodia addressed to the Cambodian government, the United Nations, and donors and other governments. These recommendations are made in light of the failures of previous efforts by the international community in this area, but with the recognition that security sector reform is crucial for promoting and protecting human rights in Cambodia.
If the security forces are not professionalized and key abusers are not appropriately held to account, there is little possibility of democratic reform — or indeed any kind of structural reform — in Cambodia. Please see chapter 14 for a full set of recommendations. This report is based on extensive in-person interviews, including with senior CPP civilian and military officials, members of the military and police, civil servants, judges, prosecutors, foreign and Cambodian diplomats, foreign and Cambodian journalists and human rights workers, academics, and others, some of whom also provided open source and other materials from their files.
In addition, it relies greatly on published and, in some cases, unpublished written materials in English, Khmer, Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, including online and printed media reports, books, and journals, and documents disseminated by or held in the archives of the Cambodian and other governments, United Nations bodies, and international and domestic human rights organizations.
These materials include underlying data that have formed the basis for various human rights reports and related publications on Cambodia from the s to the present and are on file with Human Rights Watch. The texts of the interviews are on file with Human Rights Watch. Because of the escalating assault on human rights activism, journalism, and other non-partisan research in Cambodia, the names of many of the interviewers and interviewees and other identifying information about them have been omitted to protect them from possible retaliation by the authorities, including Hun Sen and the senior security force commanders who are the subjects of this report.
Any incomplete sourcing in footnotes is to protect sources. Also, on file with Human Rights Watch are downloaded versions of all recently published Khmer and Vietnamese-language online news media and other online resources cited in the report, which in some cases may no longer be accessible online. Under Vietnamese auspices, the first formal unit was set up on April 22, The establishment of a single coordinated Cambodian command for the various Cambodian units in formation was incomplete when the Vietnamese launched a large-scale invasion to overthrow the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge on December 25, , which took Phnom Penh on January 7, Elements of these and other units set up under Vietnamese auspices during the remainder of and before January 7, participated in a minor way in the Vietnamese invasion, in which for propaganda purposes some Vietnamese forces masqueraded as Cambodian troops, actions that paved the way for the birth of the PRK.
However, Command Committee was dissolved. Hun Sen was named Minister of Foreign Affairs. During the next decade, according to official Vietnamese and Cambodian accounts, a total of some , Vietnamese troops and 10, Vietnamese officials were deployed into Cambodia to defend and help build PRK structures, including at the party Central Committee, national government ministry, provincial, and municipal levels and especially in the military, security, and foreign affairs fields.
Weigh heavily the opinions of the foreign advisors … At all levels and in all sectors, we should discuss with the fraternal advisors in order to agree on weekly and monthly programs and planned activities. It was not until the mids that the RPPK membership matched the number of Vietnamese officials in the country. It stated that the PRK Council of Ministers governed only in the economic and social spheres, without mentioning any command authority over army and other forces.
Chan Si died on December 31, Among the various figures who came to prominence in the military and defense realms in the period, only Pol Saroeun was an ex-East Zone CPK army defector linked to Hun Sen. Tea Banh, an ethnic Thai, had left the Khmer Rouge ranks in and taken refuge in Thailand in Pol Saroeun, as chief of staff, enjoyed de jure command authority over the whole of the PRK armed forces and was de facto the most powerful military figure, next to Hun Sen himself.
In preparation for further Vietnamese troop withdrawals and a possible peace agreement, including the Khmer Rouge and other opposition forces, in April chief of state Heng Samrin promulgated a new constitution transforming the PRK into the State of Cambodia SOC. However, the Khmer Rouge reneged on their commitment to the agreement, after which the SOC refused to keep its commitments on demilitarization and demobilization.
The elections took place amidst armed conflict. Hun Sen and the CPP threatened secession of seven eastern provinces and renewed civil war if they were not made equal partners in a new government, including maintaining de facto control over the military and police. This is exactly what later transpired.
A provisional government was soon formed with Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen as co-chairpersons. In the provisional and then constitutional governments of , Ranariddh and Hun Sen were named concurrently as co-supreme commanders of the armed forces and police. Nhek Bunchhay, while Pol Saroeun held a secondary deputy post. Believing it was unnecessary, Tea Banh and Meas Sophea chose not to participate.
On November 30, , Hun Sen became sole prime minister. The ministry was also not empowered to perform key staff functions like intelligence gathering and analysis. Together, the Supreme Commander, a number of deputy supreme commanders, a chief and a number of deputy chiefs of the newly named Mixed General Staff were made the superiors over the Army Command, Navy Command, the Air Force Command, RCAF intervention divisions and brigades, and various Supreme Command staff offices, including its Research and Intelligence Directorate.
A number of new and additional deputy supreme commanders were also appointed, including Hing Bun Hieng and Sao Sokha, both of whom were key players in the coup. Though Hun Sen signed the Paris Agreements on behalf of the CPP and committed to ending party control over the armed forces and other state institutions, the CPP has never relinquished control over the military or police, judicial, or other state officials.
This practice has become more open and formal in recent years. Internally, the CPP continues to place a high priority on expanding the number of officers and soldiers in the armed forces while excluding members of other parties, although former members of other parties who have defected to the CPP are allowed. According to CPP-friendly media, they comprised the leadership of , security forces. Instructions to the armed forces to act against the opposition were repeated, at times in even more threatening tones, in , especially after small civil society-led peaceful protests in May against the politically motivated arrest and charging of five human rights defenders in connection with activities aimed at opposing human rights violations.
The Association is effectively an unarmed paramilitary CPP mass organization. By June , it claimed a total membership of 72,, with a hierarchical structure of committees and branches at the national, provincial, municipal, district, and commune levels.
Blatant security force commander partisanship has continued as the CPP geared up for local elections in and national elections in Tea Banh praised the security forces for having prevented these activities by timely suppression of demonstrations and protests. As before the national elections of , in late senior security force officials began carrying out CPP grassroots strengthening activities in the provinces. Deputy Supreme Commander Gen.
Such activities increased following a December CPP Central Committee Conference, designated as an extraordinary party congress, at which the strategy it had formulated for winning the June commune and national elections was pronounced.
The strategy emphasized the importance of CPP leaders going down to the grassroots to strengthen and mobilize support for the party. With Hun Sen presiding, 1, party delegates attended the conference, including Central Committee members. However, this military police battalion, which had jurisdiction only over military personnel, was dissolved in October at the time of the Paris Agreements on Cambodia. The establishment of the gendarmerie as a militarized policing force with jurisdiction over both civilians and military personnel was envisaged in a July decree that launched special training for it.
However, before the force was operational Sihanouk had become politically marginalized. Hun Sen and the CPP took the opportunity to subvert the GRK for their own political purpo ses and soon succeeded in making it into their best-trained force for use against their political enemies. However, in reality the gendarmerie was overwhelmingly under CPP control since its inception. The Gendarmerie was given the power to conduct judicial and administrative policing nationwide to suppress crime and maintain public order, doing so with regard both to military personnel and civilians, and thus to arrest both and turn them over to the custody of the courts for investigation and trial.
Under prime ministerial command, gendarmes were also authorized to provide forces to carry out their powers at the request of the ministry of interior, ministry of national defense and other ministries, including via special military operations. The GRK headquarters was headed by a single commander functioning in consultation with the prime minister s.
Kieng Savut had a notorious reputation as a CPP henchman and serious human rights abuser. He was installed by the CPP. France wanted somebody else with a better reputation.
We knew about him beforehand. We knew he had been a senior member of the A-teams. France knew of his role in violence and that he was involved with the mafia through casinos, and that he funneled money to Hun Sen. However, it took years for the French government to fully accept the role of Kieng Savut in violence and corruption. He owned all the brothels near the Martini Club and was involved in drug-trafficking in He also trafficked girls. He was only a gangster and had no professional qualities.
But France needed him at the beginning of the project. This was the last straw, too embarrassing to ignore. As Chairman of the national GRK General Staff with direct command over t he national mobile intervention gendarmes, which included infantry, armor and motorcycle squadrons, Sao Sokha gained increased political favor from Hun Sen, especially after he personally arrested key CPP security force officers who unsuccessfully tried to stage a coup to oust Hun Sen and Ranariddh on July 2, Realizing he had been vulnerable to ouster by CPP-controlled security forces, Hun Sen has since made the GRK one of the most important mainstays of his hold on power.
As a reward to for his services, on July 24, Sao Sokha was designated an advisor to Hun Sen with the rank of a government under-secretary of state. Although the authority of the ministry over police was national, at the municipal, province, district, ward, and subordinate levels, it was shared with the RPPK leadership there.
The primary criterion for recruitment into and promotion in the police was political loyalty , and by the mids there were more than 10, police officers. In practice, this meant the police aimed to eliminate three kinds of opposition: armed insurgency, organized but non-violent oppositional groups, and individual peaceful dissent. Such police repression was carried out via routine abuse of human rights, including torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, prolonged arbitrary detention without charge or trial, or unfair trials.
Prisoners slated for release were warned by the police never to talk about the ill-treatment inflicted upon them, on pain of re-arrest. Within the system, according to former PRK officials, police were not punished for having tortured or mistreated a prisoner, despite legal provisions making this possible.
Conversely, disciplinary action was sometimes taken against those who were caught being too lenient with or solicitous of prisoners, such as by allowing them contact with relatives bringing food or medicine. As of the mids, there were probably more than 5, political prisoners detained in the PRK, the majority held by the police. The Ministry of Interior lost the power to command sub-national police, retaining only such tasks as training them and inspecting their work.
Police under such command dealt with both political security and common criminal matters. However, the Ministry of Interior retained command over previously established specialized police forces with a national remit, including those responsible for suppressing anti-SOC activities.
Together with a Bodyguard Directorate, those for defense of political security were under a designated Deputy Minister of Interior, Sin Sen, one of four deputies to the then Minister of Interior, Sin Song. Defense of Political Security 4 was generally responsible for guarding SOC installations and gatherings, whereas the separate Bodyguard Directorate was responsible for the close protection of particular individuals and groups of individuals.
The Ministry of Interior also still had a Criminal and Economic Constabulary Directorate, concentrating on serious common crimes, including crimes related to property and narcotics. Common and economic criminal policing at the sub-national levels was taken care of by bureau and offices with the police commissariats and inspectorates there.
One aspect of this was the hiving off in late January of a Ministry of National Security from the Ministry of Interior, with defense of political security and maintenance of public order functions moving to the new security ministry.
Its local governance powers included gathering statistical data, such as voter registration data and information on foreigners in the country; receiving regular reports and specific requests for security force actions from local administrations; and rescinding municipal and provincial orders, when deemed necessary.
They also covered keeping track of and receiving complaints from the population about the actions of municipalities and provinces, but not the police. The structure of the Office of the Ministry included a Supreme Directorate of National Police to be headed by an official taking the newly created post of Supreme Director of National Police, to whom was subordinated a police Intervention Unit, and five Central Directorates.
According to an organigram that was part of the sub-decree, the Supreme Directorate of National Police had line authority over municipal and provincial police commissariats and via them over district police inspectorates and commune administrative police posts, but the central directorates had no such authority. Their authority was only over directly subordinate directorates.
For the time being, many of the police posts, including that of Supreme Director of National Police, remained unfilled, leaving Sin Sen in effective charge of national-level police. Appointments of security force officers at these senior levels has remained a prime ministerial prerogative, and four Ministry of Interior Central Directorates were placed in separate categories, not entirely under the Supreme Director for National Police; these were Security; Justice Judicial Police ; Public Order; and Means.
Legally and practically, Supreme Commissioner of National Police Neth Savoeun shares operational command authority over center-level police with Em Sam-an. According to the Criminal Procedure Code, the chairpersons and vice chairpersons of the Security Central Directorate and some other Central Directorates, plus the chairpersons and vice-chairpersons of their subordinate directorates and of a number of other directorates, as well as personnel heading a wide variety of offices subordinated to various directorates, are all judicial police officers with national jurisdiction.
Governors and deputy governors of municipalities, provinces, and districts and chiefs of rural and urban communes are also judicial police officers, but only with local jurisdiction.
The Minister of Interior still has no judicial police powers. In April a major structural initiative created two new supreme directorates: one for immigration i.
Sok Phal and another for identification i. Mao Chandara. The two supreme directorates were created by combining existing Ministry of Interior and police units to form omnibus bodies of quasi-ministerial rank.
They were specified as being separate from the National Police and instead formally part of the Ministry of Interior, but not placed under Sar Kheng as such. Another recent major initiative has been the re-creation starting in August of a force resembling the A3 Combat Police set up by the PRK in , then officially dissolved in In these capacities, Pol Saroeun oversaw the creation and operation of a provincial security apparatus, including detention facilities where people accused of opposition to the PRK and the Vietnamese occupation were held indefinitely without charge or trial.
Some were allegedly involved with the anti-PRK guerrilla campaign of Khmer Rouge remnants or with non-Communist anti-PRK insurgent groups, while other detainees were accused of non-violent political dissent. H undreds of political detainees were held in the Takeo provincial prison. Decisions about how long a prisoner would be held were made by the provincial committee headed by Pol Saroeun. Such military detention of political suspects was almost universally without charge or trial, and prisoners were often held indefinitely on the basis of unsubstantiated and exaggerated or simply false allegations of opposition activity.
These frequently resulted from unreliable evidence arising from torture, abusive conditions of incarceration and other forms of coercion inflicted on political and other suspects as a matter of course. Q ran networks of agents disguised as ordinary people, identifying suspected enemy operatives whom military intelligence officers were empowered to detain and interrogate. Like other political detainees, those in Q custody were held without charge or trial and often subjected to torture. Pol Saroeun remained in his position of military authority through the UN-organized elections of May He also exercised significant influence over Takeo province.
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