A Change of Guard

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Tuesday 1 April 2008

'Brave' Foe of Khmer Rouge To Go on Trial Today in L.A.

Chhun Yasith draped himself with a star-and-stripe.

Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 1, 2008


A Cambodian-American accountant is scheduled to go on trial in a Los Angeles courtroom this morning for allegedly inciting a failed coup attempt in his homeland, some 8,000 miles away.
The former leader of the self-styled Cambodian Freedom Fighters, Yasith Chhun, 51, is charged with violating the Neutrality Act, a law that dates to 1797 and bars Americans from taking up arms against countries with which America is at peace. Mr. Chhun also faces charges of conspiring to kill, to destroy property, and to use a weapon of mass destruction in connection with the unsuccessful putsch in November 2000.
Seven people, some or all of them insurgents, were reported killed in the attempt to oust the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former brigade commander for the Khmer Rouge, which killed about 1.7 million people during its rule in the late 1970s.
"Chhun is a brave man," a former vice president of the Cambodian Freedom Fighters, So Sokhom, said yesterday during a telephone interview from his jewelry store in Arlington, Va. "It doesn't matter. Until the day I die, I still salute him. Nobody stood up to defend the Cambodians except for people like him."
Mr. Hun Sen was named a co-prime minister of Cambodia after United Nations-sponsored elections in 1993. In 1997, he forced out his counterpart, Prince Ranariddh, in what outsiders called a coup. Mr. Hun Sen's party won elections in 1998, but the campaigning was marred by violence and observers decried the elections as unfair.

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