When Khmer Rouge war crimes suspect Ieng Sary passed away last week,
so too did any chance of recovering the large amounts of money and
property he is believed to have accumulated as one of Pol Pot’s inner
circle, and then later as leader of rebel forces in the Pailin area in
the 1990s when gem mining and logging were at their height.
The wealth of the Pol Pot regime’s late foreign minister was long
rumored, but according to Youk Chhang, executive director of the
Documentation Center of Cambodia, Ieng Sary, as the Khmer Rouge’s chief
financial controller, had access to a $20-million fund provided by the
Chinese government.
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Chhang said that he had begun
investigating the assets of the regime alongside collecting evidence of
their alleged crimes in the 1990s. He said that he discovered from
documents and interviews with witnesses that the Khmer Rouge had access
to a bank account in Hong Kong, through which China funneled millions of
dollars to the movement over many years.
“Ieng Sary was the name on the account,” Mr. Chhang said, citing a
now-deceased former Khmer Rouge finance official, Comrade Rith, who set
up the account and managed transactions for the guerilla movement when
it was based on the Thai border in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Hong Kong bank account story was backed up by the testimony of
four other former Khmer Rouge officials, who claimed the account held
about $20 million, Mr. Chhang said.
“I have conducted research before [Ieng Sary] was arrested… hoping
that the resource could be used for victim reparations,” Mr. Chhang
said.
Author and historian Henri Locard said there was no doubt that Ieng
Sary was in charge of finances for the Khmer Rouge before and after the
1975 to 1979 period of their rule when almost two million people died
from starvation, disease and execution.
“When he was in Beijing in ’71 to ’75, the Chinese would supply as
much money as he wanted, for the revolution. The Chinese were supplying
of course weapons, but also dollars, and the dollars went through him,”
Mr. Locard said.
“And it was the same after the Khmer Rouge [rule]. How much he skimmed off that, no one can tell.”
As well as the cash from China, which continued up to the 1991 Paris
Peace Agreements, Ieng Sary also accumulated wealth from selling huge
amounts of timber and gemstones extracted from Thai-Cambodian border
areas he commanded around Pailin and Banteay Meanchey province’s Malai
district up until his defection to the government in 1996, Mr. Locard
said.
“He made a lot of money out of the revolution,” Mr. Locard said.
“What is probable is that Ieng Sary’s family should be immensely wealthy,” he added.
After he defected to the government in 1996, Ieng Sary was also
denounced by his former revolutionary colleagues for pocketing their
cash. In a broadcast on Khmer Rouge-controlled radio just hours before
his defection was officially confirmed, Ieng Sary was accused of
stealing more than 250 million Thai baht, about $10 million at the time,
that had been provided by the Chinese to Pol Pot’s forces between 1985
and 1991.
Until his arrest in 2007, Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith, also a
former Khmer Rouge minister, lived in a large villa in Phnom Penh’s
Chamkar Mon district and took regular trips to Thailand for medical
checkups.
Ieng Sary’s remains were brought from Phnom Penh on Thursday to
another large residence in Malai, which locals and relatives said
belonged to the former Pol Pot regime leader.
Ieng Vuth, Ieng Sary’s son and current deputy governor of Pailin
province, on Monday dismissed the claim that his father had control of
the alleged Khmer Rouge bank account in Hong Kong as “speculation,” and
declined to comment on his family’s wealth.
Kong Duong, director of the Pailin provincial information department,
said Monday that Ieng Sary’s family owns a large corn-processing
factory in the province, which is run by his eldest daughter, Ieng Minh.
And his son, Mr. Vuth, owns a 40-room hotel in Pailin, Mr. Duong said.
In 2007, the Khmer Rouge tribunal’s Defense Support Section deemed
Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, to be indigent and, therefore,
qualified to have their legal costs, thousands of dollars each month,
paid for by the U.N.-backed war crimes court.
“He certainly made himself indigent,” said Mr. Locard, who added that
the former foreign minister was “certainly the richest” of the Khmer
Rouge leaders.
In other countries where tyrannical leaders have amassed fortunes at
the expense of their people, such as in the Philippines with Ferdinand
Marcos and Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, successive
governments have pursued the assets to provide rep-arations for victims.
But there is little hope of such an effort in Ieng Sary’s case.
Following his death, the Khmer Rouge tribunal’s Office of the
Co-Prosecutors announced it had dropped its case against Ieng Sary—and
victims’ reparations requires a conviction.
“A reparation verdict is dependant on a conviction,” said the tribunal’s legal communications officer Lars Olsen.
Similarly, Cambodian law does not allow for a civil case to be brought against a person who is deceased.
“It’s hopeless since the criminal law stipulates that when a
defendant was not yet convicted and he passed away, he is not guilty,”
said Hong Kimsuon, a lawyer who represents the civil parties complaining
against the Khmer Rouge leaders.
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