Former official: Former Khmer Rouge leader `Brother Number Two' Nuon Chea. Photo: Getty
Phnom Penh: Senior military officers behind the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields", where an estimated 1.7 million people died in the mid-1970s, remain high-ranking members of Cambodia's government, according to one of the organisation's most senior surviving members.
Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologue, has accused the government of "blatant and overt" interference in a long-running United Nations tribunal to protect "those who occupy the highest offices of the Cambodian government of the taint of their dark past".
He claimed that as senior Khmer Rouge military officers they were "critically responsible" for implementing the murderous organisation's policies.
Ink print: Prime minister Hun Sen, once in the Khmer Rouge, photographed voting in 2013. Photo: Reuters
Now frail and in poor health,Nuon Chea, 88, who was second in command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, made the accusations in a just-released 270-page appeal against his conviction at the tribunal in August for crimes against humanity.
Citing 223 alleged errors during his trial, the appeal document claimed the government blocked access to witnesses and scuttled investigations as part of "an irrefutable pattern of conduct designed to diminish responsibility of former CPK (Khmer Rouge) officials such as (president of the National Assembly) Heng Samrin and (prime minister) Hun Sen at Nuon Chea's expense".
The document claims that Mr Heng Samrin, 80, is the most senior military officer still living to have participated in the evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975 as the Khmer Rouge implemented its disastrous plan to create an agrarian utopia where money and private property had no meaning.
He was a former Khmer Rouge political commissar and army division commander before he defected and fled to Vietnam in 1978.
Lawyers acting for Nuon Chea, who has expressed remorse for the Khmer Rouge's atrocities but refused to accept criminal responsibility, have called on the tribunal to summon Mr Heng Samrin, Senator Ouk Bunchhoen and a third figure, whose name has been redacted from the document, to testify before judges who had previously ruled they were not required to give evidence.
The Cambodian government did not reply to a request to comment on Nuon Chea's claims that will be considered by the tribunal when it resumes sittings later in January.
Claims the government has interfered in the work of the tribunal, where UN-appointed international judges and lawyers share duties with Cambodian counterparts, have been made previously, including in 2012 by former reserve Swiss judge Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, who referred to the "overt interference" of government representatives.
The government has refused to allow the tribunal to prosecute any more than five Khmer Rouge leaders.
Key government members, including Mr Hun Sen, Asia's longest serving leader, admit they were former Khmer Rouge cadres but deny responsibility for the organisation's genocide.
Mr Hun Sen fled to Vietnam during internal purges of the Khmer Rouge in 1977 and became a commander of a rebel army sponsored by Hanoi before Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia two years later.
In his appeal, Nuon Chea lashed out at the tribunal, saying it has proven to be a "diligent servant of the victors" of a conflict that raged in south-east Asia for three decades by ensuring that all that happened before and after the Khmer Rouge's rule from 1975 to 1979 remains "conspicuously missing from the final narrative".
Nuon Chea criticised the tribunal for failing to mention in its judgment against him the US' carpet bombing of Cambodia that he claimed resulted in at least 10 times as many deaths as the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh and violence perpetrated by US-sponsored Khmer Republic forces that bitterly opposed the Khmer Rouge in a protracted civil war.
He also criticised the tribunal for failing to cite Vietnam's invasion and the violence perpetrated by Vietnamese against Cambodians.
Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, the 83-year-old former Khmer Rouge head of state, face further charges at the tribunal of genocide over deaths through execution and starvation at prison camps after both were found guilty of crimes against humanity in August.
They and Kaing Guek Eav, one-time chief of the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation and torture centre, are the only people who have been convicted at the partly Australian-funded tribunal since it was established amid controversy in 2006.
Plagued by staff walk-outs, mismanagement and cost overruns, the tribunal could drag on until 2016, prompting concerns that Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, who is also frail and in ill-health, may die before final verdicts are reached.
Ieng Sary, the 87-year-old former Khmer Rouge foreign minister, died in 2013 before all the evidence was heard in his case and his 80-year-old wife, Ieng Thirith, Khmer Rouge's most senior woman, was freed in 2012 on the grounds she was suffering from diminished mental capacity.
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