Former Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, on trial for genocide and war crimes, died in hospital on Thursday at the age of 87, cheating Cambodia and the UN-backed court out of justice for the rule of the Pol Pot regime.
Brothers in arms and brothers-in-law, top Khmer Rouge leaders Ieng Sary (left) and Pol Pot at the top of their powers as foreign minister and dictator respectively in Cambodia, and Ieng Sary in the dock at the tribunal last year. (File photos)
Ieng Sary - who has been on trial for a raft of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity charges - died while still under the custody of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
His death came less than a year after his wife and fellow defendant, Ieng Thirith, was declared unfit to stand trial due to dementia. Of the trial’s four initial defendants, only one has avoided chronic health problems and repeated hospitalisation.
Sary’s lawyer, Michael Karnavas, told the Phnom Penh Post Ieng Sary passed away at approximately 8:55 am.
"We can confirm that Ieng Sary died this morning after being hospitalised since March 4," the court's spokesman Lars Olsen said. The oldest of three former leaders on trial, he was the minister of foreign affairs in Pol Pot's regime.
Ieng Sary co-founded the brutal Khmer Rouge movement in the 1970s, with fellow students who earned royal scholarships to study in France.
He served as its public face abroad as "foreign minister" of the regime of his brother-in-law Pol Pot, which lasted from April 1975 to December 1979. The men were married to sisters.
In October 1975, Ieng Sary embarked on a tour to justify Khmer Rouge "liberation" of the country, including a press conference at the old government-owned Erawan Hotel.
He proclaimed to regrettably little public notice that the regime considered that "one million Cambodians is enough" to move the country forward. At the time, Cambodia's post-war population was estimated to be seven million.
The communist regime claimed it was building a pure socialist society by evicting people from cities to work in labour camps in the countryside. Its radical policies killed or led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands from brutality, executions, starvation, disease and overwork.
As a member of the Khmer Rouge's central and standing committee, Ieng Sary "repeatedly and publicly encouraged, and also facilitated, arrests and executions within his Foreign Ministry and throughout Cambodia," Steve Heder said in his co-authored book Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Heder is a Cambodia scholar who later worked with the UN-backed tribunal.
Known by his revolutionary alias as "Comrade Van," Ieng Sary was a recipient of many internal Khmer Rouge documents detailing torture and mass execution of suspected internal enemies, according to the Documentation Centre of Cambodia.
"We are continuing to wipe out remaining (internal enemies) gradually, no matter if they are opposed to our revolution overtly or covertly," read a cable sent to Ieng Sary in 1978. It was reprinted in an issue of the centre's magazine in 2000, apparently proving he had full knowledge of bloody purges.
Ieng Sary's death came during the course of his trial with two other former Khmer Rouge leaders by the joint Cambodian-international tribunal.
Concerns that the court's octogenarian defendants will not live to see a verdict rendered have plagued it from the start.
At least 1.7 million people were killed or perished between 1975 and 1979 under Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and their small group of Marxists known as Angka (The Organisation).
But establishing a tribunal took decades and since the current case against the regime's top living leaders began in late 2011, it has moved in fits and starts.
Ieng Sary's death comes at a particularly troubling moment for the hybrid court, which is facing severe budget woes, and increasing allegations of interference and mismanagement.
On March 4, the same day Sary was hospitalised for the last time, a number of national staffers went on strike - indefinitely stalling proceedings - over months of unpaid wages.