Nuon Chea, also known as "Brother Number Two," the effective second-in-command of the Khmer Rouge, appeared in court for the first time this week. He is charged with a panoply of crimes against humanity for his actions as a leader within the extraordinarily cruel and bloody Khmer Rouge regime.
The tribunal, convened in 2006, has charged Nuon Chea with "murder, torture, imprisonment, persecution, extermination, deportation, forcible transfer, enslavement and other inhumane acts".
The tribunal is expected to hear documentary evidence that Nuon Chea personally ordered the murder of 14,000 people held at the Tuol Sleng prison, a former Phnom Penh high school.
The hearing today was meant to address a request by Nuon Chea that he be allowed out of custody. It had to be deferred, however, due to accreditation issues with one of the two Dutch attorneys on his defense team (Victor Koppe, whose bio can be found here).
Speaking before Monday's court appearance, Son Arun, Nuon Chea's lawyer, said his client "feels an absence of freedom in his detention, where all he does is eat and sleep".
As one assumes detention is necessarily meant to cause an absence of freedom, we're all glad to hear it's working properly. Nuon Chea is the second Khmer Rouge leader up on crimes against humanity charges to ask for bail. Earlier this year, Kang Kek Leu was denied bail, as the judge thought the former head of Tuol Sleng prison might, possibly, flee in the face of being charged with 17,000 murders. Given the similarity of Nuon Chea's charges, one imagines a similar outcome for his plea for bail.
The pressing of decades old crimes against humanity charges continues to be a high point of our nascent millennium. Whether it's Southeast Asian communists or former right-wing Latin American leaders, everyone is now on notice that there is no statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.
In his own half-assed, self-justifying defense, Nuon Chea once said: "Naturally, we are sorry, not only for the lives of the people, but also for the animals. They all died because we wanted to win the war."
Eliding the difference between his fellow Cambodians and farm animals is, more than anything else, the clearest view of what Nuon Chea thinks of everyone around him.