The Bucolic Life of a Cambodian Grandmother Accused of Mass Killings

[DonViejo]

By JULIA WALLACEFEB. 24, 2017

ANLONG VENG, Cambodia — In this dusty mountain hamlet on the Thai border, she is known as Grandma Chaem.

The tiny 74-year-old lives peacefully in a snug, stilted house surrounded by papaya, lime and custard-apple trees. Her children and grandchildren live nearby. She grows cucumbers and donates to her local pagoda, chews betel leaf and tends her cows. But Im Chaem, the woman enjoying this apparently idyllic retirement, is accused of overseeing the killing of tens of thousands of people as a Khmer Rouge official in northwestern Cambodia in 1977 and 1978. In 2015, a United Nations-backed tribunal charged her with crimes against humanity, including mass murder, extermination and enslavement.

On Wednesday, the tribunal’s investigating judges quietly dropped the charges, raising questions about whether they had yielded to pressure from the Cambodian government, which opposed the prosecution.

The tribunal, set up to try those accused of being responsible for the worst crimes committed during the nearly four years that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, is a joint project of the United Nations and the Cambodian government. The government, however, has fought efforts to prosecute anyone beyond the Khmer Rouge’s senior leaders and one notorious prison chief. The case was dismissed, the tribunal said in a statement, because Ms. Im Chaem “was neither a senior leader nor otherwise one of the most responsible officials of the Khmer Rouge regime.”

Ms. Im Chaem said she had never planned to go to court anyway. “I do not like what they accuse me of,” she said in a recent interview at her home in Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold. “I don’t want to think about that. There’s no reason for it. I don’t want to have any trouble. I just want to live in peace.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-im-chaem.html?emc=edit_th_20170226&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284

[Demsrule86]

1. How much peace did you give those you murdered.

You don't deserve peace...murderess.

[dalton99a]

2. The banality of evil.

[riversedge]

3. This is so unspeakable--that humans would do these horrible things to other humans...

......According to a confidential document submitted by prosecutors in 2008, Ms. Im Chaem and another official, Yim Tith, were sent to the country’s northwest in 1977 to purge cadres seen as traitorous, often because they could not meet the regime’s hefty rice quotas with their starving labor forces and primitive technology. They killed many others along the way, collateral damage in the quest to enforce a radical communist vision.

Together, they may have been responsible for as many as 560,000 deaths, the prosecution document said.

Prosecutors estimated that 40,000 people had died at the largest prison in the district that Ms. Im Chaem ran, Phnom Trayoung, which was allegedly under her direct control. Some were executed by night, while others died doing heavy labor at the prison’s quarry while eating meager rations of rice porridge.

An entire village of 400 people, Chakrey, was virtually eliminated; fewer than 10 men were alive by the end of 1978. At a nearby jail, around 6,000 people were killed, 20 or 30 every night.


Photo
Kaing Rin, Ms. Im Chaem’s daughter. “She can’t even kill a fish,” Ms. Kaing Rin said of her mother, “so how could she kill a human being?” Credit Omar Havana for The New York Times

“In Chakrey village we could hear the screams from the forest nearby,” said one survivor cited in “The Pol Pot Regime,” a book by the historian Ben Kiernan. “The victims’ clothes were distributed to us the next day.”....................