PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Ieng Sary, who served as foreign minister in Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime, was brought before the country’s U.N.-backed genocide tribunal with his wife Monday to face charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, who was minister for social affairs in the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge government, were served with arrest warrants at dawn at their residence in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.
Their detentions bring to four the number of people arrested by the tribunal, officially called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
The radical policies of the communist Khmer Rouge are widely blamed for the deaths of about 1.7 million people from starvation, disease, overwork and execution. None of the group’s leaders have faced trial yet.
Because the U.S. and China opposed the government installed by the Vietnamese in 1979 — and supported a resistance coalition in which the Khmer Rouge played a part as the country’s official representative at the United Nations — there was little significant backing for a genocide trial of Khmer Rouge leaders, even as the scale of the horrors they perpetrated became more obvious.
Only when the Khmer Rouge failed to honor a 1991 U.N.-brokered peace agreement and became more clearly an international pariah did the idea of an international genocide trial gain traction.
When the ultimate downfall of the guerrilla group became obvious in 1997 — and Prime Minister Hun Sen felt secure against other rivals — Cambodia finally broached the idea.
