The former foreign minister of the now-defunct Khmer Rouge movement plans to appeal to Cambodia’s genocide tribunal against his pretrial detention, a court spokesman said yesterday.
The UN-assisted tribunal has charged Ieng Sary, 82, with crimes against humanity and war crimes. He is due to appear today to press for his release, tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said.
Ieng Sary is one of five defendants being held by the tribunal, which plans to begin its first trial later this year. His wife, 76-year-old Ieng Thirith, who served as the Khmer Rouge’s social affairs minister, is also being held on charges of crimes against humanity.
The tribunal, jointly run by Cambodian and international personnel, attempts to establish accountability for the atrocities committed by the communist group when it ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
The group’s radical policies resulted in the deaths of about 1.7 million people, who were executed or died of starvation, disease or hard labor.
In their detention order in November, the investigating judges said Ieng Sary is being prosecuted for supporting Khmer Rouge policies that were “characterized by murder, extermination, imprisonment, persecution on political grounds and other inhuman acts such as forcible transfers of the population, enslavement and forced labor.”
Ieng Sary has dismissed the charges against him as “unacceptable” and demanded evidence to support them, a copy of his detention order said.
He and his wife belonged to the inner circle of the Khmer Rouge and were in-laws to the movement’s late leader Pol Pot, who was married to Khieu Ponnary, Ieng Thirith’s sister. Ieng Thirith took her husband’s surname after they got married.
In 1996, Ieng Sary received a royal pardon from former King Norodom Sihanouk as a reward for leading his followers to join the government. The mutiny foreshadowed the Khmer Rouge collapse three years later in 1999.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS