Khieu Samphan and Jacques Vergès, two old men with thin-rimmed glasses and thickened waists, were sitting on a floor mat, shoeless, having tea. It was late August 2006, in a room at the Renakse hotel, a converted colonial mansion in central Phnom Penh. Khieu, the former president of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and a Pol Pot loyalist to the end, was still free. But he was growing nervous as a UN-backed tribunal was ramping up its efforts to indict the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. So he had called on his old friend Vergès, defender of terrorists and tyrants. Khieu wore brown polyester pants, Vergès a beige linen suit. They called each other “Maître” and “Président” and reminisced about the time when they had no titles – their student days in Paris in the 1950s. And they strategised. Vergès’ first move was to present Khieu as neither a monster nor an ideologue but a reasonable man and a patriot. Vergès had already argued, in a preface to Khieu’s 2004 memoir The History of Cambodia and the Positions I Took, that while Khieu was Cambodia’s president under the Khmer Rouge, he was only their “fellow traveller”. It was true, according to most accounts, that Khieu, a well-respected populist economist and member of Cambodia’s parliament in the early 1960s, had only joined Pol Pot’s group after he was forced to flee to the jungle to avoid being assassinated by the regime. But Vergès was going further.
more from Stéphanie Giry at The National here.