Cambodia: court rules Khmer Rouge leaders guilty of genocide

For the first time, two leaders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia have been found guilty of genocide. Nuon Chea, 92, was the deputy of regime leader Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, 87, was head of state.

They were on trial at the UN-backed tribunal on charges of exterminating Cham Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese. The guilty verdict is the first official ruling that what the regime did was genocide, as defined under international law.

Up to two million people, most of them ethnic Khmer, are believed to have died under the brief but systematically brutal Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979.

They are two of only three people ever convicted by the tribunal.

The tribunal judging their criminal responsibility for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians also found them guilty of committing crimes against humanity and other breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

"The chamber... finds that the crimes of genocide... were committed" against ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslims, presiding judge Nil Nonn said - the first time the court has issued such a ruling.

The large crowd of spectators attending the session included members of the Cham, a Muslim ethnic minority.

The leaders are already serving life sentences after being convicted in a previous 2011-2014 trial of crimes against humanity connected with forced transfers and disappearances of masses of people.

The Khmer Rouge sought to achieve an agrarian utopia by emptying the cities to establish vast rural communes. Instead, their radical policies led to what has been termed "auto-genocide" through starvation, overwork, and execution.

Judge Nil Nonn read out the lengthy and much-anticipated ruling to a courtroom in Phnom Penh full of people who suffered under the Khmer Rouge.

During the trial, a 1978 speech from Pol Pot was cited in which he said that there was "not one seed" of Vietnamese to be found in Cambodia. And historians say that indeed a community of a few hundred thousand was reduced to zero by deportations or killings.

Apart from being targeted in mass executions, Cham victims have said they were banned from following their religion and forced to eat pork under the regime.

Led by Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge was a radical Maoist movement founded by French-educated intellectuals.

They sought to create a self-reliant, agrarian society: cities were emptied and residents forced to work on rural co-operatives. Many were worked to death while others starved as the economy imploded.

During the four violent years they were in power from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed all those perceived to be enemies - intellectuals, minorities, former government officials - and their families.

The scale and brutality of the killings - many of them meticulously documented by officials - means the regime remains one of the bloodiest of the 20th Century.

The regime was defeated in a Vietnamese invasion in 1979. Pol Pot fled and remained free until 1997 - he died under house arrest a year later.

This could be the final decision of the tribunal, officially called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).

Established in 2006 with both Cambodian and international judges, it has so far only convicted three people for the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime at a cost of $300m (£232m).

In 2010 it convicted Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who was in charge of the infamous Tuol Sleng torture center and prison in Phnom Penh.

Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary was a co-defendant with Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea but died before judges delivered a verdict in the first of the two sub-trials in 2014. His wife Ieng Thirith, the regime's social affairs minister and the fourth co-defendant, was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial and died in 2015.