The defense team for aging war crimes defendant Nuon Chea on Monday challenged documents presented to the court two weeks ago by prosecutors, arguing that many of the submissions lacked relevancy and fell outside the scope of the trial.
Nuon Chea’s lawyer, Victor Koppe, told the Trial Chamber judges that his client’s role in Democratic Kampuchea had been misrepresented by prosecutors and that there was a distinct difference between party policy and the crimes allegedly committed.
“Nuon Chea doesn’t deny the seniority of his role and doesn’t deny formulating policy, but he does deny that those policies were intended as crimes,” Mr. Koppe told the court. “If lower-ranking cadre committed crimes, they did so in defiance.”
Mr. Koppe asked the court to play an excerpt from a video interview with Nuon Chea in which the latter acknowledges that the highest-ranking members of the Lon Nol regime were to be executed, but says he knew nothing of the systematic extermination of soldiers in the days after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975.
“As I recall, defeated soldiers were to surrender their weapons and return home. That’s what I remember of the directive. But I don’t know what actually happened,” he says in the clip. “[Top leaders] were to be liquidated. They deserved the severest penalty.”
He is then asked if he was informed of the deaths of thousands of soldiers after Phnom Penh’s fall.
“At that time I didn’t know at all about these killings,” Nuon Chea says in the clip. “During the regime I did not know. And if I had known then, I would have taken preventive measures to stop that kind of killing. They’d done nothing wrong, they were normal soldiers, no different from ordinary people.”
Mr. Koppe argued that when Nuon Chea made those remarks, he had no idea that they would be made public and so his candidness meant the statements were “trustworthy.”
Mr. Koppe also referred to an excerpt from a book by Khmer Rouge historian Ben Kiernan, in which Nuon Chea is said to have referred only to the “scattering” of the Lon Nol officials around the country, not to having them “smashed.”
Monday was characterized by several back-and-forth rallies between Senior Assistant Prosecutor Dale Lysak, who at one point accused Mr. Koppe of making repeated ad-hominem, or personal, attacks, and the latter, who said prosecutors had presented a convoluted depiction of the regime.
Today, Nuon Chea is expected to deliver an hour-long statement to personally respond to the prosecutors’ document presentation.
