Khmer Rouge leaders found guilty of genocide

The last surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge that brutally ruled Cambodia have been convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by an international tribunal. Nuon Chea, 92, and Khieu Samphan, 87, are the first Khmer Rouge officials to be found guilty of genocide and have been sentenced to life in prisonThey are already serving life terms after earlier convictions at a previous trial for crimes against humanity connected with forced transfers and mass disappearances of people.

© PA In this March, 20, 2008, file photo, former Khmer Rouge's chief ideologist and No. 2 leader, Nuon Chea, foreground, sits in the court hall at the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The verdict read aloud in the courtroom by Judge Nil Nonn established that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against the Vietnamese and Cham minorities during the regime's 1975-1979 reign of terror. Scholars had debated whether suppression of the Chams, a Muslim ethnic group whose members had put up a small but futile resistance against the Khmer Rouge, amounted to genocide.

© AP Photographers, right, take pictures of Khieu Samphan, former Khmer Rouge head of state, on screen at the court's press center of the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, June 23, 2017.

The court found Khieu Samphan not guilty of genocide against the Chams, for lack of evidence, though he was found guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese under the principle of joint command responsibility. 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.