The Bucolic Life of a Cambodian Grandmother Accused of Mass Killings
nor otherwise one of the most responsible officials of the Khmer Rouge regime." Ms. Im Chaem
said she had never planned to go to court anyway. that was neither a senior leader
ly strict with bad people, people who made mistakes." Her mother, she said, became a respected local leader for
the governing Cambodian People’s Party after the disintegration of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. that on
The government — whose nucleus is a group of former Khmer Rouge officials
and soldiers who defected early on — has effectively blocked the tribunal from reaching further into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, many of whom gained positions in the army or local government when they agreed to reintegrate in the 1990s.
"Everyone who sees her face and knows her really loves her." Still, when asked where Ms. Im Chaem could
be found, Ms. Kaing Rin claimed her mother was on a long journey and would not return for days.
"For me, even though the court dismissed the case, the criminal remains the criminal until she is punished." Anlong Veng, about a seven-hour drive northwest of Phnom
Penh, is dominated by a huge swampy lake, a defense around the last home of Ta Mok, the warlord known as the Butcher, who was Ms. Im Chaem’s direct superior.
But Im Chaem, the woman enjoying this apparently idyllic retirement, is accused of overseeing the killing
of tens of thousands of people as a Khmer Rouge official in northwestern Cambodia in 1977 and 1978.
According to a confidential document submitted by prosecutors in 2008, Ms. Im Chaem
and another official, Yim Tith, were sent to the country’s northwest in 1977 to purge cadres seen as traitorous, often because they could not meet the regime’s hefty rice quotas with their starving labor forces and primitive technology.
