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population and 70% of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda. The said animosity was
encouraged by the Rwandan armed forces and largely carried out by Hutu militias,
with the full knowledge and blessing of the government, making it directly culpable.
The Rwanda genocide ended only when the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front)
took over the country. The RPF were a trained military group consisting of Tutsis who
had been exiled in earlier years, many of whom lived in Uganda. The well-organised
RPF, backed by Uganda’s army, gradually seized more territory until 4 July, when its
forces marched into the capital, Kigali. After its victory the RPF established a coalition
goverment. In the years following the genocide more than 120,000 people were
detained and accused of bearing criminal responsibility for their participation in the
killings. They were pursued within local courts in the domain of the national court
system and the Gacaca courts.39 The ring-leaders had been prosecuted at a UN tribunal
in neighbouring Tanzania (Arusha), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda .40
In Cambodia, genocide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime (KR), led
by Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979, in which nearly three million people were killed.
The KR had planned to create a form of agrarian socialism. Ideology thus played an
important role in this genocide.41 The KR policies of forced relocation of the population
from urban centres, torture, mass executions (mainly intellectuals), use of forced labour
and malnutrition led to the deaths of an estimated 25 percent of the total population.
When Vietnam launched its invasion on 25 December 1978, the Cambodian
people offered no resistance. Indeed, after three years of terror under the Khmer
Rouge, many Cambodians welcomed the Vietnamese as liberators. Three Cambodian
regiments, equipped by the Vietnamese and made up mostly of those who had fled
the Khmer Rouge, took part in the invasion.
In January 1979 a new government was installed with substantial backing from
the army of Vietnam. In August of that year (1979) a special court, the People’s
Revolutionary Tribunal, was constituted to try two of the Khmer Rouge government’s
most powerful leaders, Pol Pot (Prime Minister) and Ieng Sary (Minister for Foreign
Affairs). The charge against them was genocide, but at the time both men were in
the Cambodian jungle leading the Khmer Rouge in a struggle to regain power; they
were, therefore, tried in absentia. The trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary was at that time
39 See
40 See S/RES/ 955 (1994), in the present Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), Arusha
branch.
41 There is also another point of view (crimes-against-humanity) expressed by Sadat L N. and Pivnichny
D. J., Towards a New Global Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity, Blog of the European Journal of
International Law (EJIL: Talk!), published on August 5, 2014: “(…) the Khmer Rouge generally killed,
tortured, starved or worked individuals to death not because of their appurtenance to a particular racial,
ethnic, religious or national group – the categories to which the Genocide Convention applies – but
because of their political or social class or the fact that they could be identified as intellectuals.” See