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Zacklin told me in an email. “It is the direct result of the type of agreement concluded,
and in my view was inevitable once the decision was made to compromise.”
It was the sort of send-off his own regime would never have permitted: an elaborate
Buddhist ceremony that ended with prayers, reminiscences, and the crackle of fireworks
in an inky night sky. On March 14, 2013, Ieng Sary was rushed from his holding cell
at the ECCC to the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh, where he died of
cardiac arrest. He was 87. For a week afterward, hundreds of white-clad mourners turned
out in Malai, his old base along the Thai border, to pay their respects to a man they re-
membered as a comrade and patriot. To just about everyone else, Sary enjoys the dubious
distinction of being the only person in history to be charged with genocide twice: first in
1979 and again, three decades later, by the ECCC.
On the day of his funeral, monks chanted as farmers and former guerrilla fighters ar-
rived at Sary's villa to pay their respects. His gold-colored casket sat next to mountains
of flowers. When evening fell the casket was moved into a two-story crematorium strung
with blinking colored lights. During a ten-minute eulogy, Sary's daughter Hun Vanny
made just one reference to his involvement with the Khmer Rouge, a period when “he
sacrificed his life by leaving his wife and family, moving from place to place.” Paying a
final farewell was Sary's frail widow and fellow ECCC defendant Ieng Thirith, who was
led to the base of the crematorium for a moment before being bundled into a van and driv-
en away. The previous September, the ECCC had ruled that she was unfit to stand trial
due to dementia, and she was released into a vegetative, house-bound retirement. After
Thirith's departure, the fuse of the crematorium was lit by Y Chhean, the governor of
Pailin province, a former bodyguard of Pol Pot and subordinate of Sary who had defected
with him in 1996. Fireworks flowered overhead as the casket caught fire. Gongs clattered
and clanged. Smoke from the crematorium was piped into the night sky like tractor ex-
haust as a haunting moan burst from the loudspeakers—a crude imitation of an elephant's
roar, intended to ward off evil spirits.
Back in Phnom Penh, the ECCC pressed on with Case 002. With one of its defendants
now dead and another ruled unfit to stand trial, the frailty of the remaining two now be-
came a pressing concern. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were both in their eighties,
and in precarious health. In order to quicken the proceedings, judges had sliced up the
massive Case 002 indictment into a series of “mini-trials,” the first of which (Case 002/
01) focused on the forced evacuation in Phnom Penh in April 1975 and the subsequent
execution of former Lon Nol officials. The goal was to secure judgments before the ac-
cused died, whether “for stealing a loaf of bread,” one ECCC lawyer said, “or for the
crime of genocide.”
On the whole, the ECCC's lawyers and judges persevered with diligence and profes-
sionalism. With controversy raging outside the courtroom, it was easy to overlook the
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