Ieng Sary, Dead Before Justice Is Done

BEIJING â€" Brother Number Three is dead.

In a “surreal moment” late last year, the 87-year-old Ieng Sary, watching his trial for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes from a holding cell out of the judges’ view as he lay on a bed because of his poor health, fell asleep as “wrenching testimony” was given against him, The Globe and Mail reported. His defense lawyer, Ang Udom, asked the court for an adjournment.

Falling asleep, declared mentally unfit, dying - the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are disappearing before justice can be done, critics say.

Mr. Ieng Sary co-founded the Khmer Rouge with his brother-in-law, Pol Pot, the former foreign minister. His death on Thursday came as he was on trial in Phnom Pnh in Case 002, the second case of the Cambodian and United Nations tribunal that is trying former leaders and high-level officials of the Khmer Rouge, according to widespread reports citing the tribunal spokesman, Lars Olsen.

Formally, the court, which began work in 2006, is known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia.

The death of Mr. Ieng Sary, who was hospitalized 10 days ago, according to media reports, highlighted the difficulties facing the court, which many said has moved too slowly amid very complicated politics, as this tweet suggested:

In January, I reported on the problem in a post on this site that called the story of the court “a remarkable tale of perseverance and pitfalls.”

Other defendants in Case 002 are Khieu Samphan, an ex-president of the Khmer Rouge, and Nuon Chea, chief ideologue for the Communist movement. A fourth defendant, Ieng Sary’s wife, Ieng Thirith, an ex-social affairs minister, “was ruled unfit to stand trial because of a degenerative mental illness,” Voice of America said. Pol Pot died in 1998 without facing trial.

The court’s first trial, Case 001, saw “Duch,” or Kaing Guek Eav, the commandant of the main Khmer Rouge prison, Tuol Sleng, ultimately sentenced to life in prison.

MR. Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister and the Khmer Rouge’s top diplomat, “was said to have been responsible for convincing many educated Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge to return to help rebuild the country,” the BBC wrote. “Many were then tortured and executed as part of the purge of intellectuals.”

About 1.7 million people died in the Khmer Rouge’s campaign of massmurder. Here’s a fuller account by the BBC, which quoted Mr. Olsen as saying, “We are disappointed that we could not complete the proceeding against Ieng Sary.” However, the case against the remaining two defendants would continue and would not be affected, Mr. Olsen said.

As my colleague Seth Mydans reports: “Mr. Ieng Sary was part of an inner circle of partly Paris-educated communists who led the movement that caused the deaths of 1.7 million people from starvation, overwork and execution during its rule over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.”

“I have done nothing wrong,” Mr. Ieng Sary said before his arrest in 2007, Seth wrote. “I am a gentle person. I believe in good deeds. I even performed good deeds to save several people’s lives.”

But “Mr. Ieng Sary ‘repeatedly and publicly encouraged, and also facilitated, arrests and executions within his Foreign Ministry and throughout Cambodia,’ wrote Steve He! der, a Ca! mbodia scholar who assisted the tribunal and is co-author of “Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge,” Seth reported.

Britain and France Push for Arming Syrian Opposition

LONDON â€" Britain and France are putting pressure on their European partners to lift an embargo on weapons supplies to Syrian rebels in a conflict that has claimed 70,000 lives and created one million refugees.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, has said his government might veto an extension of the European embargo when it comes up for renewal in May.

“I hope that we can persuade our European partners,” he told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday. “But if we can’t, then it’s not out of the question we might have to do things in our own way.”

His remarks came as Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, called for the European Union to rethink a weapons ban that he said favored the Damascus rgime, which continued to receive powerful weaponry from Russia and Iran.

“We understand the idea of not adding weapons to weapons,” Mr. Fabius told a parliamentary committee. “But that position doesn’t work in the face of reality, and that is that the opposition is bombarded by others who are getting weapons while they are not.”

The stance of the Continent’s two biggest military powers reflected frustration at the failure to find a diplomatic solution to the two-year civil conflict.

However, it has prompted concerns from some European partners about the wisdom of sending weapons to a volatile region that could end up in the hands of anti-Western jihadists.

Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, said during a visit to London last week that the decision so far not to lift the embargo was wise and right. “We have to avoid a conflagration in the whole region! ,” he said.

Mr. Cameron’s signal that Britain was prepared to go it alone with arms supplies to the rebels came on the eve of an Anglo-Russian strategic dialogue in London on Wednesday that was to include discussion of the Syrian crisis.

The British and other Western governments have criticized Moscow for supporting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and failing to push him toward a negotiated settlement.

Ahead of the London talks, however, the Russians have hinted they might be prepared to halt their own weapons supplies to the regime if there were a similar ban on sending arms to the rebels.

The key figure on the Russian side at Wednesday’s London talks is Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister, who reiterated in an interview with the BBC last week that there was no question of oscow pressing Mr. Assad to step down.

Voice of Russia radio, in its report of the interview, highlighted Mr. Lavrov’s offer to consider an arms embargo on Syria if it were told what steps would be taken to suppress weapons supplies to the opposition.

That theoretically leaves open the prospect of a compromise at Wednesday’s talks, which are intended to underline a thaw in the previously troubled relations between London and Moscow.

If the Russians could be persuaded to distance themselves further from Mr. Assad, the British might step back from their apparent readiness to arm the rebels.

Charles Glass, a commentator on the Middle East, suggested in a recent column in The Guardian that rather than lifting the U.S.-European arms embargo on Syria, it would be bette! r to ask ! Russia and Iran to join it.

“The rebels’ own hands â€" as in any war â€" are not without blemish,” he wrote. “The victims of lethal and non-lethal aid to government and rebels alike are the Syrian people.”

Despite the daily reports from Syria recounting the worsening plight of civilians, there seems to be little public appetite in Europe for a deeper involvement in the conflict.

Jean Asselborn, the Luxembourg foreign minister, appeared to sum up a widely held view in Europe when he said this week: “Weapons are what is least needed in Syria.”

Do you agree with Mr. Asselborn Or are the French and British right to press for arming the opposition in order to redress the imbalance between government and rebel forces

Are there alternative strategies to ending the plight of the Syrian people Let us kow your views.

Technology Meets Art at Edinburgh

LONDON â€" The way that technology “seizes and shifts our perceptions of a world” is the theme of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, its director, Jonathan Mills, announced at a press conference this week in the Queen’s Gallery of Buckingham Palace. The festival, which will run from Aug. 9 to Sept. 1, offers its usual dense array of performances and genres, with over 90 productions programmed across all genres.

Mr. Mills highlighted events that, he said, explore the way artists have used the technologies of their time. Citing Beethoven’s “reinvention” of piano composition when he wrote for new steel-framed pianos, he described Gary Hill’s production of the composer’s “Fidelio” for the Opera de Lyon, as “bringing Beethoven into a contemporary vernacular.” An interactive theatrical piece, “Leaving Planet Earth” from the Grid Iron company will transport audiences to “New Earth,” Mr. Mills continued. The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet,❠with its use of 1964 footage of a Richard Burton performance; Philip Glass’s reimagining of Jean Cocteau’s film, “La Belle et la Bête”; the Taiwanese actor Wu Hsing-kuo’s version of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis; and the Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s version of “Coriolanus” will all be shown. (“What’s not to love about about a production that has not one, but two, heavy metal bands,” remarked Mr. Mills.)

There are two mini-festivals within the festival, each accompanied by extensive film programs. “Beckett at the Festival” presents works written by Samuel Beckett for television and radio, here adapted for stage by the Gate Theater Dublin (“Eh Joe,” “I’ll Go On,” “First Love”) and Pan Pan Theater (“Embers” and “All That Fall”).

“Dance Odysseys” offers a welcome long-weekend of new, small-scale dance works that inc! lude seven premieresâ€"a change from the usual large-public dance programming at the festival. (There is that too, in the form of Jose Montalvo’s “Don Quichotte du Trocadéro,” and Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project.)

There is prodigious classical music, beginning with Valery Gergiev conducting Prokofiev’s film score of Eisenstein’s 1938 “Alexander Nevsky” at the festival’s opening concert. “This is a festival where you can here the Mahler 2nd Symphony played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Berio’s mash-up of it in “Sinfonia,” played by the BBC Scottish Symphony,” Mr. Mills said.

He also pointed to the Ensemble musikFabrik’s “Tribute to Frank Zappa,” describing Zappa as a “modernist, sophisticated avant-garde composer influenced by Varese and Cage,” and to a Patti Smith and Philip Glass homage to Allen Ginsburg.

The surprising juxtaposition of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Bartok’s âœBluebeard’s Castle,” directed by Barrie Kosky and sung by the Oper Frankfurt was explained by Mr. Mills as both concerning “a pair of doomed lovers” (although you’d think that might apply to any number of operas).  The most radical-sounding opera proposition was nonetheless “American Lulu,” a version of the Berg opera, reworked, with additional music, by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, who has set the piece (directed by John Fulljames and performed by Scottish Opera and The Opera Group) in the American deep South against a background of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

The choice of the Queen’s Gallery for the presentation of the program was linked to a centerpiece exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci” The Mechanics of Man,” which will show rarely seen anatomical studies by the artist at the Queen’s Gallery in the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Dating from 1510, when the artist dissected 20 bodies at the University of Pavia’s medical school, the 240 ! detailed ! drawings and 13,000 words of notes have been in the Royal Collection since the late 17th-century.

“It’s the first time the entire manuscript of Leonardo’s anatomy notebooks will be displayed in the U.K., alongside 3D imaging on 60-inch, high-definition screens,” said Martin Clayton, the curator of the show. “It shows his incredible accuracy and the modern relevance of his studies, which chime with contemporary imaging in an extraordinary way.”

IHT Quick Read: March 13

NEWS The Syrian military’s ability to fight rebels and hold territory has steadily eroded, forcing it to cede the job of running many checkpoints to paramilitary groups, give up a provincial city without much of a fight and enlist the top state-appointed Muslim cleric as a recruiter. Anne Barnard reports from Beirut.

The Roman Catholic cardinals’ first ballot of the conclave came up with no new pope, signaled by the black smoke from a Sistine Chapel chimney. But, clearly the modern world was pushing against the walls of Vatican City. Rachel Donadio and Jim Yardley report from Vatican City.

Soth Korea said on Tuesday that North Korea cannot unilaterally nullify the 1953 Korean War cease-fire, calling the North’s threats a ploy to strengthen Kim Jong-un’s leadership. At the same time, North Korea has begun evacuating citizens into tunnels with emergency provisions and putting military camouflage on buses and trucks, the South Korean Defense Ministry said. Choe Sang-Hun reports from Seoul.

Police failures over five decades allowed Jimmy Savile, one of Britain’s best-known television personalities, to escape investigation for a lifetime of sex offenses dating back to the early 1960s, according to a report published on Tuesday by a police oversight agency. Stephen Castle reports from London.

Australia’s mining boom has enticed thousands of young workers, leaving the country’s tourism industry short of skilled labor. Matt Siegel reports from Sydney.

The French government called for a law requiring Internet service providers to give all the traffic on their networks equal priority, saying existing rules were insufficient for protecting free speech online and ensuring fair competition among Web publishers. Eric Pfanner and Nicola Clark report from Paris.

In a profound signal of uneasiness about the healt of the euro zone, the German central bank said that it had nearly doubled the reserves it held to cover possible losses. Jack Ewing reports from Frankfurt.

Japan said Tuesday that it had extracted gas from offshore deposits of methane hydrate â€" sometimes called “flammable ice” â€" a breakthrough that officials and experts said could be a step toward tapping a promising but still little-understood energy source. Hiroko Tabuchi reports from Tokyo.

ARTS Two artists belatedly learned that they play integral roles on “Harlem Shake,” a song that went from an Internet sensation to No. 1 on the pop chart. How an obscure dance track containing possible copyright violations rose to the top of pop charts illustrates not only the free-for-all nature of underground dance music but also the power of an Internet fad to create a sudden hit outside the major-label system. James C. McKinley Jr. reports.

SPORTS Alex Ferguson would not talk to the media after Manchester United, the team he manages, lost in the Champions League, and for that he faces punishment from European soccer’s governing body. Rob Hughes on soccer.