LOCARD Henri
Pseudonym: 2-TCE-90
Cases: Case 002/02
Category: Expert
Background and role
At the time of his testimony in July-August 2016, Henri Locard was a retired French historian. He had previously worked at the University Lumière Lyon 2 in France, and had volunteered at the Royal University of Phnom Penh since 2000. 1
From 1965 to 1967, he was a teacher in a French school in Cambodia. 2 He was asked by Chau Seng, a former Minister in the Sihanouk’s regime (“Sangkum”) to write some articles for the magazine “Kambuja”. 3 In 1989, he came back to Cambodia to research Democratic Kampuchea (“DK”) when his friend, Moeung Sonn, requested his assistance to write his biography. 4 In 2000, he began a PhD on the ideology of the Khmer Rouge and the political system in the countryside, in order to understand the reasons why some of his friends under the Sangkum had disappeared. 5 He authored many books, including the biography of Moeung Sonn and his wife, Prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot's Little Red Book, and Why the Khmer Rouge. 6
Locard testified as an expert before the Case 002/02 Trial Chamber on his research methods, the security centres under DK, and the movement of population between 1970 and 1975.
Locard’s investigation methods and reliability
Locard approached his research of DK through the lens of Cold War history.
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He researched regimes similar in ideology including Vietnam, Communist Vietnam, the Soviet Union, North Korea, he believed that DK was modelled on China in particular; “a combination of the Great Leap Forward and counterrevolution.”
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Locard explained that his book entitled “Why the Khmer Rouge” was intended as pedagogical for students and journalists who wanted to have a summary of all the aspects of the regime - how it grew, developed, and collapsed.
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His main sources were hundreds and hundreds of interviews with Cambodian people, some articles, speeches, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service.
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Locard admitted that he was not very professional, and rarely made any recordings of the interviews he conducted.
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While investigating prisons, Locard did not record any interview he conducted.
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It was difficult to find those witnesses because the population had been completely displaced since.
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During the investigation, people told him about the Khmer Rouge slogans that, according to him, were disseminated at the centre, and came up to the local authorities to be set to music and different rhetoric under the DK regime (i.e. the "hunt for enemies").
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Many of the words used were very sophisticated, with the main outlines provided and given the Khmer mentality from the major national themes.
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People heard the slogans during their political training under the regime.
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He initially collected them for fun, wrote them on notebooks, but then turned it into a publication.
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He did not record the authors or places of those slogans, but they were collected “nationwide”.
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Locard did not find any slogans against the Cham.
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He explained that this corroborated his “conviction” that if Cham were more likely to be more “victims than the average population”, that was not because they were hated by the regime for being an ethnic minority, but because they wanted to continue to practice their religion and because of their revolt in Krouch Chhmar District – this was the most serious offence they committed and led their massacre without imprisonment.
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Locard believed that Pol Pot never took any decision without seeking the opinion of Nuon Chea who was his shadow for the whole time, whereas Khieu Samphan played an important role as a keynote speaker during the re-education sessions.
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Locard explained Khieu Samphan’s contact with Pol Pot in 1960s, and his role and power, claiming that his sources were some former Khmer Rouge cadres who had come to testify before the Court in Case 002/01, including Suong Sikoeun, Saloth Ban alias So Hong, and Phy Phuon.
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Those witnesses were a very useful source for him.
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In his Closing Brief, Khieu Samphan argued that the sources Locard provided to the Chamber after his testimony did not support his statements in Court, and his statements and writing exceeded the scope of his expertise with a deep-seated against the accused.
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The Trial Chamber found that Locard’s works - including books, PhD thesis, and eleven reports on the subject of regional security centres, commissioned by the Co-Prosecutors - were often based on either anonymous sources or interviews of witnesses, some of whom did not testify in court and whose statements were not always accessible or, when accessible, may show some discrepancies with Locard’s assertions.
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The Trial Chamber therefore attributed little probative value to the writings authored by him except when clear and reliable underlying material was accessible and could corroborate his findings.
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On the last day of his testimony before the Trial Chamber, Locard stated that the Nuon Chea Defence counsel asked him “totally useless questions”
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whereas Khieu Samphan Defence counsel “practiced cold torture” on him.
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Later on, he further made remarks in the press on the Defence counsels, saying that they were “criminal” because they were making the tribunal waste time, and were “perverse people” or “negationists”.
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The Trial Chamber found that he showed an inability to assist the court with the level of neutrality and objectivity expected from an expert, and disregarded the expert opinions provided during his testimony.
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The security centres under DK
Locard started to research prisons in 1991. He first interviewed Moeung Sonn, who lived in Lyon, and then other people.
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He explained that his research started from the grassroots - provinces, communes, people’s communes; the ordinary people.
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His main subject area was the provincial prisons where almost all of the victims were completely innocent of any crime.
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He investigated the prison network in order to see if there were similar institutions to Kaoh Khyang prison in Prey Nob District where Moeung Sonn was detained under the DK regime.
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Being asked in court about different sorts of security centres, Locard invited the Chamber to read his book entitled "The Khmer Rouge Gulag".
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Locard regretted that many archives from security centres had disappeared; the population was in such misery and so deprived that their main concern was to survive, and in some places, papers were systematically destroyed, in particular in Chea Sim’s district in Prey Veng (deceased, former President of the Cambodian People’s Party).
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He further regretted that the court had concentrated “too much” on S-21;
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internal purges or the singled-out victims like the Vietnamese and Cham, and not sufficiently on just ordinary Khmers in the provincial prisons who were the vast majority of the victims.
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Locard considered himself as the voice of the ordinary Cambodians who suffered a “horrendous death”, and of their families.
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According to Locard, there were more than 260 security centres during DK.
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The reason was that there were about 150 districts in total, and while some districts had only one prison, others had several, particularly those located closer to the centre, i.e. Kampong Thom or Kampong Chhnang province.
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Everywhere he went he asked people if there were any prisons.
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He said that there was not a single region, province or district in Democratic Kampuchea without a major prison.
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Therefore, prisons could number “hundreds or thousands”.
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The Trial Chamber found that Locard’s findings were based on information he personally gathered which were not always identifiable or verifiable.
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The Trial Chamber therefore accepted his conclusions concerning the 50-60 security centres only where corroborated by other reliable evidence, and accorded minimal weight to his findings regarding the remainder.
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Movement of population between 1970 and 1975
The totalitarian regime began when civil war started in the areas controlled by the revolutionaries; people were no longer allowed to move around or travel.
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The mass displacements of the population began to take place in 1970-71, including Kratie, Oudong, and the city of Kampong Cham which was partially evacuated.
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Before April 1975, only the agricultural areas were under the Khmer Rouge’s control, except for Kratie.
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The Trial Chamber relied on Locard’s testimony in addition to other evidence to find that people were evacuated from towns between 1970 and 1975 following their liberation by the CPK forces.
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