Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

SON SEN
402
(ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. The film was directed by Haiti-born filmmaker Raoul Peck
(b. 1953) and stars Idris Elba (b. 1972) as Augustin and Oris Erhuero (b. 1968) as Honoré.
A Belgian-born Rwandan Tutsi actress, Carole Karemera (b. 1975), plays the role of
Augustin’s wife, Jeanne. A number of plot lines weave through the movie, including one
in which U.S. actress Debra Winger (b. 1955) portrays U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for Africa Prudence Bushnell (b. 1946), who agonizes over the inaction of U.S.
policy toward Rwanda despite her constant pleas. One of the features of Sometimes in April
is that it was filmed entirely on location in Rwanda.
Son Sen (1930–1997). Cambodian communist leader before and during the rule of the
Khmer Rouge, under the dictatorship of Pol Pot (1925–1998). Son Sen was born into an
ethnic Cambodian community in southern Vietnam and educated in the Cambodian
capital, Phnom Penh. Like many of the founders of Cambodian communism, Son Sen was
then sent by the French colonial authorities to Paris for advanced education, and while
there he became a member of the Cercle Marxiste, the so-called Marxist Circle, which had
Pol Pot at its center. On his return to Cambodia, Son Sen became director of studies at
the National Teaching Institute and, clandestinely, a founding member of the Communist
Party of Cambodia (later to be reamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or CPK).
In 1963, he became a member of the Central Committee of the CPK and was forced to
flee the capital when King Norodom Sihanouk’s (b. 1922) antisubversion police were
about to arrest him. He was CPK secretary for the Northeastern Zone during 1970–1971,
and was then appointed chief of staff of Khmer Rouge forces. Beginning in August 1975,
Son Sen was deputy prime minister and minister of defense in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge government.
In the latter capacity, Son Sen oversaw the Santebal, the Khmer Rouge’s notorious
secret police force. He and the deputy prime minister for the economy, Vorn Vet (c.
1934–1978), were thus responsible for the appointment of Khang Khek Iev (b. 1944),
known as “Comrade Duch,” to the position of director of Tuol Sleng, the main Santebal
prison in Phnom Penh. It was Duch, acting on orders from Son Sen and Vorn Vet, who
was responsible for the death of thousands of people at the prison. After the downfall of
the Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, Son Sen remained a leader of the regime in
exile. In the eyes of many, he was one of Pol Pot’s most loyal supporters. A member of the
Supreme National Council (SNC), established in Phnom Penh as Cambodia moved
toward a political settlement between the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, and Royalist
supporters (as a transitional successor government was brokered in the early 1990s), Son
Sen was believed to have been previously nominated by Pol Pot to be his successor. When
the Khmer Rouge withdrew from the SNC in 1993, however, Pol Pot made Son Sen into
his scapegoat for attempting to negotiate an unapproved peace settlement with the Cambodian
government. On Pol Pot’s orders, Son Sen was murdered as a traitor near Kbal
Ansoang in 1997—just one year before Pol Pot’s own death due to natural causes.
Sonderkommando (German, “Special Commandos”). Originally an SS term for a unit
assigned special tasks, primarily killing Jews, the term later came to mean those Jewish
prisoners in the Nazi death camps assigned to work in both the gas chambers and the crematoria.
The prisoners would help the victims with the removal of their clothing and
shave their hair (primarily the women), while the latter Sonderkommandos would remove
the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria after first extracting gold teeth and
inspect all bodily orifices for hidden coins and jewels. The life of these prisoners themselves
was relatively short, as they themselves would become candidates for death after