On April 4

On this day in ...
... 1976 (35 years ago today), the man who'd been a "virtual prisoner" since the Khmer Rouge takeover the previous year, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was forced to resign his position as Cambodia's head of state. Within days Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan (right) would be named "Chairman of the State Presidium," and his colleague, Pol Pot, Prime Minister. As IntLawGrrls have posted in our Khmer Rouge accountability series, Pol Pot is dead, but Khieu Samphan awaits trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. (photo credit)

(Prior April 4 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On November 9, ...

... 1996, newly elected Bosnian Serb President, Biljana Plavšić dismissed Gen. Ratko Mladić, whom the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had indicted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. She said in a televised statement "that international opposition to General Mladic had made it impossible for him to remain," the New York Times reported, adding, "The television is tightly controlled by the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic." Today, as posted, Plavšić (left) is serving an ICTY-imposed sentence. But co-indictees Karadžić and Mladić remain at-large fugitives from that mechanism of international criminal justice.

... 1953, 2 days after King Norodom Sihanouk returned from exile, self-imposed months earlier as a protest against colonial rule, Cambodia became independent from France.