July 30. 2007


Justice and the Cambodian Knot
By Uli Schmetzer
www.uli-schmetzer.com

The wheels of international justice are turning so slowly in Cambodia the leaders of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in the 1970s are in danger of dying of old age before a court hears the evidence against them.
Unlike other parts of the world - the Balkans for example - the baffling delay in bringing to justice the last of the still alive Khmer Rouge ogres is partly the result of reluctance by an international community whose own conscience over the Cambodian Killing Fields is far from lily-white and partly the fault of a Cambodian government anxious to sweep this murderous chapter of its past under the table without delving too deeply into who was guilty, who was not and who collaborated.
Perhaps the real hitch is this: The accused know too much.
They know the United States and its allies realized Pol Pot’s regime was murderous and working to death its citizen (1.7 million perished) but did nothing to stop it. The accused know Washington engineered a military dictatorship in Cambodia and then carpet bombed ‘neutral’ Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
On the Cambodia government side many of those in power in Phnom Penh today - including Prime Minister Hun Sen, Cambodia’s strongman - were active members of the Khmer Rouge or, like Hun Sen, senior military officers during the pogrom years.
During the ten year long charade over a trial both sides argued technicalities, the composition of the court, the type of laws under which the accused would be judged and the type of evidence permitted. In contention was even the location of the court which Hun Sen insisted must be within Cambodia, so retaining his power to manipulate, stop or influence proceedings.
Finally on July 18 this year, six years after Hun Sen told the world’s media: “I see no further obstacles” (to the trial) the prosecution announced five people would face the international court (stacked with Cambodian judges) for crimes against humanity. But at the same time the prosecution stipulated the names of those five would be kept a secret.
That secret is about as porous as a sieve since only five top cadres among the Khmer Rouge regime are still alive to answer for the Maoist folly of a regime that set out to eliminate the country’s entire intellectual and professional class. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia anyone wearing glasses was classified as an intellectual and marked for extermination or worked to death in concentration camps that provided labor for Pol Pot’s lunatic irrigation projects.
At the infamous S-21 torture center in Phnom Penh, a kind of Khmer Rouge Auschwitz, tens of thousands were tortured and executed.
The director of S-21, Kang Kek Iev, 63, has been held in pre-trial detention since 1999. He was found that year working as an official in a humanitarian organization in Phnom Penh. He had also converted to ‘Born-Again Christian.’ He is one of the five expected to face trial.
The man on top of the list of five is sure to be Nuon Chea, 82, Brother Number Two in the Pol Pot hierarchy and the most senior Khmer Rouge after Pol Pot’s death in 1998. Since he and other Khmer Rouge laid down their weapons as part of an amnesty in the late 1990s Nuon Chea has lived a comfortable existence in northern Pailin, a town that was the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge before they surrendered. (Most of the Khmer Rouge fighters have been integrated in the Cambodian army which is very much under the control of Hun Sen.)
Brother Number Two has shown no repentance. During interviews he has argued the skulls and bones found in Cambodia’s Killing Fields were those of victims killed by American bombs. He derides the entire genocide story as an invention concocted by the ‘victors’ and describes the Khmer Rouge era a war of independence against invaders – first the Americans then the Vietnamese. His only concession is: “We made a few mistakes.” But he still praises his boss, Pol Pot.
Less loquacious is Khieu Samphan, 76, the former Khmer Rouge head of state who also lives in Pailin near Nuon Chea, but keeps a low profile.
The most affluent of all five is Ieng Sary, 78, Pol Pot’s foreign minister and his wife Jeng Tirith, 75, the former minister for social affairs. The couple live in style in Thailand, giving credit to reports they escaped with much of the Khmer Rouge loot. Both avoid the media and are frequently absent from their villa near the Thai-Cambodian border.
If the trial ever materializes it will be a surprise in the post-Pol Pot history of a nation on which the international community lavished three billions dollars alone to safeguard a democratic election in the 1990s which ended up reconfirming in power Hun Sen. He was the former Khmer Rouge officer who defected to Vietnam and was installed as a Vietnamese puppet Prime Minister when Vietnamese forces invaded and defeated the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.
Since then international aid has not only kept Cambodia alive but has enriched a new hierarchy whose ideas and practices are about as democratic as were those of Pol Pot and his predecessors.
Nine years ago Hun Sen asked for international financial help to set up a trial of senior Khmer Rouge survivors. Since then the trial has been periodically postponed thanks to scores of contrived technical objections. Still the financial aid for the trial kept flowing into Cambodian coffers, as it always does in that country.
Former U.N. general secretary Kofi Anan once described the envisaged Cambodian genocide trial like this: “No situation illustrates the grave implications of international ambivalence then the 20 year failure to bring Cambodia’s former Khmer Rouge leaders to trial for their crimes.”
Sadly, like other mass killers since World War II, the Khmer Rouge tyrants have enjoyed impunity so far and may do so in the future. After all those who know Cambodia realize the threads of its past and its present are so intertwined no trial can or will be allowed to unravel the Cambodian Knot.
ends