Cambodia Steps Slowly Toward a Genocide Trial
Skepticism Clouds Quest for Accountability

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 10, 2006; A01

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Taing Kim Sam was raped by three Khmer Rouge
soldiers when she was 18. Now 49, she has been waiting more than half
her life for justice. She has deep reservations about whether her
government can deliver, but it is finally about to try.

On a recent Sunday, she strode into a spacious, air-conditioned
courtroom built in an arid military field on the capital’s
outskirts. Vinyl covers still protected the new upholstered seats, and
the smell of fresh paint and sawdust wafted in the cool air.

Taing Kim, petite with large, expressive eyes, peered in awe at the
crescent-shaped courtroom, at the polished wooden stage with a table
and chairs, at the seats for 500 spectators.

“It’s so huge,” she murmured. “It looks suitable for a tribunal.”

More than a quarter-century ago, the Khmer Rouge tortured, executed
and starved to death about 1.7 million Cambodians in a fratricidal
fury that few today can comprehend.

The communist movement sought to create its vision of a peasant
society supposedly free of class structures and foreign influence. It
killed teachers, doctors, merchants and Muslims. It abolished religion
and closed schools and banks. It emptied cities and forced people to
work on cooperative farms.

Now, 27 years after the brutal regime was driven from power, the
Cambodian government, assisted by the United Nations, is taking its
first tangible step toward justice. The courtroom and an
administrative office opened Feb. 6, and prosecutors will be arriving
soon to begin formal investigations for the court.

The first defendants likely will stand trial in 2007, said Sean
Visoth, administrative director for the Extraordinary Chambers in the
Courts of Cambodia, the official name of the tribunal.

Activists and some survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide are concerned
that the tribunal, dominated by Cambodian judges and prosecutors, will
fall short of international standards. They say that the $56.3
million, three-year budget is far too small, and that the process is
taking so long that senior Khmer Rouge leaders could die before trials
begin. There will be no death penalty.

Taing Kim is one of those torn between a desire for accountability and
skepticism about the Cambodian officials running the tribunal. “I
still worry that the government judges will take sides with the Khmer
Rouge,” she said, “and that justice will be a fraud.”

Visoth asked skeptics to reserve judgment. “It’s in the best interests
of Cambodia to make this process successful,” he said.Memories of
Horror Taing Kim was among 388 survivors, former prison guards and
interrogators who arrived in the capital last week from provinces
across the country to see the courtroom and tour the most infamous
sites of torture and death. They entered the cells of Tuol Sleng, the
school-turned-prison where an estimated 14,000 to 16,000 people were
held and tortured. They beheld Choeung Ek, the most notorious of a
series of killing fields, where about 14,000 people were sent from
Tuol Sleng to be executed.

The visit was organized by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a
nonprofit research institute that has spent nine years cataloguing
Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Under a searing sun, Taing Kim alighted from a bus, took several steps
into Choeung Ek and stopped before a shallow rectangular pit, empty
now but for parched grass.

“That,” she said, jabbing a finger toward the former mass grave,
“looks just like the grave that they intended to bury me in.”

“They” were Khmer Rouge soldiers, some of them teenagers and boys no
older than she was at the time, she recalled.

Taing Kim was a newlywed when the Khmer Rouge took power in April
1975. She and her husband were sent to a labor camp. One night, he was
taken away. Three nights later, the village chief, a Khmer Rouge
member, came for her, she recalled.

“Your husband has found a good place to live and wants you to join
him,” he said.

She was taken to a clearing, where she saw several other
women. Suddenly, three soldiers grabbed her and tore off her clothes,
she recounted. The “animal act” began, she said bitterly. The first
soldier raped her, then pushed her to another, who took his turn, then
pushed her to the third, who raped her again.

What she saw next is seared in her memory. The soldiers began killing
the other women they had raped, one by one, with blows to the back of
the head,and throwing them into a grave. One woman protested that she
was four months pregnant. They killed her, ripped the fetus from her
womb and threw both into the grave, she said.

Taing Kim escaped from the young soldier guarding her by telling him
she had to relieve herself in the bushes. She ran until she found a
pond thick with rushes. She waded in and hid there for three nights.

As she recounted her story, she raised her left hand, shaking two
fingers for emphasis. “Words cannot convey my anger,” Taing Kim
said. “I wanted to kill the Khmer Rouge after the regime fell. But I
decided to leave it to the law.”

Last year, Taing Kim visited Germany on a trip sponsored by the
Documentation Center and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a foundation
that promotes social democracy. In Bonn, she spoke about her
experience. The audience wept, she recalled. They asked her how the
leaders of a Buddhist country could be so brutal. “I told them the
leaders did not understand the religion,” she said. “If they were
religious, they would not have killed people.”An Uneasy Encounter On
the day Taing Kim visited Tuol Sleng, Lach Mien, 48, a slight, deeply
tanned farmer with a broad nose and full lips, returned to the prison
for the first time in 27 years.

“We were under their command,” he said of the Khmer Rouge. “If I
refused to obey, I would be killed.”

By his account, he was 17 when a Khmer Rouge district commander
selected him to join the army. He was dispatched straight to the
battlefield.

In 1978, Lach Mien was promoted and sent to work at Tuol Sleng. He
first worked typing up interrogation reports. Then he became an
interrogator.

“It’s not a job to be proud of,” he recounted. “But I did it because I
was afraid.”

On the tour last month, he walked through prison cells for the first
time since a Vietnamese invasion force overthrew the Khmer Rouge in
1979. He viewed shackles and iron spikes lying on a mattress. In
another room, he saw a braided rope whip in a glass case.

“I had this in my room,” he said. “If the prisoner refused to answer
the question, I used it.”

His job, he said, was to force people to confess to being agents of
the CIA, the KGB or Vietnam. If they refused, he would call in the
torturer. “I’d hear the sounds of the beating,” he said. The torturer
used tree branches or electric jolts on a bare back, he said.

Suddenly, a look of shock and recognition lit up Lach Mien’s
face. “That’s me!” he said, pointing to a faded, peeling
black-and-white photo on a display board. The face was that of a boy,
the skin smooth, the nose and lips unmistakably his.

“I feel like I was born in the wrong place,” he said, with a tone of
remorse mixed with horror at what he had done.

As he walked through the courtyard, near the gallows where prisoners
had been lifted upside down and dipped in jars of filthy water, he met
Chum Mey, one of only five known living survivors of Tuol Sleng.

“Who are you?” asked Chum Mey, now 75. “I was a prisoner. That was my
room: 04,” he said, pointing to a room on the second floor.

“I was an interrogator,” Lach Mien replied softly.

Chum Mey was taken aback. “Did you know Mr. Seng? He was my
interrogator.”

“He was my team leader,” Lach Mien said, avoiding Chum Mey’s eyes.

“Did you know Mr. Hor?” Chum Mey continued, his brow knit in
agitation.

“He was the chief of the torture unit,” Lach Mien replied. “He
tortured those who refused to confess.”

Hor had broken Chum Mey’s fingers and torn out his toenails.

Lach Mien told Chum Mey that he felt compelled to do as he was ordered
or be killed himself. There was a moment of tension, but Chum Mey,
eager to see the rest of the prison, moved on.

Later, Chum Mey said he felt a flash of anger when he learned of Lach
Mien’s identity. But he wants to let the law handle the guilty, he
said. “He did not commit this crime by his own decision.”‘A Lot of
Questions’ Youk Chhang, 45, is director of the Documentation Center of
Cambodia. He was beaten and jailed briefly by the Khmer Rouge when he
was 14. In his view, the tribunal’s success will depend on public
participation, so that the people can decide for themselves whether
justice is being served.

“There are still a lot of questions about why it happened, how it
happened, and who did this,” he said in an interview. “We still deny
that Cambodians are capable of killing other Cambodians. It brings
shame to our nation. We need the trial to reflect on
ourselves. . . . Knowledge heals.”

Activists are skeptical that the Cambodian courts can fairly conduct a
genocide trial, even with international help. The courts here are
partisan and controlled by the ruling coalition, said Kek Galabru,
president of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of
Human Rights.

She noted that the process so far has taken nine years and that the
Cambodian government still has not raised its $13.3 million share of
the tribunal budget.

Prime Minister Hun Sen was a member of the Khmer Rouge before breaking
with the group and defecting to Vietnam in 1977.

The tribunal’s U.N. deputy administrative director, Michelle Lee, said
the United Nations could withdraw from the process if officials think
it fails to meet international standards. Cambodian judges will
constitute a majority on each panel, but as a safeguard, an
international judge must agree before a guilty verdict is reached.

“Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t see much political will by the
government to see such a tribunal,” Kek Galabru said. “They have to
show us.”

On a Saturday last month, at the Choeung Ek killing field, Taing Kim
lit a stick of incense and placed it in an urn in front of a granite
stupa, a Buddhist memorial to the victims. Inside, more than 5,000
human skulls layon a series of tiers. Many had been shattered by
gunshots to the head or smashed in with hoes. One was labeled
“Juvenile female, 15-20 years.” Another “Senile male, over 60 years
old.”

They too, she said, await justice.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company