Sat, Aug. 11, 2007
Editorial | Genocide Tribunal
Justice for Cambodia
Cambodians have been waiting decades for justice to rise from the
killing fields. Finally, that time has come.
The country’s genocide tribunal last week indicted Kaing Guek Eav,
better known as Duch. He is the first top official of the notorious
Khmer Rouge to be detained by the special U.N.-backed war crimes
court.
The slow march to accountability holds many lessons for international
justice.
Duch, 64, ran a notorious prison that doubled as a torture and
execution center. The building is now a memorial to the 14,000 people
who lost their lives there. Only seven inmates survived.
About 1.7 million Cambodians died when the radical communist group
Khmer Rouge ruled, from 1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot,
killed one-fifth of the country’s population in pursuit of a twisted
vision of a peasant utopia.
Intellectuals and professionals were executed. Peasants never got
their utopia, but at least they had a better chance of surviving: Many
among the 150,000 Cambodian refugees in Philadelphia and other
American cities were impoverished farmers.
A credible justice process for the Khmer Rouge’s crimes has been
stalled for many reasons, including a 10-year occupation of Cambodia
by the Vietnamese, who ousted the Khmer Rouge from power, and a
13-year civil war.
Long-time Prime Minister Hun Sen also has resisted an international
tribunal. That could be because he feared an inquiry might provide
damning details of links between members of his government and the
Khmer Rouge.
In that fear rests the importance of pursuing justice for all crimes
against humanity.
Such trials, once convictions accumulate around the world, hold
promise of having a deterrent effect on heads of state who otherwise
might resort to grotesque human rights abuses to retain their grip on
power and resources.
Dictators thrive on impunity for their actions. They bet that the
international community won’t bother to intervene, especially if they
are in remote corners of the world.
An international justice system that can indict, catch and convict the
purveyors of genocide is part of the calculus for ending that impunity
and changing bad guys’ thinking.
But there will have to be flexibility, even if human rights activists
dream of all such cases going before the International Criminal Court
in the Hague.
Hun Sen wasn’t ever going to give up all control over trying Khmer
Rouge officials. The compromise, five years in the making, is a hybrid
tribunal comprising international and Cambodian jurists. Procedural
rules also had to be worked out with Hun Sen’s government.
The court may not have the full freedom of other tribunals, but it
already is proving its worth by targeting Duch; Pol Pot’s top
lieutenant, Nuon Chea; former Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, and Khieu
Samphan, who was president under the Khmer Rouge.
Their prosecution can come none too soon. Pol Pot and his military
commander, Ta Mok, lived into old age without ever being tried. Other
top leaders, who have been allowed to live freely in Cambodia, are in
their 70s or older.
Rorng Sorn, 39, was a child in Cambodia during Pol Pot’s reign. Two of
her uncles died. She and her sister were separated from their parents
for years.
Now director of programs at the Cambodian Association of Greater
Philadelphia, Sorn says the prosecutions now are a good thing, but she
long ago moved on with her life.
Others have been waiting.
Sorn told of an elderly Cambodian man in Philadelphia whose parents
were killed by the Khmer Rouge. One sister died from illness; another
walked into the woods to look for food and never returned.
The man said holding Khmer Rouge officials accountable honors the
memory of his lost loved ones. It is for them that Duch and others
should face public scrutiny and scorn.
Cambodians deserve to hear accounts of how and why atrocities were
done from the mouths of the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders. They
deserve verdicts based on evidence.
Only then can this bloody chapter in history be closed.