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THE
ROVING EYE
Rouge justice
By
Pepe Escobar
It was exactly 30 years ago.
It still is, and will remain for ages, a
collective trauma: every single person in Cambodia
has at least one relative who was killed in the
dreaded Pol Pot years (April 17, 1975-January 7,
1979) when the Khmer Rouge imposed a neo-agrarian
social-engineering folly on a whole nation.
Conceptualized by Ieng Sary - based on his own
Sorbonne thesis - and implemented by Pol Pot, the
return of Cambodia to Year Zero and the terror
reign of Angkar (the Party) may have killed up to
2 million Cambodians, out of a total population of
7.7 million, and traumatized everyone else in the
country for generations.
Some of Pol Pot's
henchmen are still alive, living in the desolate
Pailin area or hidden in crumbling mansions in
Phnom Penh. Nobody was ever punished for the
concentration camps, the institutionalized terror,
the mass executions, the mass famine. In 2003,
filmmaker Rithy Pann released the remarkable
S21, where a few survivors and their former
executioners confront their memories on the site
of S21, the former school in Tuol Sleng that
became a detention center in the heart of Phnom
Penh where 17,000 prisoners were tortured and then
executed. As Nath, a survivor, tells another
survivor in front of Tuol Sleng, reconverted into
a genocide museum: "Up to now, has anybody said
that the 2 million dead among the Khmer people
were a mistake, has anybody said 'I'm sorry'? Have
you ever heard this from any of the commanders, or
the executioners? So how will the families of the
victims and the survivors rediscover peace? How to
understand that it was a crime? They don't even
say it was a mistake! They don't have anything to
be forgiven because it was not a mistake."
A tribunal no one really
wants
This impunity corrodes Cambodia's
gentle Buddhist soul. To add insult to unspeakable
injury, the Khmer Rouge terror - the ultimate Cold
War-related tragedy - was far from over after the
Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in January 1979.
During the 1980s it metamorphosed into shameful
acceptance, to the point that the United States
recognized the "exiled" Khmer Rouge as the
legitimate government of Cambodia and the Khmer
Rouge kept a United Nations seat. Even after the
collapse of the "evil" Soviet empire and the end
of the Cold War, the government of strongman Hun
Sen and the UN only reached an agreement on a
court in 2003.
The whole process has been
dragging on forever. The Cambodian National
Assembly approved "extraordinary chambers" to
conduct a trial only in early January 2001. In May
2003 the UN adopted Resolution 57/228B, which set
a three-year-long tribunal, with its US$56.3
million budget basically provided by the
international community, composed of Cambodian and
international judges, and with life imprisonment
as the maximum sentence (no death penalty). But it
was only in October 2004 that the Hun Sen
government finally ratified the tribunal
agreement.
Dispensing a few drops of
justice three decades after the facts depends on a
mere fistful of dollars. Late last month, the
international community finally pledged a paltry
$38 million for the trial, still $4.5 million
short of the necessary $43 million. Japan is the
largest donor ($21.6 million, half of the total),
followed by France ($4.8 million), Britain ($2.8
million) and Australia ($2.3 million). The US has
contributed exactly zero dollars. Cambodia, one of
the poorest countries in the world, is supposed to
contribute $13 million. But it has officially
announced it can only come up with $1.5 million.
Considering that foreign donors injected more than
$500 million into the Cambodian economy in 2004, a
little extra global effort wouldn't hurt much.
The US is not offering a single cent
because of the Foreign Operations Appropriations
Act of 2005, passed by Congress, which explicitly
forbids help to a Cambodian tribunal. Only
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has the power
to overturn it, if she judges in her infinite
wisdom that the tribunal is competent,
independent, impartial, incorruptible and "capable
of delivering justice that meets internationally
recognized standards". Many at the UN recognize
that the system is not perfect. Most of the judges
will be Cambodian, but all major decisions will
require the vote of at least one international
judge. Anyway, the UN is staking its reputation on
the trial - though not so forcefully as it should.
But so far there's no evidence Rice is losing any
sleep over the matter.
No one is,
actually. The US - after the Vietnam War and the
illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia itself (which
killed more than 600,000 Cambodians, according to
local and European estimates) has absolutely no
moral authority to push for a tribunal: every
serious historian of Southeast Asia knows that the
Khmer Rouge emerged because Washington did
everything to undermine King Norodom Sihanouk.
China blatantly supported the Khmer Rouge. As for
Japan, it may be funding half of the proceedings,
but its full attention is in fact focused on its
bid to become a permanent member of the UN
Security Council - an uphill battle considering
that China is seriously considering its World War
II-related reasons to block it.
Even the
Cambodian nation is not unanimous. The majority of
the population, now at 12 million, is less than 20
years old, and a third lives under the poverty
line. Most know about the Khmer Rouge only by oral
tradition, with no direct experience of the
terrible suffering. They tend to believe that the
money sucked up by a long trial would be better
spent on socially conscious projects.
So
it's up to the UN to take the lead. The problem is
that the UN has been consumed by other crucial
problems, such as the tsunami aftermath and the
Darfur tragedy in Sudan - which Secretary General
Kofi Annan considers the most pressing
humanitarian tragedy at the moment. Moreover,
there's the need to fight back the relentless
efforts by Washington neo-cons to discredit the UN
and Annan himself.
Cambodia is trying to
do its part. It has appointed a task force that
will train 300 people and it is taking care of
logistics. But nothing much is being done - apart
from preliminary training for 30 judges and the
translation of legal documents into the three
official tribunal languages, Khmer, English and
French - because there is no money, thus no final
green light from the UN. For security reasons, the
tribunal will probably take place at a military
barracks 11 kilometers west of Phnom Penh. The UN
has still not approved the site.
The main
priority will be how to make Cambodian and
international judicial staff work as a team. The
tribunal will automatically follow Cambodian court
procedures but will use international rules
whenever they need. Legal experts already despair:
they say a specific code for this new court will
have to be drafted.
United Nations
officials in Geneva admit off the record that the
UN and especially Annan himself must urgently
demonstrate their total commitment to get things
moving. One way of doing it would be to give the
go-ahead for the tribunal even if full funding is
still not secured. The tribunal in this case would
be able to start in three months' time, while the
UN goes on overdrive to get the remaining fistful
of dollars.
Pol Pot is dead. Only a few,
aging Khmer Rouge commanders will be tried.
Certainly not the prison guards and torturers in
Rithy Pann's film, who say on camera they were
just following orders from Angkar. Strongman Hun
Sen is a former Khmer Rouge. Today he poses as a
statesman - the longest-serving prime minister in
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. One
wonders whether he will allow Cambodia to confront
its terrible legacy of autogenocide freely, or
whether he embraces the sound of silent pain
corroding the soul of a nation for decades to
come.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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