More than three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, its key members are going on trial in a court that Cambodians appear to have little confidence in, writes RORY BYRNEin Cambodia
THIS WEEK SAW events in Cambodia that many believed would never happen. More than 30 years after the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power by invading Vietnamese soldiers and their Cambodian allies, the trials of those deemed “most responsible” for the deaths of an estimated million and a half men, women and children under the ultra-Maoist group finally began.
The joint UN/Cambodian tribunal has been delayed by three decades of war and negotiations, and many Cambodians were convinced it would never take place. The government, they whispered, will scupper the process, and even now, with the trials under way, doubts persist on whether justice will finally be served.
These concerns are understandable, given that the government is led by strongman Hun Sen, a former member of the Khmer Rouge. “The government will delay the court until these old Khmer Rouge leaders have died,” says Phnom Penh taxi driver Som Mey, a member of the main opposition Sam Rainsy party. “The CPP [Cambodian People’s Party led by Prime Minister Hun Sen] does not want the truth to come out.”
For its part, the government has consistently denied that it has or will ever seek to influence the court, pointing out that it began the trials process in the first place, in 1997. The Khmer Rouge, led by the mysterious and charismatic Pol Pot, who died in 1998, seized power in 1975 after defeating the corrupt US-backed Lon Nol regime in a long and bloody war. Its aim was to transform Cambodia into a self-sufficient rural-based communist utopia, and anyone who got in its way was to be “swept away”.
For the next three years, eight months and 20 days Cambodia drowned in a sea of its own blood. Whole classes of its society were ripped out, root and branch. Urban dwellers, foreign minorities, Buddhist monks and the educated were targeted for systemic destruction.
Unlike in China under Mao, no effort was made to “re-educate” those termed “class enemies”. Under the Khmer Rouge, they were liquidated – either immediately, or by being worked to death. “If you live, no gain; if you die, no loss” was the mantra of the black-clad Khmer Rouge cadres who killed with impunity. Many “old people” – the very peasants that the Khmer Rouge claimed to represent – also died from starvation or were executed for “counter-revolutionary” crimes as trivial as breaking a hoe. By the time the Khmer Rouge was swept from power in 1979 about a quarter of the population had died.
So far, five former leaders of the Khmer Rouge have been arrested and brought before the court, but it remains unclear whether more indictments will follow. There are hundreds if not thousands of mass murderers still living freely in Cambodia, often side by side with their victims, and few if any of them will face justice.
VISIT ALMOST any village in Cambodia and talk to anyone aged over 35 and you quickly get a sense of the terrible legacy of the Khmer Rouge. In Phum Mae Lop in Prey Veng province in eastern Cambodia, the grief and rage of the villagers 30 years after the fall of the regime is palpable. Tears flow down the cheeks of one old woman and she has to be held up by friends as she remembers the husband and five children she lost under the Khmer Rouge. “Why did they kill them when they did nothing wrong?” she weeps. This is the question most Cambodians are still asking – why did Cambodians kill their fellow countrymen and women in such numbers and with such brutality?
It remains unclear whether the Khmer Rouge tribunal, officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), will draw a line under the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. A recent study conducted by the Open Society Justice Initiative found three-quarters of the people here have little or no knowledge of the ECCC, while among those that did know about it, about a third said they had no confidence that the court would deliver justice. While the ECCC has made some effort to reach out to victims, success has been limited.
About 80 per cent of Cambodians are illiterate peasants living in isolated villages largely cut off from the outside world. They rely on government-owned television and radio stations for information, and so far the government has made little effort to inform them about the court.
Nevertheless, the start of the Khmer Rouge tribunal is undoubtedly an historic event. “It’s an important day for Cambodia, for justice, and, at the risk of being grandiloquent, for humanity,” international co-prosecutor Robert Petit told reporters after the opening of the first trial on Tuesday.
In the dock is Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his nom de guerre Comrade Duch. At 66 years old, he is the youngest of the five defendants, the rest of whom are in their 80s. A slightly built former maths teacher, Duch was the commander of the Khmer Rouge special branch known as Security Prison 21 (S21), headquartered in a former school turned torture centre in downtown Phnom Penh. According to documents discovered there in 1979, at least 12,380 people were tortured before being executed at the nearby Choeung Ek killing fields on the outskirts of town. S21’s base was captured intact by Vietnamese forces, who swept into Phnom Penh on January 7th, 1979, and it is now a genocide museum.
Visiting the museum today you come face-to-face with the horrors committed by the Pol Pot regime. Dried blood still stains the walls of the classrooms, where victims were tied to iron bed frames and tortured with iron bars, pliers and electric shocks. Many of the victims at S21 were members of the Khmer Rouge; they and their families were accused by an increasingly paranoid regime of secretly working for the CIA, the KGB or the Vietnamese.
Duch is the only one of the five former KR leaders due to stand trial who readily admits his guilt. He is a born-again Christian and has vowed to tell all in court. Because the Khmer Rouge was an incredibly secretive organisation, most Cambodians still know little about it, a situation not helped by the fact that the history of the Pol Pot era has never been taught in Cambodian schools.
Vann Nath (63), is an artist who survived internment and torture in S21. He attended the opening of the trial on Tuesday and said it was only the second time he had seen Duch’s face since being a prisoner. Vann Nath says that Duch’s demeanour is mysterious. “When he was in power, he was brutal. I was afraid to look at his face. Now, he’s just an old man.”
Indeed, it’s the banality of evil that is so striking when considering the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Most of the perpetrators were indistinguishable from their victims. Three years ago on a trip to the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin, I paid a visit to Nuon Chea (86), at his rustic cabin built right on the Thai border. While Pol Pot had concentrated on political matters, Nuon Chea, known as “Brother Number Two” in the regime’s hierarchy, is believed to have been responsible for implementing the group’s genocidal policies. This included working closely with Duch at S21.
Nuon Chea was sick in bed but rose to greet me. Shaking my hand, he engaged in small talk while his wife served ice-cold water and watermelon. Chea’s knees were bandaged and he complained constantly of arthritis and other ailments.
He denied that the communist party was responsible for the millions of deaths in Cambodia. While admitting that “mistakes were made”, he preferred to point the finger of blame at foreign powers. Watching him as he was lovingly tended to by his younger wife, he seemed just like any other Cambodian man of his age. When he announced that our meeting was over and rose to say goodbye, I snapped his photo in the interests of posterity. Suddenly the old man’s face turned ashen. Completely ignoring me, he turned on my hapless interpreter. “I know you very well,” he said in Khmer. “I know where you live. I can have you killed.”