Cambodia’s
The Khmer Rouge Tribunal:
Why has it taken so long to establish Asia’s
first genocide tribunal? Will it achieve justice both for the living
and the
dead?
A talk by Tom
Fawthrop
Present:
Reinhard Hohler, Patrick McGowan, Ken Dyer, Kosum Saichan,
Jill Locke,
Glynn Morgan, Mathew Smith, Constance Brereton, Bonnie Brereton, Nikko
Snyder,
Stezygne Szano, Gianni Lia, Annelie Hendriks, Manus Brinkman, Thomas
Ohlson,
Richard Nelson-Jones, Kain Victor, Juergen Polte, Dianne & Mark
Barber-Riley, Guy Cardinal, Hans & Saengdao Bänziger, Victoria
Voneito,
John Cadet, Ian Ross, Arthur Wright, Olivier Evrard. An audience of 28.
Tom Fawthrop is
a British journalist
covering SE Asia and has been reporting on Cambodia
since 1981 for
international newspapers such as The Economist and The
Sunday
Times. His first glimpse of gun-toting Khmer Rouge teenagers was
in 1979
in a jungle along the Cambodian-Thai border. He has also witnessed a
number of
momentous events in his career, including the downfall of the Marcos
Regime and
the destruction of East Timor by
military-orchestrated violence.
This is
Tom’s summary
of his talk.
Genocide,
Justice & the Cambodian Tragedy
Of
all
the atrocities of our times, one of the worst was what happened in Cambodia
from
1975-79, the era of the Pol Pot regime. His Khmer Rouge forces driven
by a
brutal mixture of xenophobic nationalism and an extreme Maoist creed
emptied
the cities and turned the country into a vast rural gulag. They killed
through
mass executions and torture or caused the death from starvation and
lack of
medicine 1.7 million Cambodians - an estimated 22% of the population.
Only
now, 27 years later, international justice is finally catching up with
these
mass murderers. Pol Pot is dead - but those top leaders who are still
alive are
now the subject of an indictment before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal that
is
currently being set up in Phnom
Penh.
Why
on
earth has it taken so long for Cambodians to have the opportunity to
close this
dark chapter of their history and have the satisfaction of seeing
justice done
and their tormentors held accountable?
After
the Nazi genocide against the Jews, the world came together in the
United
Nations to pass the 1948 Geneva Convention for the Prevention and the
Prosecution of Genocide.
Why
was
it not implemented back in 1979 immediately after the overthrow of the
Pol Pot
regime? (Convenor: one of the reasons Tom gave for this was that
the Khmer
Rouge had murdered almost all of the judges, and anyone else with an
education.)
It
was
not for any lack of evidence. In the middle of Cambodia's
capital city of Phnom Penh,
there is a very unusual school building. Years ago it was a school. But
it
didn't become notorious until after it was converted into a political
prison
called S-21. For several years S-21 was a place of indescribable
cruelty. They
said then that you could hear the screams from blocks away. Today there
is only
an eerie silence.
In
1979
a Vietnamese photographer stumbled on S-21 and found that most of its
records
of inmates, confessions and horrible tortures remained intact. This
evidence is
a prosecutors dream.
Mountains of
evidence were available even back then. Hundreds of
survivors were eager to testify about the horrors of the Pol Pot
regime. But where were the human
rights
lawyers and investigators in 1979?
The KRT tribunal
has
been delayed for 27 years primarily because Washington and its allies
persuaded
UN member states to accept the credentials of the Pol Pot regime, even
after it
had been driven out of Phnom
Penh.
The voting record shows that not one western government ever opposed
the
seating of the Pol Pot delegation. The UN was bullied and cajoled into
accepting a murderous regime functioning largely from exile in Thailand.
This
travesty of
diplomacy has become one of the most shameful chapters in UN history.
Cambodia,
already a victim of US B52 bombing and the Pol Pot regime, was made to
suffer
all over again because it had been liberated in 1979 by the wrong
country; Vietnam.
Cambodian refugees and survivors called for an international tribunal,
as did
Bill Hayden, the then Australian foreign minister, international NGOs
and Hun
Sen, Cambodia's
prime minister. They were contemptuously ignored by the very
governments that see
themselves as the western guardians of global human rights.
A
genocide
tribunal
was viewed as a dangerous diversion at a time when Washington
and London
were
intent on backing the anti-Vietnamese insurgency of Pol Pot and his
allies. In
the 80s, while Oxfam was helping Cambodians recover from Year Zero with
aid for
clean water and sanitation, Britain
was sending SAS trainers to advise the anti-Vietnamese coalition
forces,
including the Khmer Rouge, camped on the Thai border - so that they
could more
effectively sabotage Cambodia's
fragile recovery.
That
is
why more recent genocides in Bosnia,
Rwanda
and Sierra Leone
have all leapfrogged over Cambodia – in
those countries international justice and trials for crimes against
humanity
and genocide have already started years ago.
The
Cambodian Tribunal is unique. It is the tribunal that the pundits said
would
never happen because some governments have been implicated and
compromised by
their support for the Khmer Rouge. China,
the US, UK, Thailand,
and Singapore
all opposed any attempt to put Pol Pot on trial during the 1980s and
have all
been involved in covert support of Khmer Rouge forces and their allies.
It
was
not until 1997 that the UN General Assembly finally recognised that
crimes
against humanity had occurred during the Pol Pot era and that the
perpetrators
should be held accountable.
In
May
2003 a treaty was signed between the Cambodian government and the UN to
hold a
tribunal in Phnom Penh.
Based on a partnership of international judges and lawyers working
together
with Cambodian judges and lawyers. These judges have now been named, a
Secretariat is now functioning and the tribunal is expected to open in
January
2007.
The ultimate
enemy
of justice is now memory and time. The memories of witnesses and
defendants are
fading, and many of those with evidence to give are dying. Several
Khmer Rouge
leaders, including Pol Pot, have cheated justice with their own deaths.
Now,
after all the time lost, Cambodians have a right to a final hearing. So
many
hurdles have been surmounted that it is now only a matter of funding.
------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Fawthrop has
reported on Cambodia
and SE Asia since 1979 for
international media including the
Guardian, Irish Times the Economist and BBC online.
He is the
co-author
of “ GETTING AWAY WITH GENOCIDE
Elusive Justice
& the Khmer Rouge Tribunal “
By Tom Fawthrop /
Dr. Helen Jarvis
The book covers
the
period from 1979 -2004 including Cambodia
after the Khmer Rouge/ the struggle to preserve the evidence during the
1980s
and raise the issue/ the Khmer Rouge battle to regain power backed by China and the complicity of western
powers
/diplomacy and UN peacekeeping in Cambodia.
Truth, justice
and
reconciliation – the Cambodian model of dealing with their tragic
past. What a
tribunal can hope to achieve and why Cambodian people 27 years on still
hunger
for justice/who will be put on trial and where are the suspects now?
Contains rare pix
of
Pol Pot enjoying hospitality in Thailand
Published in UK
by
Pluto Books. It is available here in Chiangmai through INTG at the
discount
price of 800 Baht (over 1300 baht Asia Books) by contacting Louis
Gabaude at
EFEO House.
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