Wednesday, May 20, marks the annual “Day of Anger” for Cambodians remembering the victims of the brutal five-year reign of the Khmer Rouge. The five defendants to be tried in Phnom Penh are accused of crimes against humanity relating to the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodian lives in 1975-79.
It has been more than three months since the ceremonial start of the trials in Cambodia on February 17, intended to bring the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. Witnesses were first called on March 30 and have only recently begun their testimony. Civil war ended in Cambodia in the 1990s, and Khmer Rouge chief Pol Pot died a decade ago. Justice is only now being sought, some 30 years after the Killing Fields era.
At this rate, it might be another 30 years by the time closing arguments roll around.
International news reports from the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia in February focused on the historic nature of the Khmer Rouge trials, but most articles mentioned the word “corruption” in their leads, if not in the headlines.
Disputes between the international and Cambodian judges who sit on the hybrid United Nations/Cambodian tribunal still remain unresolved, and charges of corruption are now coming from both sides. The Phnom Penh Post reported “a complete breakdown of trust between the two sides” on May 13.
The international judges hope to try even more Khmer Rouge members—something the Cambodian side of the court will not permit. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was, coincidentally, a lower-level Khmer Rouge officer until 1977, has said that more trials could send the country back into civil war.
Funding for the tribunal from international donors is mostly frozen in a trust fund held by the United Nations Development Program, pending a commitment from Phnom Penh to ensure that proceedings will be free and fair—and that someone besides the Cambodian government can hear complaints. Frustrated by Hun Sen’s intransigence, Australia took the rogue step of calling for the release of its donations in April, a request the UNDP denied. The trials likely would not have started at all without a $200,000 bailout from Japan to pay Cambodian staff. Japan then went even further, upping its investment in the court with a $4.17 million donation in April.
The first defendant is Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), 66, the former head guard of Tuol Sling “S-21” prison, where an estimated 16,000 perished. Yet the other four defendants, including Nuon Chea, 81, reputedly Pol Pot’s number two, are thought to carry greater responsibility for orchestrating widespread massacres that were part of an experimental policy to establish an entirely agrarian society of brutal forced labor camps.
A number of local non-governmental organizations, like the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, have launched a determined effort to spread the word about the trials. In some rural communities, Cambodians continue to live alongside the same Khmer Rouge officials that tormented and exterminated their families three decades ago. Ideally, the pursuit of justice would bring healing and reconciliation to remote villages, but the court doesn’t have the mandate to touch these aging, lower-level party members.
Despite the outreach efforts, a January 2009 survey from the University of California-Berkeley’s Human Rights Center reports that 85 percent of Cambodians have little or no knowledge that a trial is even underway.
This remarkable lack of interest, and the unaddressed allegations of corruption, raise the tense question of whom the expensive and controversial proceedings actually benefit.
Cambodian-American sociologist Leakhena Nou, an assistant professor at California State University-Long Beach, is a vocal critic of the trials. In a February 18 National Public Radio interview, she noted that the tribunal would not “address a more deep-seated emotional trauma that has impacted the population.”
David Crane, founding chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, concurs. At a February conference on transitional justice at Fordham Law School, Crane spoke about some of the factors that made the Sierra Leone trials a particular success. The Sierra Leone tribunal was physically located at the scene of some of the war’s most hideous crimes. (The Cambodian tribunal is tucked away from public view on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.) The Sierra Leone trial began in 2002, immediately after the civil war, and also benefited from a truth commission. (The Cambodian tribunal comes some 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, and does not include a truth commission.)
Crane also emphasized that the Sierra Leone trial met the most important criteria of international justice—it was for and about the victims. International justice, in the spirit of the Nuremburg Trials, can work for post-conflict societies and provide healing and closure to victims. But it’s not the right approach every time, particularly when 30 years have passed since the crimes were committed.
Justice in Cambodia should be exclusively about people like artist Bou Meng, 68, and mechanic Chum Mey, 78, who will testify in Phnom Penh in the coming weeks. The court should also have the support of people living far away from the trial headquarters. Victims of the Khmer Rouge have suffered too much too long ago to see their traumatic experience undermined by a global squabble over international funds and clashing conceptions of international law.
Caroline Stauffer is a former intern at the World Policy Institute and is currently in Bangkok working with the Associated Press.