RIGHTS-CAMBODIA: The Genocide of Justice

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Analysis - Boonthan Sakanond

BANGKOK, Jan 3 1999 (IPS) - As the international clamour grows for punishing two top Khmer Rouge leaders who surrendered recently to the Cambodian government, questions remain how about they can be brought to trial if local authorities refuse to initiate action against them.

Analysts say that barring a change in the stance of Cambodian authorities, the only hope for justice could be lengthy and complex proceedings against them, for alleged crimes against humanity, in an international court of law.

Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, among the few surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, were promised immunity from trial by the Cambodian government late December as part of a deal struck for their peaceful surrender by Prime Minister Hun Sen.

“If we bring them to trial, it will not benefit the nation, it will only mean a return to civil war,” Hun Sen was quoted as saying after their surrender. “We should dig a hole and bury the past and look toward the future.”

The two leaders were senior members of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and forcibly turned the country into an agrarian commune in line with their extreme Maoist ideology.

Some two million people died of overwork, starvation, disease and systematic executions during the Khmer Rouge’s reign, before it was ousted by rebels backed by Vietnamese troops in 1979.

Pol Pot, the supreme leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in April 1998 while on the run from Cambodian government troops near the Thai-Cambodia border.

Ieng Sary, Pol Pots brother-in-law, was granted amnesty in 1996 after surrendering with several thousand troops. Only one leader, Ta Mok, a commander notorious for his butchery, remains at large with some 100 loyalists.

Though the Cambodian government has sought amnesty for Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, such a move is not expected to take place without strong resistance from both within and outside the country.

In a statement, King Sihanouk, officially Cambodias head of state, refused to accept any demand for granting amnesty to the two men.

“I will not renew my power of amnesty for major Khmer Rouge criminals,” Sihanouk said in a statement from Beijing, where he is undergoing medical treatment. The king stated he believes the majority of Cambodians do not support a pardon.

Internationally, pressure is mounting on the Cambodian government from human rights groups and some governments to bring surviving Khmer Rouge leaders before a tribunal to try them for crimes against humanity.

“It’s a black day for the Cambodian people and a black day for international justice,” Demelza Stubbings, a representative of Amnesty International, was quoted as saying. The human rights group expressed shock at Hun Sen’s reversal of his previously stated support for the creation of a tribunal.

Hun Sen, a young Khmer Rouge commander in the mid-seventies, was one of the leaders of the uprising against the Pol Pot regime and became premier of the Vietnamese-backed government in Cambodia. Over the past two decades he has consistently maintained that Khmer Rouge leaders will be punished if caught and repeatedly sought the setting up of an international tribunal.

Though evidence of the Khmer Rouges crimes against humanity have existed for nearly two decades, attempts to set up an international tribunal to prosecute guerrilla leaders have been initiated only in recent years.

The United States and China, which as part of their Cold War, anti-Vietnam strategy in the eighties backed the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian civil war, had strongly opposed any moves toward trying the guerrilla leaders in the past. The extremist group was and still remains bitterly anti- Vietnamese.

“There is no doubt that the Western world bears a high responsibility for todays situation,” says Raoul Marc Jennar, a Cambodia scholar based in Phnom Penh.

“Led by the United States of America, the West strongly supported the reconstruction of the Khmer Rouge army after 1979, protected the Cambodian seat at the UN for the Khmer Rouge and refused to condemn the genocide and the crimes against peace, the war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed under Pol Pot and Khieu Samphans leadership,” explains Jennar.

The West, he says, even refused to include the word “genocide” in the Paris peace agreement which brought the Khmer Rouge to the negotiating table and paved the way for UN-sponsored elections in 1993.

With the end of the Cold War, the US government changed its stance. A proposal by the US to set up an international tribunal -û along the lines of those set up in Bosnia and Rwanda — to try the remaining members of the Khmer Rouge leadership is pending before the UN Security Council.

But no such tribunal is expected to be effective unless it is actively supported by the Cambodian government — and here lies the stumbling block to bringing Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.

Even if the U.N. goes ahead with an international tribunal, there will be a basic obstacle facing any such body, apart from putting hard evidence against the Khmer Rouge leaders in a court of law: the apprehension of these offenders who have eluded capture for nearly 20 years.

If the surrendered guerrilla leaders choose not to leave Cambodia, they cannot be arrested like Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who is under detention in the United Kingdom and whose arrest on foreign soil is seen by activists as an alternative way of bringing human rights offenders to justice.

Still, some diplomats in Phnom Penh are speculating about a possible about-turn by the Cambodian government, which they say might yet use the guerrilla leaders as pawns to win concessions from the international community.

“Amnesty to Ieng Sary, though not morally justified, was politically understandable as he defected along with troops and hence helped mitigate the civil war between government troops and the guerillas. But there is no such obvious strategic benefit in pardoning Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea,” observes an Asian diplomat in Phnom Penh.

The diplomat feels that Hun Sen may still have some trick up his sleeve and is planning a trial of the two Khmer Rouge leaders at a later stage.

Highlighting the deceptive nature of Cambodia’s politics on the Khmer Rouge issue is the call for an international tribunal for Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea by Sam Rainsy, an opposition leader who had been a strong supporter of amnesty for the the guerrillas.

Prince Norodom Ranariddh, leader of the royalist Funcinpec Party, which was allied with the Khmer Rouge in the eighties and waged war against Hun Sen s government, has kept quiet on the issue. In the past, he had campaigned for pardoning the guerrilla leaders.

Ranariddh, though till recently the main opposition leader in Cambodia, joined hands with Hun Sen and took over the post of chairman of the newly elected Cambodian National Assembly after the July 1998 general election.

“Justice does not exist in Cambodia. Because only a few feel bound by ethics and values. Cynicism and tactics prevail. Not principles,” says Jennar.

So unless new and clear actions by the Cambodian government prove the contrary, the December deal it struck with the Khmer Rouge leaders will be a victory for impunity, and an occasion for shame and mourning.