CAMBODIA: Killing Fields Survivors Want Full Access to Tribunal

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 5 2004 (IPS) - As Cambodia moves closer to setting up a tribunal to prosecute members of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, the call for survivors of that brutal period to witness the entire trial is gathering momentum.

In the vanguard are those like Youk Chhang, who was just 14 years when the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, marched into Phnom Penh in 1975 and unleashed a policy of terror and oppression through out Cambodia that lasted till 1979.

”For me as a survivor, it is important for the government to ensure that survivors are allowed to witness the entire trial,” Chhang, director of the Phnom Penh-based Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DCC), told IPS in a telephone interview.

Public participation, he added, will ”guarantee the quality of the trial now that all is set for it to begin.”

The DCC is an independent body that, since January 1995, has been chronicling stories and gathering evidence from Cambodians who witnessed or suffered during the Khmer Rouge dictatorship.

Close to 1.7 million Cambodians were killed during the Maoist group’s rule, due to executions, forced labour and famines.

For now, this push for openness and public participation during the trial appears to have received support from the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The government recognises that the tribunal will be a ”public process and it will be open to the public and to different organisations,” said Helen Jarvis, advisor to Deputy Prime Minister Sok An, who heads the government’s task force for the tribunal.

Such openness is ”stipulated clearly in the law regarding the tribunal,” Jarvis explained in an interview. ”However, there will be some closed hearings if the tribunal requires it, as it is the case elsewhere.”

On Tuesday, the Cambodian parliament approved 29 amendments to prevailing laws, enabling the likelihood of this U.N.-backed special tribunal to get underway in mid-2005 to prosecute the surviving members of Pol Pot’s regime.

It came a day after the parliament endorsed an agreement between the United Nations and Phnom Penh that laid the groundwork for this tribunal, which has had a rocky and, at times, troublesome journey since its first draft six-years ago.

The final hurdle that stands in the way is the funds needed for the trials, due to last three years. The United Nations has estimated the trial to cost over 50 million U.S. dollars, a tab to be picked up by impoverished Cambodia and the international donor community.

Pol Pot, however, will not be facing justice, since he died in 1998. Nor, say some rights activists, will then foreign minister Ieng Sary, who was granted an amnesty by the current Cambodian government.

Of the other surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, only two members – Ta Mok, the military chief, and Duch, who headed the grisly Toul Sleng interrogation centre in Phnom Penh – await the tribunal.

The concern by Chhang and other survivors to witness the tribunal’s proceedings is with reason – to ensure it is credible and that justice prevails.

It evolves from the disputes that have arisen since 2001 about the nature of the tribunal and the judges who will preside over the hearings.

The Cambodian government has rejected attempts by U.N. officials, legal scholars and human rights groups to establish a special war crimes tribunal in this South-east Asian country on the lines of the two others trying perpetrators of gross human rights violations in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Phnom Penh insisted – and subsequently prevailed – with its push for a mixed tribunal. This involves a fusion of local and international jurists, with local judges making up the majority but guided by international law.

In the case of the tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, however, they were composed of foreign jurists in their entirety with no local judges on the bench, which has been the tradition for war crimes tribunals.

Groups like the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the London-based Amnesty International have questioned the new legal format of a mixed tribunal in the wake of Cambodia’s weak judicial system.

In separate reports, both human rights watchdogs have expressed concern that politics rather than justice may prevail, due to the influence Cambodia’s political elite has over the judiciary and also the record of corruption within the legal establishment.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, too, reflected such concern in 2002, when he questioned Phnom Penh’s decision for a mixed tribunal, saying that such a special court ”would not guarantee independence, impartiality and objectivity.”

Hun Sen, himself, has been named by some rights activists as someone to watch during the trial, since he was a former member of Khmer Rouge till he defected to join the subsequent Vietnamese-backed government.

Cambodian human rights activists have also lent their voice to the doubters about a fair judicial process due to another glaring reality – the country having few judges who are versed in the field of international law for war crimes tribunals.

Jarvis, the government advisor, admits that Phnom Penh will have to overcome this fear. ”The issue of the quality of the judges is something that people are concerned about. And Cambodia has already begun training its judges to ensure that quality will prevail.”