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Cambodia Trials To Begin

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The Associated Press

Published: February 2, 2009

KOMPONG SPEU, Cambodia - Im Savoeun remembers how they clung to each other for the last time, sobbing, as life drained from her husband after a savage beating by the Khmer Rouge. The starving man's crime was stealing a potato.

"I could not help him. There was no medicine. The only thing I could give him were my tears," said the 64-year-old woman, who, like countless Cambodians, has spent half a lifetime grieving and waiting for justice.

In 2009, after years of political sabotage, judicial bickering, corruption allegations and funding shortages, the Khmer Rouge is likely to begin facing retribution for the crimes of its 1970s reign of terror.

A U.N.-backed tribunal announced in late January that it would put the first of five former Khmer Rouge leaders before a panel of Cambodian and international judges Feb. 17 on charges of crimes against humanity. The trials of the other four, all old and ailing, are unlikely to begin until 2010.

Stepping first into the 504-seat courtroom will be 65-year-old Kaing Guek Eav, who ran the Khmer Rouge's largest torture center. The others are Khieu Samphan, the group's former head of state; Ieng Sary, its foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirith, who was minister for social affairs; and Nuon Chea, the movement's chief ideologue. They face a maximum of life imprisonment.

'There Will Be No Balance'

The trials will put Cambodia among a half dozen countries caught up in international criminal trials in the past 15 years for crimes against humanity. For Cambodia, the process has had a particularly stormy history, and it faces skepticism about its fairness and scope and suspicions that some pretext or other will halt it altogether.

"Even if we condemn five or 10 at the tribunal, there will be no balance because they killed millions," says Im Savoeun, who lost four other family members. "My husband and son can never come back to me, but at least they will have received some justice."

Despite the scale of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian side at the tribunal, called the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, has sought to strictly limit the court's reach. It recently refused a proposal by Robert Petit, the Canadian international co-prosecutor, to cast the net wider and try up to five more former Khmer Rouge figures.

Even this would not satisfy many critics and victims.

"You can't have 2 million people dead, try five or 10 cases and call it a day. That may be all they do, but we are not going to say that justice was done no matter how well that process goes," said Brad Adams of New York-based Human Rights Watch.

"The reason we want more than 10 is because there are dozens of people with thousands of deaths on their hands running around out there still. They deserve their day in court."

But Prime Minister Hun Sen's government is full of former Khmer Rouge higher-ups, himself included, and has little to gain from the trials.

"There is fear among the Cambodian government. The former Khmer Rouge are asking, 'Who is next?'" said Youk Chhang, who heads the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has collected some 1 million documents related to the Khmer Rouge.

Adams, an American who has monitored the court's progress since it was proposed 13 years ago, said, "There has been political interference that intentionally slowed the whole process down just to basically play out the clock on the possibility that some defendants would die."

In an open admission that the trial has more to do with internal politics than standards of international justice, Cambodian co-prosecutor Chea Leang recently argued that putting more than five figures on trial could endanger national stability.

It's A Costly Process

Although Japan's contribution this month of $21 million has at least temporarily allayed fears the court might run out of funding, a probe into corruption - including the buying of positions on the court - has yet to be concluded.

Attorneys for Nuon Chea, the ideologue, say corruption "could undermine the fundamental right to a fair trial."

Petit isn't giving up. "There is still a fair chance that the tribunal will realize a limited measure of justice. It will help set the historical record once and for all and will help people understand and believe what happened here," he said.

Im Savoeun has gone from being a poor farmer's daughter to a member of Parliament and has never forgotten those responsible for the horrors she and her husband endured, even though his killers won't be on trial and already may have died a peaceful death.

The slim, handsome woman vividly recalls the backbreaking work from sunrise to sunset clearing forests, digging irrigation canals and planting rice; hunting for frogs, rats and snakes to eat; seeing corpses piled high on oxcarts rumbling off to mass graves; and her son dying on a garbage heap as he rummaged for fish bones to eat.

"Thirty years of waiting was long for me," she said, sobbing. "But finally we are starting the trial now, so at least the young generation will learn and understand."

THE KHMER ROUGE
Inflamed by an ultracommunist vision, the Khmer Rouge sought to eradicate traditional Cambodian society and begin again from "year zero." They made the country a vast slave labor camp, abolishing all freedoms.

•The communist guerrilla group was led by Pol Pot when it overthrew a military dictatorship on April 17, 1975. Pol Pot, who was called Brother Number One by his followers, was named as the country's prime minister in 1976. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, Pol Pot continued to lead the Khmer Rouge army from the countryside. He resigned as the regime's leader in 1985. He died in 1998 while imprisoned on murder charges.

•The Khmer Rouge banned all institutions, including stores, banks, hospitals, schools, religion and the family.

•The regime forced Cambodians to work 12 to 14 hour days every day.

•Up to 2 million people are estimated to have died under the Khmer Rouge, with starvation, disease and executions listed as the causes of death.

•The United Nations installed a peacekeeping mission in Cambodia after the withdrawal of the Vietnamese. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia was established in February 1992. Its goal was to implement the Paris Peace Accords of 1991 and to restore peace and civil government in Cambodia. UNTAC also was to start the country's rehabilitation.

Sources: The Associated Press, www.dithpran.org, www.answers.com, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

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