Cambodia comes to terms with its past

Cambodian and International co-prosecutors Chea Leang and Robert Petit work in the courtroom during the hearing of former Khmer Rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Eav on the outskirt of Phnom Penh. Cambodia's Khmer Rouge court opened its first public hearing late last year in what many see as a landmark moment for a country trying to overcome its brutal past.
TANG CHHIN SOTHY, AFP, GETTY IMAGES

Accused ringleaders of Khmer Rouge regime go on trial

Norma Greenaway, Canwest News Service
February 17, 2008

Youk Chhang remembers being aflame with an all-consuming desire for revenge when he settled in Texas in the 1980s as a survivor of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in his native Cambodia.

The young refugee hated the people responsible for the extermination of about 1.7 million Cambodians -- 25 per cent of the population -- from April 1975 through January 1979, among them a beloved sister and countless other relatives.

But mostly, Chhang says, he hated them for making his mother's life a living hell. Now 74, she spent decades as a single mom haunted by the feeling she had failed to protect her children.

At one point, for example, she walked away as Chhang was being beaten within an inch of his life by Khmer Rouge enforcers because he was caught picking mushrooms to take to his pregnant, starving sister.

His mother reasoned that if she went to his defence, both of them would be killed. But Chhang was puzzled and hurt by his mother's behaviour and they became estranged for many years.

Once in the United States, Chhang says his days on the Texas A&M campus in College Station were peppered with crazed, solo protests about the brutality of the Khmer Rouge that fell mostly on deaf ears.

"I was young, I was naive," Chhang said of his lonely attempts to awaken fellow university students to the crimes against humanity committed by Pol Pot's forces.

He said the genocide seemed worse because it was Cambodians murdering and torturing other Cambodians -- not some foreign invader -- in a claimed quest to create a communist utopia where money, schools and religion were abolished.

The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities, exiling millions to vast collective farms where many died.
"It's the deepest, most horrible feeling -- living in a society where the nightmare is homemade," he said.

Almost three decades later, Chhang's anger has subsided and the wounded country is about to finally embark on a major turning point in its mending process -- the UN-backed prosecution of five accused Khmer Rouge ringleaders for their involvement in what the world has come to know as "the killing fields" of Cambodia.

The tribunal includes both Cambodian and foreign justices and prosecutors, among them Canadian lawyer Robert Petit.

"This is the last chapter of the Cambodian genocide," the soft-spoken Chhang said over the phone from Phnom Penh, where he has lived since he returned to Cambodia in the early 1990s.
"It's not about revenge anymore. It's about the future. We don't want it to be repeated ever again."

Chhang, 47, has spent the last decade collecting more than 1.5 million pages of documentary evidence and witness accounts of the genocide, murder, torture and religious persecution Cambodians endured under the Khmer Rouge.

Some of the material collected by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a private research body Chhang helped found, will be used during the prosecution of the five aging members of the former regime now in custody.

First up is Kaing Guek Eav, 66. Also known as Duch, he was head of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh and is accused of directing the deaths of thousands of men, women and children. His case is expected to open before the tribunal in June or July.

The prosecutions come a decade too late to get Pol Pot, the infamous leader of the Khmer Rouge forces. He died in a jungle hideout in 1998.

Cambodians at home and abroad are divided over the merits of bringing even a handful of players to trial for atrocities committed so long ago.

Some say there is no justice that would make up for what happened to their families. Others say the trials only will serve to polish -- unjustifiably, according to them -- the current government's image. Still others say prosecution of at least a few of the villains is needed to achieve understanding and true forgiveness.

Political infighting and resistance from within the current government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who only broke with the Khmer Rouge when he was about to be killed, have delayed the process.

Despite the setbacks, there is still a thirst for justice in the country, said Petit, the tribunal's co-prosecutor.
"It's 30 years after the fact. Presumably, most people have found a way, working or not, good or not, to deal with what happened," Petit said in an interview from Phnom Penh, where he has been preparing for the trials for the last 18 months.

"But as a nation, it is important. It will allow the nation as a whole to see some justice for what happened here."