Adrees LatifKaing Guek Eav (L), also known as Duch, awaits the start of his trial on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia February 17. Duch, the ex-commandant of the notorious S-21 prison and chief Khmer Rouge ...
National Post
Peter Goodspeed
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Decades of war, mass murder, famine, terror and grinding poverty have left a legacy of pain but little justice in Cambodia. But on Tuesday, Cambodians finally witnessed the start of the first-ever trial of a senior Khmer Rouge leader involved in murdering 1.5 million people.
Kaing Guek Eav, 66, known as "Duch" when he supervised the Tuol Sleng torture centre, appeared before a United Nations-assisted court in an old army barracks on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, charged with crimes against humanity in 1975-79.
The former high school math teacher is the first of five Khmer Rouge defendants scheduled to go on trial a full 30 years after their alleged crimes and 13 years after the international community began to press Cambodia to bring the perpetrators of one of history's worst cases of genocide to account.
But while dozens of Khmer Rouge victims were among the hundreds of people who stood in line to get seats, there is little indication they will obtain justice anytime soon.
Tuesday's hearing merely established a schedule for Duch's trial, which is expected to begin in earnest in late March when prosecutors for the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia plan to produce 33 witnesses over 40 days.
No one doubts the horror of "Pol Pot Time," when a fanatical agrarian communist revolution based on Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution emptied Cambodia's cities, tried to destroy its culture and tortured, starved, executed and worked 1.5 million people -- 20% of the population -- to death.
Although Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge lasted only three years, eight months and 20 days, the pace of international justice has been much, much slower.
Duch, a recent convert to Christianity, has expressed remorse for his actions but insists he was acting "under orders" when he supervised the torture and deaths of nearly 20,000 prisoners.
No dates have been set yet for the trials of the other Khmer Rouge leaders -- Khieu Samphan, former head of state; Ieng Sary, the foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirith, minister for social affairs; and Nuon Chea, "Brother No. 2," the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologue and senior surviving member.
Pol Pot cheated justice by dying in April, 1998.
The cause was reportedly a heart attack, but rumours persist he was allowed to commit suicide to avoid being tried.
Since then, attempts to prosecute the Khmer Rouge have been plagued by political interference, allegations of corruption and lack of funding, along with bickering between Cambodian and international lawyers.
Originally the United Nations asked the Cambodian government to arrest and try up to 30 top Khmer Rouge leaders before an international tribunal.
But Hun Sen, Cambodia's Prime Minister, is a former Khmer Rouge commander who only broke with the group when he was about to be swallowed by its genocide. He has regularly dismissed calls for an international tribunal, saying prosecutions might plunge the country into civil war.
A decade of tortuous negotiations finally led, three years ago, to the establishment of a hybrid court with 17 Cambodian and 12 international judges.
One of the problems in collecting evidence was the ruthless efficiency of the Khmer Rouge killing machine.
Anyone with an education was targeted for death. Simply wearing eye-glasses or speaking a foreign language was a cause for execution.
Most Cambodians were made to work 20 hours a day in rural concentration camps and received only a handful of rice daily. Doctors, lawyers and intellectuals were earmarked for elimination. Many of them died in Tuol Sleng, a converted high school compound in a poor residential district in southern Phnom Penh.
Originally known as Tuol Svay Prey, it was taken over in 1976 and turned into a prison. Renamed Tuol Sleng (Hill of the Poison Tree), it became the Khmer Rouge's central interrogation and torture centre, with inmates being tortured and executed in the former classrooms.
There was nothing sophisticated about the Khmer Rouge. They usually beat their victims to death with clubs, hooks, sharpened farm implements and whips made from coiled electrical wire.
Today, Tuol Sleng is a macabre museum to their cruelty, with the walls of some classrooms decorated with photographs of the thousands of people who died there.
The black and white pictures were taken just moments before their execution and show faces filled with terror and hopelessness.
More than 5,000 of them have no names, mainly because no one who knew the victims was left alive to identify them.
The international community set aside US$170-million over five years to conduct the genocide prosecutions, but the Cambodian government is still doing everything it can to restrict the scope of the trials.
Last month, Robert Petit, a Canadian lawyer and co-prosecutor with the special tribunal, submitted the names of six former Khmer Rouge leaders, saying he had enough evidence to charge them with crimes against humanity.
But his Cambodian counterpart objected to charging anyone else, not on legal grounds, but because she claimed new charges risked destabilizing the country and would cost too much.
The Hun Sen government insists it agreed to "only a small number of trials" to satisfy international opinion.
This week, Human Rights Watch issued a statement declaring, "The tribunal cannot bring justice to the millions of the Khmer Rouge's victims, if it tries only a handful of the most notorious individuals, while scores of former Khmer Rouge officials and commanders remain free."
The sluggish progress of Cambodia's genocide trials doesn't bode well for Darfur, Sudan, as judges at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague are said to be prepared to indict Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's President.
A master of delaying tactics, Mr. Bashir's government suddenly announced Tuesday it reached "an agreement of good intentions" to negotiate a ceasefire with Darfur's largest rebel group, the Justice & Equality Movement.
The diplomatic breakthrough appears to offer the international community an unpleasant Cambodian-style choice between justice or peace.
National Post
Peter Goodspeed
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Decades of war, mass murder, famine, terror and grinding poverty have left a legacy of pain but little justice in Cambodia. But on Tuesday, Cambodians finally witnessed the start of the first-ever trial of a senior Khmer Rouge leader involved in murdering 1.5 million people.
Kaing Guek Eav, 66, known as "Duch" when he supervised the Tuol Sleng torture centre, appeared before a United Nations-assisted court in an old army barracks on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, charged with crimes against humanity in 1975-79.
The former high school math teacher is the first of five Khmer Rouge defendants scheduled to go on trial a full 30 years after their alleged crimes and 13 years after the international community began to press Cambodia to bring the perpetrators of one of history's worst cases of genocide to account.
But while dozens of Khmer Rouge victims were among the hundreds of people who stood in line to get seats, there is little indication they will obtain justice anytime soon.
Tuesday's hearing merely established a schedule for Duch's trial, which is expected to begin in earnest in late March when prosecutors for the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia plan to produce 33 witnesses over 40 days.
No one doubts the horror of "Pol Pot Time," when a fanatical agrarian communist revolution based on Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution emptied Cambodia's cities, tried to destroy its culture and tortured, starved, executed and worked 1.5 million people -- 20% of the population -- to death.
Although Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge lasted only three years, eight months and 20 days, the pace of international justice has been much, much slower.
Duch, a recent convert to Christianity, has expressed remorse for his actions but insists he was acting "under orders" when he supervised the torture and deaths of nearly 20,000 prisoners.
No dates have been set yet for the trials of the other Khmer Rouge leaders -- Khieu Samphan, former head of state; Ieng Sary, the foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirith, minister for social affairs; and Nuon Chea, "Brother No. 2," the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologue and senior surviving member.
Pol Pot cheated justice by dying in April, 1998.
The cause was reportedly a heart attack, but rumours persist he was allowed to commit suicide to avoid being tried.
Since then, attempts to prosecute the Khmer Rouge have been plagued by political interference, allegations of corruption and lack of funding, along with bickering between Cambodian and international lawyers.
Originally the United Nations asked the Cambodian government to arrest and try up to 30 top Khmer Rouge leaders before an international tribunal.
But Hun Sen, Cambodia's Prime Minister, is a former Khmer Rouge commander who only broke with the group when he was about to be swallowed by its genocide. He has regularly dismissed calls for an international tribunal, saying prosecutions might plunge the country into civil war.
A decade of tortuous negotiations finally led, three years ago, to the establishment of a hybrid court with 17 Cambodian and 12 international judges.
One of the problems in collecting evidence was the ruthless efficiency of the Khmer Rouge killing machine.
Anyone with an education was targeted for death. Simply wearing eye-glasses or speaking a foreign language was a cause for execution.
Most Cambodians were made to work 20 hours a day in rural concentration camps and received only a handful of rice daily. Doctors, lawyers and intellectuals were earmarked for elimination. Many of them died in Tuol Sleng, a converted high school compound in a poor residential district in southern Phnom Penh.
Originally known as Tuol Svay Prey, it was taken over in 1976 and turned into a prison. Renamed Tuol Sleng (Hill of the Poison Tree), it became the Khmer Rouge's central interrogation and torture centre, with inmates being tortured and executed in the former classrooms.
There was nothing sophisticated about the Khmer Rouge. They usually beat their victims to death with clubs, hooks, sharpened farm implements and whips made from coiled electrical wire.
Today, Tuol Sleng is a macabre museum to their cruelty, with the walls of some classrooms decorated with photographs of the thousands of people who died there.
The black and white pictures were taken just moments before their execution and show faces filled with terror and hopelessness.
More than 5,000 of them have no names, mainly because no one who knew the victims was left alive to identify them.
The international community set aside US$170-million over five years to conduct the genocide prosecutions, but the Cambodian government is still doing everything it can to restrict the scope of the trials.
Last month, Robert Petit, a Canadian lawyer and co-prosecutor with the special tribunal, submitted the names of six former Khmer Rouge leaders, saying he had enough evidence to charge them with crimes against humanity.
But his Cambodian counterpart objected to charging anyone else, not on legal grounds, but because she claimed new charges risked destabilizing the country and would cost too much.
The Hun Sen government insists it agreed to "only a small number of trials" to satisfy international opinion.
This week, Human Rights Watch issued a statement declaring, "The tribunal cannot bring justice to the millions of the Khmer Rouge's victims, if it tries only a handful of the most notorious individuals, while scores of former Khmer Rouge officials and commanders remain free."
The sluggish progress of Cambodia's genocide trials doesn't bode well for Darfur, Sudan, as judges at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague are said to be prepared to indict Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's President.
A master of delaying tactics, Mr. Bashir's government suddenly announced Tuesday it reached "an agreement of good intentions" to negotiate a ceasefire with Darfur's largest rebel group, the Justice & Equality Movement.
The diplomatic breakthrough appears to offer the international community an unpleasant Cambodian-style choice between justice or peace.
National Post
No comments:
Post a Comment