Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). 26/05/2009: The court building on day 21 of Duch's trial at the ECCC©John Vink/ Magnum
By Stéphanie Gée
26-05-2009
The hearing of Tuesday May 26th was marked by a statement from the accused Duch aimed to explain, among others, that the personal conflict between the secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Le Duan, and Brother nº1, Pol Pot, degenerated into a bloodbath. Indian journalist Nayan Chanda, specialist on political issues in Indochina, finished his testimony, not without recalling Vietnam's dampened hopes in relation to its Khmer Rouge comrades. After him, Craig Etcheson came back to the stand, once again more as a matter of form...
The fate of the “Hanoi Khmer”
Nayan Chanda recalled that in 1975 and 1976, Vietnamese officials made visits to Cambodia, in what were as many attempts for negotiations that all failed. At the most, as the Indian expert remembered, local agreements were made in the months following the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975, which allowed for the forced repatriation to Cambodia by the Vietnamese authorities of Khmer nationals who had taken refuge on their soil. In some cases, these repatriations were carried out on the basis of one person being exchanged for one head of cattle.
Nayan Chanda then read a relevant section taken from David Chandler's book “Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison”: “He wrote that the accused was able to elaborate a very sophisticated concept of treason, between 1972 and 1973. It discussed chains of traitors and a secret operation that was then implemented by the Khmer Rouge to purge those who were called the 'Hanoi Khmer', who had come back in 1970 after years of exile in Northern Vietnam to help the revolution there. In 1973, hundreds of them were arrested and assassinated in the utmost secrecy, after Vietnamese had withdrawn most of their troops from Cambodia. Some managed to flee to Vietnam after their detention, others were arrested after April 1975, many were arrested in the special zone. The stealthy and pitiless aspects of this purge campaign may have answered to the emerging administrative style that was specific to Duch. This campaign already foretold the operating mode of S-21.”
Vietnam's disappointed hopes
Before an open conflict broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam, the latter long believed that it could count on friends in the Khmer Rouge ranks, before gradually opening their eyes. The Indian journalist recalled a “tactical alliance between the Vietnamese communist party and the Cambodian communist party in 1974.” “Back then,”he pursued, “it was patent that the United States were going to withdraw from the region and the Khmer Rouge would be able to take power in Cambodia. At that time, the Vietnamese were ready to help the Khmer Rouge. On April 17th 1975, the Khmer Rouge victory was made possible thanks to the considerable amount of weapons and trainings provided by the Vietnamese to the Khmer Rouge in late 1974. The Chinese had then not been able to give such assistance, because they had no means available. […] It was therefore the Vietnamese communist party that provided a very valuable assistance to the Khmer Rouge to allow them to reach victory in 1975. So, there is aberration somewhere in what is otherwise a fundamentally conflictual relationship. I have the feeling that the Vietnamese hoped that, by helping the Khmer Rouge in this way, they could win them over to their own way of looking at things. But their reckoning was erroneous, as it was realised subsequently. As soon as victory was theirs, the Khmer Rouge declared they had obtained it on their own, without any foreign assistance. […] Vietnam understood immediately that there was no gratitude to expect from the Khmer Rouge.”
The expert added that the Vietnamese misinterpreted the situation as they seemed to think they had more friends than they really did within the Khmer Rouge revolutionary ranks. “I have recently read a research paper written by a Russian on the relations between Cambodia and Vietnam, on the basis of Soviet diplomatic materials recently made public. The author wrote that Nuon Chea [ex-Brother nº2 and indicted by the tribunal] was the person appointed by Pol Pot to go and ask for help in Vietnam on the eve of Phnom Penh's fall. He was the party's Mister Vietnam... […] Until 1978, the Vietnamese thought that Nuon Chea was a moderate and a friend of Vietnam!”
However, Nayan Chanda believed that from late 1977, “Vietnam seemed to have understood it was not an issue of misunderstanding or resolution of some territorial disputes, but that the conflict with Cambodia pertained to the Khmer Rouge policy towards Vietnam. The problem was therefore to be solved through a political change in Phnom Penh or a change of the people in power in Phnom Penh. In other words, if there were changes within the Communist Party of Kampuchea [CPK], that was fine, but if that was not the case, it was necessary to take Phnom Penh to ensure peace and stability.”
Duch: the personal conflict between Le Duan and Pol Pot resulted in bloodshed
When his turn to interrogate Nayan Chanda came, Duch's international lawyer requested that first, the accused be given the opportunity to respond to the expert's testimony. Duch then started a long statement, in which he lashed out at Brother nº1:
“It was part of the implementation of Hô Chi Minh's theory, which said that the only main cause was the fight against the French. Consequently, there could only be one party in power, the Communist Party of Indochina: one party, one soldier, one government and one country, that is the Indochinese Federation. This was his theory. It was the source of life and death, and the hostility between Le Duan and Pol Pot. Le Duan was secretary of the Vietnam Workers' Party, which later became the Vietnamese Communist Party. […] The conflict between the two men was a mortal conflict, a long-standing one, that started as early as 1954. Le Duan saw himself as the father of Indochina, even if there was a Geneva Conference. Both tried to overthrow the other. […] Although the armed conflict existed, Le Duan wanted Pol Pot to follow him... […] The dispute led to the open armed conflict in 1978, which came to the attention of the international community on December 31st 1978. I want to say that Pol Pot and Le Duan were having a personal dispute. Each had his own party, his own soldiers, and this resulted in a bloodbath and had a disastrous impact on the lives of the civilian population. What I am saying is that Pol Pot was not a great patriot of the country, but he was a murderer. He was the father of the murder of Cambodia. […] So, I maintain my view, that it was a dispute between Pol Pot and the Indochinese Federation which was at the origin of the conflict in which Pol Pot was a murderer. More than a million people lost their lives. In this context, in S-21, my hands were stained with the blood of the people who lost their lives there... I do not deny my responsibility for this crime. However, I want to show that […] Vietnamese and Cambodian blood was shed again and again because of the dispute between these two persons.”
What is at stake with Nayan Chanda's summoning, according to François Roux
Rather than interrogating the expert, François Roux explained to him that the meaning of his presence was fully realised in light of the attempts of the office of the co-Prosecutors to demonstrate and obtain a decision from the Trial Chamber saying that [with reference to the final submission of the co-Prosecutors made at the end of the investigation phase] '[T]he evidence on the Case File [...] establishes that an international armed conflict existed between the armed forces of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) and the armed forces of Vietnam from April 1975 and continuing until 6 January 1979.' This question, which is not only political but also legal, could bear consequences as, if it is considered that an armed conflict existed since April 1975, this would mean that all the Vietnamese prisoners sent to S-21 from that time were victims of war crimes. That is what is at stake here. This does not yield a great interest for Duch, since he has always recognised he knew since September 1977 there was an open conflict between Cambodia and Vietnam. He also admitted that, at least for the whole year of 1978, the Vietnamese prisoners who had arrived were victims of war crimes that came under his responsibility. […] The dispute bears little impact on Duch's guilt. However, I have drawn the Chamber's attention to the responsibility that the co-Prosecutors wanted to place upon international criminal justice. That is, until now, we have always heard the official view according to which the international armed conflict had started from December 31st 1977, when diplomatic relations were severed, and now, the co-Prosecutors are asking the Chamber to take the heavy decision to contradict, through a decision of justice, that date. […] The co-Prosecutors have asked you to come here to see if you would confirm this simple sentence: an international armed conflict existed between the armed forces of Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam from April 1975 to January 6th 1979. I note that you have not confirmed that sentence. On the contrary, I note that you have indicated there were many clashes and occasional fighting of the military, and you have said 'I have the feeling that, in late 1977, the Vietnamese had concluded it was not a misunderstanding.' You also said yesterday [Monday May 25th 2009] that until late 1977, the Vietnamese government had tried to prevent the conflict from deteriorating. Have I heard correctly, Mister Chanda?”
Nayan Chanda confirmed while wondering: “However, I am not a jurist. I do not know how war is defined in law. Must it be declared? Can war exist without any declaration? If it is not necessary to have a declaration, then the two countries were at war since 1975. If it is necessary, then war effectively started only on December 31st 1977.”
This was the end of the questions to the former correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review, who was replaced by Craig Etcheson, whose examination resumed after being interrupted on Thursday May 21st.
Craig Etcheson's examination resumes on an air of “deja vu”
International co-Prosecutor Alex Bates then resumed where he had stopped, and started again the reading, tedious due to translation difficulties, of the minutes of a meeting which Duch attended and during which S-21 and the divisions were ordered to collaborate in the implementation of the purge policy. There was like an air of “deja vu” and the translation issues drowned the co-Prosecutor's demonstration, which some thought had already been made on May 21st...
Alex Bates then sought to interrogate the U.S. expert on nine letters from Sou Meth, the former commandant of division 502 of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea, sent to Duch between April and October 1977. His endeavour was interrupted by François Roux, on the basis of the same arguments that Duch's lawyer had made the previous Wednesday [May 20th]. This had already brought the debates to a standstill and resulted in a decision of the Chamber the next day [May 21st], which appears to have been partial in light of the continuing debate. The co-Prosecutor called the defence's objection an “absurdity” and recalled that “all the pieces of evidence are free and once presented, their value can be assessed.” The civil party lawyers, one after the other, joined him, which led Roux to observe that, each time the defence made an objection, they had “not only one but many opponents.” “I end up wondering where the equality of arms is in this trial?” He explained again that it was not the nature of the documents that bothered him and that his client was quite ready to comment on them. For him, the problem was that Craig Etcheson be presented with documents he became aware of after July 2007, that is after the start of the investigation procedure against Duch, as the expert worked as an investigator at the office of the co-Prosecutors and his testimony could therefore be flawed with lack of partiality. Finally, Roux wondered that the co-Prosecutors did not summon Sou Meth before the co-Investigating Judges or the Chamber to confront him with Duch... A misunderstanding seemed to settle regarding the substance of the defence's objection. Judge Lavergne then suggested as an arrangement that the expert's answers be taken with caution, in light of his current post.
Once more, Craig Etcheson was little heard. The final word went to a Cambodian civil party lawyer, Hong Kim Suon: “We have already lost a lot of time not so wisely. […] To revive the same debate is to reopen the same Pandora box. I feel like we are going round and round.” The president then adjourned the hearing...
