Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Death of a killer

The Boston Globe (US)
Published: July 24, 2006


When the infamous Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok died Friday of natural causes, the laws of nature succeeded in cheating justice. Notorious for his conduct of a purge in which 30,000 people were massacred in a district of Cambodia he ruled as party secretary, Ta Mok went on waging power struggles in the jungle for two decades after Vietnamese invasion forces drove the Khmer Rouge out of power in 1979.

This was certainly not the first time a mass murderer left this life before he could be judged in a court of law. But the case of Ta Mok is particularly grievous because he had been in the custody of the Cambodian government since March 1999. An enormous amount of detailed evidence had been accumulated for use by the prosecution in a UN- sponsored tribunal that was just about to begin its work, and the Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge cadre, deliberately delayed and evaded the establishment of an honest UN-assisted tribunal on the genocide for many years.

This thwarting of justice not only inflicts anguish on survivors of the Khmer Rouge killing fields. It allows the extermination of more than 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 - 21 percent of the country's population - to be enveloped by history's ever-present ambiguities.

Hun Sen, who was placed in power by the Vietnamese, was never eager to have an independent tribunal document the crimes of his former Khmer Rouge comrades. China, which backed the Khmer Rouge even after it was chased from power by the Vietnamese, was no less reluctant to remind the world of the horrors perpetrated by its Cambodian protégés.

And, after 1979, Washington collaborated with Beijing in backing the out-of-power Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia - a perversity rooted in a reflexive will to spite Hanoi. The geopolitics of Cambodia's genocide made strange bedfellows.

When the infamous Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok died Friday of natural causes, the laws of nature succeeded in cheating justice. Notorious for his conduct of a purge in which 30,000 people were massacred in a district of Cambodia he ruled as party secretary, Ta Mok went on waging power struggles in the jungle for two decades after Vietnamese invasion forces drove the Khmer Rouge out of power in 1979.

This was certainly not the first time a mass murderer left this life before he could be judged in a court of law. But the case of Ta Mok is particularly grievous because he had been in the custody of the Cambodian government since March 1999. An enormous amount of detailed evidence had been accumulated for use by the prosecution in a UN- sponsored tribunal that was just about to begin its work, and the Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge cadre, deliberately delayed and evaded the establishment of an honest UN-assisted tribunal on the genocide for many years.

This thwarting of justice not only inflicts anguish on survivors of the Khmer Rouge killing fields. It allows the extermination of more than 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 - 21 percent of the country's population - to be enveloped by history's ever-present ambiguities.

Hun Sen, who was placed in power by the Vietnamese, was never eager to have an independent tribunal document the crimes of his former Khmer Rouge comrades. China, which backed the Khmer Rouge even after it was chased from power by the Vietnamese, was no less reluctant to remind the world of the horrors perpetrated by its Cambodian protégés.

And, after 1979, Washington collaborated with Beijing in backing the out-of-power Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia - a perversity rooted in a reflexive will to spite Hanoi. The geopolitics of Cambodia's genocide made strange bedfellows.

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