The Financial Times (UK)
August 9 2006
In 1962, Kaing Geuk Eav, an earnest and politicised mathematician from rural Cambodia, spent a year at Phnom Penh's prestigious Lycée Sisowath.
It was a brief stop on his road to the Khmer Rouge's notorious Tuol Sleng prison where, known as "Comrade Duch", he is alleged to have overseen the torture and execution of up to 20,000 men, women and children.
Today, students at Sisowath high school - a campus of dilapidated, French colonial-era buildings around a vast shady lawn - know little about how some of Cambodia's brightest embraced a revolutionary cause that devoured their society.
With many top Khmer Rouge leaders now living in quiet retirement as part of deals in the 1990s to end decades of fighting - and other former cadres powerful in the current administration - Cambodia's government has been unable to explain the darkest chapter of the nation's history to a new generation.
Cambodian teachers simply gloss over the Khmer Rouge's rule from 1975 to 1979, when 1.7m people perished from execution, starvation and overwork.
"Modern history is difficult," says 38-year-old teacher Sam Ang Phallarith, who was seven when the ultra-radical Maoists forced the entire population of Phnom Penh, including her family, into the countryside in a drive for an agrarian utopia, uncontaminated by foreign influence.
"After a person is dead, we can start learning history. But these people are here, so we can't teach it," she added.
Yet Cambodia is finally due to begin a painful examination of its tortured past.
Last month, Buddhist priests swore in 27 Cambodian and foreign judges and prosecutors, to conduct a UN-supported tribunal that will try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes against humanity.
The question now is whether Cambodia's under-developed, highly politicised and notoriously corrupt court system will prove capable of delivering credible proceedings, even with foreign judges and prosecutors involved.
Many also fear that justice - so long delayed - will ultimately be denied, as ageing revolutionaries follow their late leader, Pol Pot, the Cambodian revolution's much feared "Brother Number One", to the grave.
Pol Pot, who operated freely on the Thai-Cambodian border after a 1979 Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from power, died in 1998, possibly murdered by surviving hard-line allies hoping his death would end pressure for them to be brought to trial.
Then, just as the tribunal's prosecutors began their work, Ta Mok, the former Khmer Rouge military commander and one of Pol Pot's bloodiest henchmen, died in a military hospital, aged about 80.
Ta Mok had been one of just two Khmer Rouge leaders - the other is Comrade Duch - in custody and his death was described by one Cambodian human rights activist as "an omen" for the tribunal.
Yet many other senior Khmer Rouge leaders are still alive and could be hauled before the court, which is expected to try between five and 10 people over the next three years.
"We want justice to be quick but not reckless," said Reach Sambath, a tribunal spokesman, adding that prosecutors were now in the laborious process of building cases before issuing indictments. "They need concrete proof and evidence before they accuse or charge somebody."
Even if the trial results in conviction and imprisonment of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch said it would give "a limited sense of satisfaction" to the victims of Khmer Rougebrutality.
"Who is going to feel great about putting an 80-year-old in prison?" he asked.
But the tribunal could trigger fresh debate, especially in the media, over the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and an examination of the complicity of many ordinary Cambodians, including the role of some officials in the current government, in the crimes of that period.
It was a brief stop on his road to the Khmer Rouge's notorious Tuol Sleng prison where, known as "Comrade Duch", he is alleged to have overseen the torture and execution of up to 20,000 men, women and children.
Today, students at Sisowath high school - a campus of dilapidated, French colonial-era buildings around a vast shady lawn - know little about how some of Cambodia's brightest embraced a revolutionary cause that devoured their society.
With many top Khmer Rouge leaders now living in quiet retirement as part of deals in the 1990s to end decades of fighting - and other former cadres powerful in the current administration - Cambodia's government has been unable to explain the darkest chapter of the nation's history to a new generation.
Cambodian teachers simply gloss over the Khmer Rouge's rule from 1975 to 1979, when 1.7m people perished from execution, starvation and overwork.
"Modern history is difficult," says 38-year-old teacher Sam Ang Phallarith, who was seven when the ultra-radical Maoists forced the entire population of Phnom Penh, including her family, into the countryside in a drive for an agrarian utopia, uncontaminated by foreign influence.
"After a person is dead, we can start learning history. But these people are here, so we can't teach it," she added.
Yet Cambodia is finally due to begin a painful examination of its tortured past.
Last month, Buddhist priests swore in 27 Cambodian and foreign judges and prosecutors, to conduct a UN-supported tribunal that will try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes against humanity.
The question now is whether Cambodia's under-developed, highly politicised and notoriously corrupt court system will prove capable of delivering credible proceedings, even with foreign judges and prosecutors involved.
Many also fear that justice - so long delayed - will ultimately be denied, as ageing revolutionaries follow their late leader, Pol Pot, the Cambodian revolution's much feared "Brother Number One", to the grave.
Pol Pot, who operated freely on the Thai-Cambodian border after a 1979 Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from power, died in 1998, possibly murdered by surviving hard-line allies hoping his death would end pressure for them to be brought to trial.
Then, just as the tribunal's prosecutors began their work, Ta Mok, the former Khmer Rouge military commander and one of Pol Pot's bloodiest henchmen, died in a military hospital, aged about 80.
Ta Mok had been one of just two Khmer Rouge leaders - the other is Comrade Duch - in custody and his death was described by one Cambodian human rights activist as "an omen" for the tribunal.
Yet many other senior Khmer Rouge leaders are still alive and could be hauled before the court, which is expected to try between five and 10 people over the next three years.
"We want justice to be quick but not reckless," said Reach Sambath, a tribunal spokesman, adding that prosecutors were now in the laborious process of building cases before issuing indictments. "They need concrete proof and evidence before they accuse or charge somebody."
Even if the trial results in conviction and imprisonment of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch said it would give "a limited sense of satisfaction" to the victims of Khmer Rougebrutality.
"Who is going to feel great about putting an 80-year-old in prison?" he asked.
But the tribunal could trigger fresh debate, especially in the media, over the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and an examination of the complicity of many ordinary Cambodians, including the role of some officials in the current government, in the crimes of that period.
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