Luke Hunt
World Politics Watch Exclusive
In late 1979 Craig Etcheson was an impressionable 23-year-old who divided his time between rock concerts and first year Ph.D. studies in mathematical models of war at the University of Southern California School for International Relations. The Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple and The Grateful Dead were his bands of choice.
Then Vietnam invaded Cambodia and lifted the veil on the true scale of carnage committed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Images from the Killing Fields shocked the affable Etcheson. The slaughter of about one third of Cambodia's population in the previous three-and-a-half years was something the young mathematician found incomprehensible.
His immediate response to those feelings was to study the events in detail.
After digging through records and recent histories, he wrote his first book: "The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea." That was in 1984. Field work followed in the years ahead and again he divided his time -- this time between family duties in Washington, D.C., and crawling through mud and bones with a shovel as a forensic scientist in Cambodia.
A quarter of a century on, Etcheson became affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and became a conduit for the dead. He used his forensic science skills to demonstrate beyond legal doubt that surviving leaders of the ultra-Maoist movement committed one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.
Routinely I would meet with Craig after a dig. Normally he was exhausted and more than slightly disturbed by his latest finds and in need of a chat over a single malt.
"After you have seen hundreds and then thousands of mass graves you gradually find a certain kind of peace with the dead, and then eventually one forms a curious social alliance with them," Etcheson said.
That alliance is deeply personal for the stocky 51-year-old, whose latest book, "After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide," was released in March. Another two manuscripts on the same subject are pending. Now he is bracing himself for the long-delayed Khmer Rouge tribunal, where his work will be scrutinized and attacked by those prepared to defend what's left of Pol Pot's hierarchy.
Potential defense lawyers, seeking to make names for themselves, are already conducting forays into Cambodia and preparing an initial strategy based on attacking the validity of the evidence and the legality of the court itself, as well as seeking to throw doubt on reports that genocide occurred.
The United Nations is also setting up the case for the prosecution, and a tribunal could begin its first hearing within the next six months.
Etcheson is unruffled. "For me it's always been about the victims," he said.
"For other people who have worked on this it's about abstractions like establishing legal precedents and defining terms like genocide, instead of addressing issues like these were once actual living human beings."
Unlike the physical evidence produced at the Rwanda, Sierra Leone and former Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals, the remains that lie in the 20,000 uncovered mass graves that dot Cambodia's picturesque landscape have been exposed to decades of human intervention and erosion by violent tropical storms.
Grave robbers seeking gold teeth and valuables stashed on body parts and in clothes of the dead have also taken a toll. The pillaging has not helped the prosecution's case.
This contamination of evidence is expected to underpin the defense case and could prove pivotal as to whether the defiant Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, live out their twilight years as free citizens or as felons behind bars.
But Etcheson does hold one trump card up his sleeve.
He is the keeper of the coordinates, the secret locations of untouched mass graves in Cambodia's remote eastern provinces, where thousands of men, women and children -- those he now calls friends -- were battered to death, dumped and buried.
"There could be hundreds or 10,000 there, or more, or less," he said.
Known collectively as the Primary Site, these mass graves are untainted by human hands and weather. They will provide the stuff forensic scientists dream of: hard evidence that has the potential to withstand the rigid tests of international law.
"This is a nice little chunk of evidence that provides a snapshot of what happened in the east during the first and second quarters of 1978 when Ta Mok and Ke Pauk came in and killed everybody," Etcheson said.
The Primary Site, the size of three to four football pitches, is where Etcheson and a small team of forensic scientists from Canada have painstakingly unearthed initial samples they say justify an excavation on a grand scale.
The findings, which Etcheson believes will directly link Pol Pot's government with the belligerent and deliberate murder of thousands, will be offered to the tribunal's prosecution as prima facie evidence.
"What they did was pretty simple," Etcheson said.
He chuckles, not out of mirth but out of a sense of irony over the abstractions of Western justice versus the simplicity of the brutality exercised by the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge.
"A Khmer Rouge sense of justice is much easier to understand. Just bring in the trucks, get 'em on, truck 'em off, then whack 'em. And that's what they did in village after village after village."
Pol Pot, Ta Mok, and Ke Pauk escaped their day in the dock through death. But one of their surviving close colleagues, Kang Kek Ieu -- or Comrade Duch -- who ran the notorious S21 torture camp, is in jail awaiting trial after being charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.
If convicted, Pol Pot's surviving henchmen and women will probably go to jail, a comfortable existence in comparison with conditions imposed during Brother Number One's regime.
But comfortable or not, such a result will mean Etcheson's efforts, made for his friends, will have proved pivotal in finding justice for all Cambodians, dead or alive.
"Maybe then I can find a job that actually comes with a paycheck," he said with a grin. "But more than likely I'll find another country where similar work needs to be done."
Luke Hunt has covered Cambodia for many years.
Postscript: Since this interview was conducted, Etcheson has been appointed as an investigator in the Office of the Co-Prosecutors at the Khmer Rouge tribunal.
Then Vietnam invaded Cambodia and lifted the veil on the true scale of carnage committed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Images from the Killing Fields shocked the affable Etcheson. The slaughter of about one third of Cambodia's population in the previous three-and-a-half years was something the young mathematician found incomprehensible.
His immediate response to those feelings was to study the events in detail.
After digging through records and recent histories, he wrote his first book: "The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea." That was in 1984. Field work followed in the years ahead and again he divided his time -- this time between family duties in Washington, D.C., and crawling through mud and bones with a shovel as a forensic scientist in Cambodia.
A quarter of a century on, Etcheson became affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and became a conduit for the dead. He used his forensic science skills to demonstrate beyond legal doubt that surviving leaders of the ultra-Maoist movement committed one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.
Routinely I would meet with Craig after a dig. Normally he was exhausted and more than slightly disturbed by his latest finds and in need of a chat over a single malt.
"After you have seen hundreds and then thousands of mass graves you gradually find a certain kind of peace with the dead, and then eventually one forms a curious social alliance with them," Etcheson said.
That alliance is deeply personal for the stocky 51-year-old, whose latest book, "After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide," was released in March. Another two manuscripts on the same subject are pending. Now he is bracing himself for the long-delayed Khmer Rouge tribunal, where his work will be scrutinized and attacked by those prepared to defend what's left of Pol Pot's hierarchy.
Potential defense lawyers, seeking to make names for themselves, are already conducting forays into Cambodia and preparing an initial strategy based on attacking the validity of the evidence and the legality of the court itself, as well as seeking to throw doubt on reports that genocide occurred.
The United Nations is also setting up the case for the prosecution, and a tribunal could begin its first hearing within the next six months.
Etcheson is unruffled. "For me it's always been about the victims," he said.
"For other people who have worked on this it's about abstractions like establishing legal precedents and defining terms like genocide, instead of addressing issues like these were once actual living human beings."
Unlike the physical evidence produced at the Rwanda, Sierra Leone and former Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals, the remains that lie in the 20,000 uncovered mass graves that dot Cambodia's picturesque landscape have been exposed to decades of human intervention and erosion by violent tropical storms.
Grave robbers seeking gold teeth and valuables stashed on body parts and in clothes of the dead have also taken a toll. The pillaging has not helped the prosecution's case.
This contamination of evidence is expected to underpin the defense case and could prove pivotal as to whether the defiant Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, live out their twilight years as free citizens or as felons behind bars.
But Etcheson does hold one trump card up his sleeve.
He is the keeper of the coordinates, the secret locations of untouched mass graves in Cambodia's remote eastern provinces, where thousands of men, women and children -- those he now calls friends -- were battered to death, dumped and buried.
"There could be hundreds or 10,000 there, or more, or less," he said.
Known collectively as the Primary Site, these mass graves are untainted by human hands and weather. They will provide the stuff forensic scientists dream of: hard evidence that has the potential to withstand the rigid tests of international law.
"This is a nice little chunk of evidence that provides a snapshot of what happened in the east during the first and second quarters of 1978 when Ta Mok and Ke Pauk came in and killed everybody," Etcheson said.
The Primary Site, the size of three to four football pitches, is where Etcheson and a small team of forensic scientists from Canada have painstakingly unearthed initial samples they say justify an excavation on a grand scale.
The findings, which Etcheson believes will directly link Pol Pot's government with the belligerent and deliberate murder of thousands, will be offered to the tribunal's prosecution as prima facie evidence.
"What they did was pretty simple," Etcheson said.
He chuckles, not out of mirth but out of a sense of irony over the abstractions of Western justice versus the simplicity of the brutality exercised by the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge.
"A Khmer Rouge sense of justice is much easier to understand. Just bring in the trucks, get 'em on, truck 'em off, then whack 'em. And that's what they did in village after village after village."
Pol Pot, Ta Mok, and Ke Pauk escaped their day in the dock through death. But one of their surviving close colleagues, Kang Kek Ieu -- or Comrade Duch -- who ran the notorious S21 torture camp, is in jail awaiting trial after being charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.
If convicted, Pol Pot's surviving henchmen and women will probably go to jail, a comfortable existence in comparison with conditions imposed during Brother Number One's regime.
But comfortable or not, such a result will mean Etcheson's efforts, made for his friends, will have proved pivotal in finding justice for all Cambodians, dead or alive.
"Maybe then I can find a job that actually comes with a paycheck," he said with a grin. "But more than likely I'll find another country where similar work needs to be done."
Luke Hunt has covered Cambodia for many years.
Postscript: Since this interview was conducted, Etcheson has been appointed as an investigator in the Office of the Co-Prosecutors at the Khmer Rouge tribunal.
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