Speaking in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng on the nation's northern border with Thailand, Hun Sen said the war was over and it was a positive sign for the future that former Khmer Rouge areas, such as Anlong Veng, had been integrated into peacetime Cambodia.
He said "the story had ended" when senior former Khmer Rouge leaders, including former head of state Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot's former deputy Nuon Chea, had come to his home and eaten with him in December 1998, marking the formal surrender of the Khmer Rouge. The term "story" is also a Cambodian euphemism for its 30-year civil war.
But despite his reference to Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, who would be prime candidates to stand trial, Hun Sen avoided any direct reference to the 56.3-million-dollar UN-Cambodian-sponsored trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders, currently stalled yet again amid bitter wrangling over the court's internal rules.
The trials have not yet reached their indictment stage despite the prosecution phase getting under way in mid-2006, and it remained unclear which former leaders would stand trial.
Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary defected and was granted amnesty from genocide charges by then-king Norodom Sihanouk in 1996 although some remain keen to indict him on charges of crimes against humanity. Former military commander Ta Mok died in a military hospital this year and was cremated in Anlong Veng. The movement's former leader Pol Pot died in Anlong Veng in 1998.
However, on Wednesday in former Khmer Rouge heartland, Hun Sen preferred to focus on Cambodia's new era of peace and sidestep the growing storm over the pace of justice - a matter he has left in the hands of Deputy Prime Minister Sok An.
"So many people died in the war," Hun Sen said in the speech, which was broadcast on national radio. "We achieved national reconciliation. Please don't let national reconciliation break down."
The lack of direct reference to the trials was unlikely to please critics, some of which have accused Hun Sen's government of deliberately delaying the long-awaited trials of a handful of surviving leaders of the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime.
Earlier this month, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused the government of meddling in the trial process, and this week, a coalition of human-rights organizations urged the court to resolve the conflict over procedural rules with haste.
The government - which contains a number of former Khmer Rouge cadre who fled the movement under the excesses of its leader Pol Pot and returned to Phnom Penh, backed by Vietnamese troops, to overthrow the regime - has maintained it is determined to try the former leaders to international standards.
Up to 2 million Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge regime. However, most of its now mainly ageing and ailing former leaders continue to live freely and openly without ever having faced justice.
4 comments:
Hun Sen is an actor put on stage by Vietnam and now supported by China. He is reading a good script written by these two power players who had bloody hand equally in the massacre of 2 millions plus Cambodians. If international community really serious about justice for Cambodians, it should ask China and Vietnam to open records of their plan involvement in Cambodia between 1975 and 1980. Cambodians should start learning to be Cambodians, look into themselves for help rather than put foreigners before their own. Until Cambodians can identify themselves as Cambodians, bound by common nationality, interest and desire to sustain as a nation, the spell of prophecies continues.
As long as your regiem is in power.. the khmer rouge will never end... YOU are the khmer rouge... just admit it.
It is in every Hun Sen interests to slow down, creat problems or excuses to prevent the KR trial from going ahead. Ah Hun Sen aim is for suvived KR members to be in the same case as Ta Mok "died".
Once and only when all those KR died then Hun Sen will let the trial proceed. Once again another hopeless future for Cambodia and it people to reconcile it past.
Those $56.3 million will be use for something else....
It hard to stay the course when Hun Sen and many of his CPP government officals are former Khmer Rouge, which mean they are former killer of Khmer directly or indirectly...there for no reason to push the trial..but every reasons to prevent it for moving forward.
Hello Kaun Khmer,
The paragraphs below excerpted from the “The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Same and Pol Pot”, by John Pilger, 1997
. . . . . . whose crimes are documented in a 1979 report of the UN Human Rights Commission as "the worst to have occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.'' He is, of course, Pol Pot, who must surely wonder at his good fortune. Not only was he cosseted, his troops fed, supplied, and trained, his envoys afforded all diplomatic privileges, but-unlike Saddam Hussein-he was assured by his patrons that he would never be brought to justice for his crimes.
These assurances were given publicly in 1991 when the UN Human Rights Subcommission dropped from its agenda a draft resolution on Cambodia that referred to "the atrocities reaching the level of genocide committed in particular during the period of Khmer Rouge rule." No more, the UN body decided, should member governments seek to "detect, arrest, extradite or bring to trial those who have been responsible for crimes against humanity in Cambodia." No more are governments called upon to "prevent the return to government positions of those who were responsible for genocidal actions during the period 1975 to 1978."
Such guarantees of impunity for the genocidists were also part of the UN "peace plan" drafted by the permanent members of the Security Council: that is, by the United States. To avoid offending Pol Pot's principal backers, the Chinese, the plan dropped all mention of "genocide," replacing it with the euphemism: "policies and practices of the recent past.'' On this, Henry Kissinger, who played a leading pan in the mass bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, was an important influence.
THE KHMER ROUGE TRIBUNAL CASE HAD BEEN CLOSED SINCE 1997. THE $56 MILLION WAS FOR THOSE MONKEYS WHO WERE WELL-CHOSEN TO PERFORM A SHOW AT THE CIRCUS.
If you are reading this, come back and share with everyone about how you feel on the KR tribunal.
I would only hope for the best for our Khmer and Khmer nation. I hope I'm wrong and you can call me names all you want.
***I invite you to read at least 5X.
Somlor Ma-chou Yuon
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