March 11, 2007Still free ... the henchmen of the killing fields
Sunday Herald (Scotland, UK)
The men above were responsible for thousands of deaths. All attempts to bring them to justice have failed ... will the latest be any more successful? A special report by Nick Meo in Phnom Penh
ANLONG SAH is a typical Cambodian rice-growing village an hour's drive from the capital Phnom Penh, a humble place with thatched roofs and grazing water buffalo, a colourful Buddhist shrine, toothless old ladies who spend all day gossiping about their neighbours' foibles, and a former Khmer Rouge executioner called Him Huy.
Three decades after 1.7 million people were starved to death or executed when an experiment in utopian communism lurched into murderous paranoia, around 30,000 ex-Khmer Rouge cadres like Him live quite openly in Cambodia.
Researchers believe the rate of mass murder was the highest of the 20th century, with about one in five of the population dying before Vietnamese soldiers invaded in 1979, putting an end to the slaughter.
At that time, as the regime crumbled, any of the killers who could be caught were killed by the mob. Some middle-ranking named cadres were later prosecuted in a victor's show trial.
But most escaped. Today, large numbers of them, including some of the leaders, stay in towns along the border with Thailand, from where they fought a guerrilla war after they were toppled from power. Others live simple lives in towns and villages around the country.
Him, of Anlong Sah village, says he was a low-level cadre who joined the movement as a teenage guerrilla, was brainwashed with Maoist ideology, then forced to take part in the killing. Now, he is a 52-year-old rice farmer and father of nine with an unnerving stare who insists he was a victim too, and says that nowadays he just does his best to forget the past.
He is allowed to by his neighbours, who seem to believe him when he says he was forced to kill hundreds of people.
Him knows there is no chance of being put on trial by the tribunal which will sit later this year in the capital with around 10 defendants expected to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Him is small fry, and if he appears in the smart new building in Phnom Penh, with a traditional Buddhist shrine in the front and a fleet of white UN Land Cruisers parked at the back, it will be to give evidence as a witness, not to be prosecuted for his crimes.
The authorities say rounding up every Khmer Rouge cadre in Cambodia could provoke civil unrest, perhaps even re-ignite the civil war. And anyway the resources are not available. The official view is that the forthcoming tribunal, years overdue and with fewer than a dozen likely defendants, is the best chance of justice Cambodia is ever going to get.
Efforts to start a tribunal have been made sporadically over the past decade, since before the last Khmer Rouge guerrillas finally surrendered in about 1998.
Finally, this year the court, costing nearly US$60 million and organised by the United Nations and the Cambodian government, was due to begin hearing evidence in the capital in July. It is expected to last for three years.
But a series of procedural stumbles and behind-the-scenes battles between international and Cambodian judges have forced a postponement, probably to some time next year. Doubts are growing that it will ever get off the ground. Only rumours trickle out about the exact details of the problems, but the central problem seems to be Cambodia's corrupt judiciary, which is notorious for being manipulated by the politicians.
International judges are staking their reputations on this tribunal, however, so if justice does not meet international standards, they may decide to pull out of the process. That almost happened in January in a row over procedure, and again last week when ruffled Cambodian judges were forced to deny taking bribes to obtain lucrative jobs on the tribunal.
Many in Phnom Penh doubt that the trial will ever happen. Prince Thomico Sisowath, who lost his parents in the terror, said: "If the government really wanted this trial to delve into Cambodia's past they would have held it in The Hague.
"I am very doubtful about how it will work in practice. There are too many links between the ruling party and the Khmer Rouge."
A journalist in Phnom Penh was pithier. "The tribunal is bullshit. The guilty will never suffer for what they did. The politicians don't want them to."
Such views, after years of stalling and delay, may be too cynical. Helen Jarvis, a spokeswoman for the tribunal and previously an academic and co-author of an excellent study of efforts to put Khmer Rouge leaders on trial, remains optimistic. "There are problems but I don't think they are terminal," she said. "I think we are closer now than we have ever been to getting the tribunal started."
The doubters, it appears, include the likely defendants. So far, they seem unruffled at the prospect of spending what is left of their lives in prison. The tribunal aims to put around 10 of them on trial, nearly all elderly men and several of them in poor health.
They include Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" and once Pol Pot's right-hand man, Khieu Samphan, the former head of state, and Ieng Sary, a former foreign minister, who has a mansion in Phnom Penh next door to the homes of some of the former victims.
SO far, however, only one man is in prison, "Comrade Duch", a former head of a torture centre which despatched more than 20,000 people to their deaths. The others are enjoying quiet and prosperous retirements, apparently untroubled by the prospect of arrest.
Nuon, regarded as one of the most evil of the regime's leaders, is infirm now but still cuts a sinister, if bowed, figure with his ever-present mirrored shades and leather jacket.
Recently, in interviews with journalists, he scorned the tribunal, insisting the Khmer Rouge had been defending Cambodia and that its enemies have exaggerated the number of deaths.
His remarkable confidence has not helped persuade sceptical Cambodians that justice is about to be done. They know the defendants are very elderly men - most of them are over 80 - who may not live to hear the verdicts. In court their lawyers may be able to argue that they are too infirm to stand trial. And then, as every Cambodian knows, the politicians are somewhat less than determined to leave no stone unturned to see justice done.
Many ministers are subject to persistent rumours about the extent of their involvement with the old regime. They may not want their pasts scrutinised. Foreign powers may also have an interest in leaving the details of history hazy.
The tribunal has no power to examine anything that happened after January 1979, when the regime fell, before Khmer Rouge remnants were re-armed and trained by China, Thailand, and, according to some claims, Britain and America. They fought on for nearly 20 years in a bloody guerrilla war against Vietnam, the cold war's last terrible infliction of suffering on Cambodia.
For many ordinary Cambodians the tribunal's limitations are a disappointment, but not a surprise. For almost 30 years they have had to make compromises with their terrible past. Virtually every family lost members in a time remembered as a bewildering and hungry era of dislocation, labour camps, endless toil, starvation, Marxist indoctrination, and murder at whim.
Those picked for the killing fields wore glasses or spoke with an educated accent; were monks; had owned a village shop; fought for the losing government side in the civil war; belonged to Muslim or Vietnamese ethnic minorities, or fell short in revolutionary zeal. But many were just chosen at random in a killing frenzy.
A blow to the back of the head with a hoe or an axe was the usual way of despatching enemies of the revolution. Bullets were in short supply. The bodies of class enemies were used to manure the fields, and their bones as reinforcing for concrete in dams and bridges.
Today, few of the survivors really understand why that time happened. Prum Son, from the village of Kbal Sen near Phnom Penh, lost three siblings and numerous friends in the mass murder. She spent four years working as a slave, with friends summoned by the cadres from their labours in the fields and never seen again.
She hopes to attend the tribunal to see its proceedings. She said: "I never understood why such terrible things happened. Perhaps now we will have a chance to learn why."
That is a common view across the country, which remains overwhelmingly rural and illiterate, as it was in 1975; a place of beauty with gentle people following a peaceful Buddhist religion.
Indeed, the name of "Brother Number One", Pol Pot, only became known after the fall of the regime in 1979.
For years, the survivors of this horror have been left to try to make sense of it, and the strongest argument for holding a tribunal today is that it will help Cambodia to confront its terrible past.
A common refrain is the high crime and murder rate, widespread corruption and economic backwardness of today's Cambodia are - in part at least-the poisonous legacy of the Khmer Rouge era.
Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, said: "Although Cambodia today looks normal, people are still traumatised. The perpetrators need a trial most of all. It will help them to understand what they did."
That is a view which can be found in the most surprising places - even the border town of Pailin, notorious as a bastion of Khmer Rouge veterans and still a dangerous place surrounded by fields of landmines.
Even men who fought for the Khmer Rouge for years want to see a tribunal. Some avert their eyes when asked about the killing, many proffer conspiracy theories about how Vietnamese spies were responsible, trying to undermine the revolution. Some, however, are angry about what happened.
Sip Proeung, 56, says he didn't take part in the mass murder but he fought as a soldier for the regime.
He said: "At that time I thought Pol Pot and Nuon Chea were for the development of Cambodia, but they cheated us. They brought only destruction.
"Now we want to know what really happened and why, and perhaps this trial will help."
But he knows that Nuon - who lives about four miles away from his village in quiet retirement - and the others are old men who have waited a long time for justice to catch up with them, cunning old men who know that patience may well prove to be their best strategy.
As the tribunal is delayed further their own imminent deaths may yet help them cheat justice.
ANLONG SAH is a typical Cambodian rice-growing village an hour's drive from the capital Phnom Penh, a humble place with thatched roofs and grazing water buffalo, a colourful Buddhist shrine, toothless old ladies who spend all day gossiping about their neighbours' foibles, and a former Khmer Rouge executioner called Him Huy.
Three decades after 1.7 million people were starved to death or executed when an experiment in utopian communism lurched into murderous paranoia, around 30,000 ex-Khmer Rouge cadres like Him live quite openly in Cambodia.
Researchers believe the rate of mass murder was the highest of the 20th century, with about one in five of the population dying before Vietnamese soldiers invaded in 1979, putting an end to the slaughter.
At that time, as the regime crumbled, any of the killers who could be caught were killed by the mob. Some middle-ranking named cadres were later prosecuted in a victor's show trial.
But most escaped. Today, large numbers of them, including some of the leaders, stay in towns along the border with Thailand, from where they fought a guerrilla war after they were toppled from power. Others live simple lives in towns and villages around the country.
Him, of Anlong Sah village, says he was a low-level cadre who joined the movement as a teenage guerrilla, was brainwashed with Maoist ideology, then forced to take part in the killing. Now, he is a 52-year-old rice farmer and father of nine with an unnerving stare who insists he was a victim too, and says that nowadays he just does his best to forget the past.
He is allowed to by his neighbours, who seem to believe him when he says he was forced to kill hundreds of people.
Him knows there is no chance of being put on trial by the tribunal which will sit later this year in the capital with around 10 defendants expected to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Him is small fry, and if he appears in the smart new building in Phnom Penh, with a traditional Buddhist shrine in the front and a fleet of white UN Land Cruisers parked at the back, it will be to give evidence as a witness, not to be prosecuted for his crimes.
The authorities say rounding up every Khmer Rouge cadre in Cambodia could provoke civil unrest, perhaps even re-ignite the civil war. And anyway the resources are not available. The official view is that the forthcoming tribunal, years overdue and with fewer than a dozen likely defendants, is the best chance of justice Cambodia is ever going to get.
Efforts to start a tribunal have been made sporadically over the past decade, since before the last Khmer Rouge guerrillas finally surrendered in about 1998.
Finally, this year the court, costing nearly US$60 million and organised by the United Nations and the Cambodian government, was due to begin hearing evidence in the capital in July. It is expected to last for three years.
But a series of procedural stumbles and behind-the-scenes battles between international and Cambodian judges have forced a postponement, probably to some time next year. Doubts are growing that it will ever get off the ground. Only rumours trickle out about the exact details of the problems, but the central problem seems to be Cambodia's corrupt judiciary, which is notorious for being manipulated by the politicians.
International judges are staking their reputations on this tribunal, however, so if justice does not meet international standards, they may decide to pull out of the process. That almost happened in January in a row over procedure, and again last week when ruffled Cambodian judges were forced to deny taking bribes to obtain lucrative jobs on the tribunal.
Many in Phnom Penh doubt that the trial will ever happen. Prince Thomico Sisowath, who lost his parents in the terror, said: "If the government really wanted this trial to delve into Cambodia's past they would have held it in The Hague.
"I am very doubtful about how it will work in practice. There are too many links between the ruling party and the Khmer Rouge."
A journalist in Phnom Penh was pithier. "The tribunal is bullshit. The guilty will never suffer for what they did. The politicians don't want them to."
Such views, after years of stalling and delay, may be too cynical. Helen Jarvis, a spokeswoman for the tribunal and previously an academic and co-author of an excellent study of efforts to put Khmer Rouge leaders on trial, remains optimistic. "There are problems but I don't think they are terminal," she said. "I think we are closer now than we have ever been to getting the tribunal started."
The doubters, it appears, include the likely defendants. So far, they seem unruffled at the prospect of spending what is left of their lives in prison. The tribunal aims to put around 10 of them on trial, nearly all elderly men and several of them in poor health.
They include Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" and once Pol Pot's right-hand man, Khieu Samphan, the former head of state, and Ieng Sary, a former foreign minister, who has a mansion in Phnom Penh next door to the homes of some of the former victims.
SO far, however, only one man is in prison, "Comrade Duch", a former head of a torture centre which despatched more than 20,000 people to their deaths. The others are enjoying quiet and prosperous retirements, apparently untroubled by the prospect of arrest.
Nuon, regarded as one of the most evil of the regime's leaders, is infirm now but still cuts a sinister, if bowed, figure with his ever-present mirrored shades and leather jacket.
Recently, in interviews with journalists, he scorned the tribunal, insisting the Khmer Rouge had been defending Cambodia and that its enemies have exaggerated the number of deaths.
His remarkable confidence has not helped persuade sceptical Cambodians that justice is about to be done. They know the defendants are very elderly men - most of them are over 80 - who may not live to hear the verdicts. In court their lawyers may be able to argue that they are too infirm to stand trial. And then, as every Cambodian knows, the politicians are somewhat less than determined to leave no stone unturned to see justice done.
Many ministers are subject to persistent rumours about the extent of their involvement with the old regime. They may not want their pasts scrutinised. Foreign powers may also have an interest in leaving the details of history hazy.
The tribunal has no power to examine anything that happened after January 1979, when the regime fell, before Khmer Rouge remnants were re-armed and trained by China, Thailand, and, according to some claims, Britain and America. They fought on for nearly 20 years in a bloody guerrilla war against Vietnam, the cold war's last terrible infliction of suffering on Cambodia.
For many ordinary Cambodians the tribunal's limitations are a disappointment, but not a surprise. For almost 30 years they have had to make compromises with their terrible past. Virtually every family lost members in a time remembered as a bewildering and hungry era of dislocation, labour camps, endless toil, starvation, Marxist indoctrination, and murder at whim.
Those picked for the killing fields wore glasses or spoke with an educated accent; were monks; had owned a village shop; fought for the losing government side in the civil war; belonged to Muslim or Vietnamese ethnic minorities, or fell short in revolutionary zeal. But many were just chosen at random in a killing frenzy.
A blow to the back of the head with a hoe or an axe was the usual way of despatching enemies of the revolution. Bullets were in short supply. The bodies of class enemies were used to manure the fields, and their bones as reinforcing for concrete in dams and bridges.
Today, few of the survivors really understand why that time happened. Prum Son, from the village of Kbal Sen near Phnom Penh, lost three siblings and numerous friends in the mass murder. She spent four years working as a slave, with friends summoned by the cadres from their labours in the fields and never seen again.
She hopes to attend the tribunal to see its proceedings. She said: "I never understood why such terrible things happened. Perhaps now we will have a chance to learn why."
That is a common view across the country, which remains overwhelmingly rural and illiterate, as it was in 1975; a place of beauty with gentle people following a peaceful Buddhist religion.
Indeed, the name of "Brother Number One", Pol Pot, only became known after the fall of the regime in 1979.
For years, the survivors of this horror have been left to try to make sense of it, and the strongest argument for holding a tribunal today is that it will help Cambodia to confront its terrible past.
A common refrain is the high crime and murder rate, widespread corruption and economic backwardness of today's Cambodia are - in part at least-the poisonous legacy of the Khmer Rouge era.
Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, said: "Although Cambodia today looks normal, people are still traumatised. The perpetrators need a trial most of all. It will help them to understand what they did."
That is a view which can be found in the most surprising places - even the border town of Pailin, notorious as a bastion of Khmer Rouge veterans and still a dangerous place surrounded by fields of landmines.
Even men who fought for the Khmer Rouge for years want to see a tribunal. Some avert their eyes when asked about the killing, many proffer conspiracy theories about how Vietnamese spies were responsible, trying to undermine the revolution. Some, however, are angry about what happened.
Sip Proeung, 56, says he didn't take part in the mass murder but he fought as a soldier for the regime.
He said: "At that time I thought Pol Pot and Nuon Chea were for the development of Cambodia, but they cheated us. They brought only destruction.
"Now we want to know what really happened and why, and perhaps this trial will help."
But he knows that Nuon - who lives about four miles away from his village in quiet retirement - and the others are old men who have waited a long time for justice to catch up with them, cunning old men who know that patience may well prove to be their best strategy.
As the tribunal is delayed further their own imminent deaths may yet help them cheat justice.
7 comments:
they can cheat from hunsen justice, bbut they cannot cheat justice in hell. hahahah
You can cheat on this earth,but you cannot cheat in hell. those who's die under you hand will see you in hell.
yuo can cheat now but you cannot cheat in hell. those people die in you hand is waiting for you and the current the judge
FUCK SAM RAINSHIT !!!!!!!! A FUCKING LOSER...... SREWED REFUGIE PARTY (SRP)
FUCK SAM RAINSHIT !!!!!!!! A FUCKING LOSER...... SREWED REFUGIE PARTY (SRP)
FUCK SAM RAINSHIT !!!!!!!! A FUCKING LOSER...... SREWED REFUGIE PARTY (SRP)
SEE PEE PEE 2:23PM, GO TO HELL DICKHEAD.
The only potential, likely defendant at a KR trial who will ever go to prison is Duch. The rest will be declared too old and in poor health and be sent home under some kind of bogus house arrest. Get it?
I think this foul 2:23pm is son-in-law of Khmeng Wat Knong Srok, they have the same barkings Shit
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