'History cannot be hidden' as Khmer Rouge leaders tried

Chum Mey visits S-21, a Khmer Rouge secret prison in Phnom Penh, where he was held for four months in 1978. The brutal communist regime killed his wife and daughter. (Photo: Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY)

Tuesday, September 14, 2010
By Calum MacLeod
USA TODAY

"People don't believe you can try the Khmer Rouge under this kind of government, who are Khmer Rouge themselves" - Son Chhay, opposition whip

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The Khmer Rouge shot and killed his wife and child. They tortured him with electric shocks and yanked out his toenails. They turned rice paddies into "killing fields," where the corpses of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were left to rot.

So for all that, jailing one old man for 19 years doesn't feel like justice to Chum Mey.

"It's a shame we don't have the death penalty anymore," says Chum, 79, inside S-21, a former Khmer Rouge secret prison where he was once jailed.

The subject of Chum's dismay is Kaing Guek Eav, 67, the former commandant of S-21 who is also known as Comrade Duch. In July, an international tribunal here convicted Duch of carrying out the torture and killings of 12,000 people.

Duch is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders arrested on charges of crimes against humanity. All are accused of taking part in killing as many as 3 million people from 1975 to 1979 — roughly one-third of Cambodia's population at the time, the United Nations says — in a ghastly attempt to turn back the clock on Western influences here and create an agrarian communist paradise.

Cambodians — including the 100,000 who fled to the United States by 1990 — have been waiting for more than 30 years to see justice for the Khmer Rouge, whose rule was followed by a Vietnamese occupation, civil war and U.N. oversight.

But Duch's sentence has angered survivors who say it is far too light for a man whose guards smashed the skulls of children against trees to prevent them from avenging the death of their parents. They ask how the tribunal can deliver justice when only five of the hundreds of former Khmer Rouge cadres and collaborators living freely in Cambodia are to be tried before it. Human rights groups say the U.N. is risking its credibility if the tribunal fails to satisfy the victims.

"I think it's not right. Somebody kill a lot of people, but they are still alive," says Wendy Lim, 57, who works the counter at the Phnom Pich Jewelry store in Long Beach, Calif., home to many Cambodian-owned businesses.

A mother of four who arrived in the USA in 1983, she wipes tears from her cheeks as she recalls the brutality of the Khmer Rouge, which killed her brother. Apologizing for her imperfect English, she says Duch's sentence was too light: "Not good — in the jail too short. He should die."

Others, however, say no tribunal will satisfy everyone and warn that justice is difficult in a country where despite a turn toward elective politics some alleged Khmer Rouge still hold powerful positions.

"This court could keep going for another 50 years because of all the crimes that were committed," says Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which is researching the genocide.

The Khmer Rouge's rise

Cambodians have been at the mercy of colonialism, communism and invaders for decades.

The French made Cambodia part of their Indochina empire in the 19th century, reaping profits from the harvesting of rice and rubber. At the height of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, Soviet-backed North Vietnamese army troops hid in Cambodia's jungles to attack non-communist South Vietnam.

The United States, backing the South with U.S. troops, bombed the bases repeatedly and aided attempts by Cambodia military to oust the Vietnamese. Hundreds of villages were destroyed. A militia arose from the countryside, calling itself the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer, the name given them by the French (Khmer is the predominant ethnic group of Cambodia). Led by Pol Pot, a Khmer who once studied radio electronics at a Paris engineering school, the Khmer Rouge vowed to bring order and equality.

After a brutal campaign, Pol's soldiers surrounded the capital in April 1975. Phnom Penh fell five days after the U.S. Congress ended an airlift of food and weapons to the besieged city.

Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea. In what it called "Year Zero," the Khmer Rouge set out to cleanse the country of Western influence and traditional Cambodian culture. Banks were closed, money eliminated, schools shuttered. City residents were herded into the countryside to farm. Lawyers, teachers, property owners and Buddhist priests were ordered to be exterminated.

Pol's handiwork resulted not in utopia but poverty, famine and mass murder. It ended when Vietnam's army invaded in 1979.

"Our project was to transform the nature of society," Nuon Chea, one of the four remaining accused Khmer Rouge leaders awaiting trial, says in a newly released documentary film, Enemies of the People, winner of the 2010 Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

During its rule, the Khmer Rouge established labor camps, farm collectives and 196 prisons where people were starved, worked to death or killed, often after digging their own graves. In the film, an admitted Khmer Rouge executioner identified as Suon talks about how his hands grew tired from slitting throats so he switched to stabbing his victims as they lay face down with their hands tied. Like Duch, he says he was following orders.

"If we didn't obey, we would have been killed," says their superior, "Sister Em."

Cambodians who fled the Khmer Rouge for the United States still struggle with the horror they endured. They demand to know why it happened and who is responsible.

Danny You, 45, an urban planner who has lived in the USA since 1984, says he and most Cambodian-Americans he knows have little regard for the tribunals. He thinks those most responsible for the mass killings will never be brought to justice.

"They are corrupt, the government," he says. "How can one guy have killed so many?" he asks, suggesting some are getting away with murder. "I saw the killing. I witnessed everything."

Tom Am, 45, who arrived in America in 1982, agrees: "Someone masterminded it. There were orders from somewhere. There should be others" on trial.

A block down Anaheim Street, the heart of Cambodia Town, or Little Phnom Penh as it is unofficially known, Sam Ty is pleased with the tribunal.

"I think it was good, verdict was fair," says Ty, owner of Pich Kiri jewelry store. "It took a long time, too long."

Sara Pol-Lim, a survivor of the "killing fields" and executive director of the United Cambodian Community in Long Beach, says many Cambodians remain fearful of talking about that period.

Despite distrust in the government, sociologist Leakhena Nou is trying to get the testimonies of Cambodian-Americans about the horrors they suffered in their native land accepted by the tribunal by its Friday deadline.

"Many people are in their 60s and 70s, so this might be their only chance to make a mark on history. They are reclaiming the power that the Khmer Rouge took away from them 35 years ago," says Nou, an assistant professor at California State University-Long Beach.

Questions about the tribunal

Under international pressure, the Cambodian government requested U.N. help in 1997 to establish a tribunal to prosecute senior Khmer Rouge leaders but demanded it exclude thousands of henchmen.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia opened in 2007, with three Cambodians and two foreigners serving as judges. Having passed judgment on Duch, Case 001, the tribunal is to hear its next trial in 2011. But the presence of former Khmer Rouge officials in Cambodia's government, including long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen, raises the issue of whether serious criminals are being shielded from prosecution, critics say.

"People don't believe you can try the Khmer Rouge under this kind of government, who are Khmer Rouge themselves," says Son Chhay, an opposition member of a Cambodia parliament dominated by Hun Sen's party.

Others question whether the tribunal shows the limitations of an international system for perpetrators of genocide.

Human Rights Watch says the tribunal's mandate is being interfered with by the Cambodian government, which could derail additional indictments and trials. The Cambodian government appears to be behind decisions to block additional indictments, it says.

Despite millions dead, "the government is refusing to hold more than five people to account," says Sara Colm, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The U.N. and the tribunal's international donors should not allow political interference with the court to undermine its credibility."

Critics say that has happened.

Sophal Ear, a Cambodian-American political economist in Monterey, Calif., pointed to the 2009 appointment of Helen Jarvis of Australia as head of the tribunal's victims unit as an example of political bias. According to Ear, Jarvis once wrote with her husband: "We, too, are Marxists and believe that 'the ends justify the means.' ... In time of revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes become necessary and justified."

"Everyone, including the donors know, that it's a lemon," Ear says of the tribunal. "It either needs to be fixed or it needs to be taken off the lot."

The tribunal is at a crossroads between legitimacy and failure, says Panhavuth Long, project officer at the Cambodia Justice Initiative, which supports the idea of international tribunals. He says the Cambodian government does not want more than five people prosecuted even though Cambodians say many more are guilty. Pol Pot died in a jungle hideaway in 1998.

"Cambodians' dissatisfaction at the (Duch) verdict makes it doubtful they will stay ... engaged for Case 2," he says.

That case involves former deputy leader Nuon Chea, 84, who along with three other Khmer Rouge leaders will be tried next year. Unlike Duch, they have not admitted guilt.

International co-prosecutor Andrew Cayley said the tribunal could prove to be a model for other nations that need international support to tackle serious crimes. "People will look back at this time and appreciate the fact that justice was met to international standards," says Cayley, a British lawyer.

Today, Cambodia is a fledgling democracy with an economy that was growing at 10% a year until the recession. Garment factories have sprung up to take advantage of cheap labor. Tourism is a big source of revenue and jobs. Two million people arrive annually to visit rain forest reserves, sparkling beaches and Angkor Wat, a 12th-century temple.

Chin Yong, driver of a tuk-tuk taxi that is a combination motorbike and carriage, is waiting for a fare near Gold Tower 42, the latest of a few skyscrapers that have gone up recently in Phnom Penh.

On this day, he is more concerned about his poor wages ($5 a day) than seeing justice for the Khmer Rouge. Although he had many relatives die under the regime, he says more tribunals are "not good for the country. We don't want more suffering through the memories."

In the countryside where most Cambodians still live, farmer Tep Naran echoes such sentiments.

"Life for people here is pretty much the same," says Naran, 29, at his home village near Skuon town, Kompong Cham province. "I don't know much about the Khmer Rouge as I wasn't even born then." Of Duch, he says, "He's so old now, why do they want to punish him?"

His father, Tep Sok, who says Duch was his math teacher before the Khmer Rouge, feels differently. "He used to advise me to be a good student, to benefit my family and the whole society. But he must have changed after that," says Tep, 65, who says he wants justice to come for the former Khmer Rouge cadres who live near his village.

In northwest Pailin province, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold, some people defend the regime.

"If there was no Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese would have stolen our land," says Ven Ra, niece of Ta Mok, a Pol Pot commander known as "The Butcher" who was awaiting trial for allegedly directing massacres and died in detention in 2006.

Those kinds of claims are one reason Chum Mey keeps coming to the former S-21 prison, now a genocide museum. When some students arrive, he rises from his seat again to tell what he witnessed here.

"History," he says, "cannot be hidden."