My brief response to Khmer Guardian’s posting of 2 June 2011:
The history of the world is the world's court of justice.
- Friedrich Schiller
I appreciate this quote posted by KI-Media for its summary of what we, the larger public, are trying to do in using the Khmer Rouge Tribunal as a vehicle to produce a fuller and more accurate historical record. It also serves as a reminder that the legal process is necessary but not sufficient (as Khmer Guardian rightly pointed out) and moreover, it’s deficient.
(As I have stated elsewhere, any legal process is limited, even more so when involving mass crimes. May I refer Khmer Guardian to my presentations for TEDxPhnomPenh and MLK, Jr. Anniversary celebration earlier this year?)
Related, we need to also keep in mind that there are more than one form of punishment or judgment which is the legal process and prison terms. Legal justice is very narrow and limiting, especially as it relates to power politics (and all international and internationalized courts are political products). Unless Cambodia becomes a country of political and economic significance with bargaining power vis-à-vis the United States or any other powerful country soon, then we can only dream in frustration our ability to demand high quality justice; realpolitik will continue to dictate the terms.
Regarding the wealth of the ten individuals in Cases 001, 002, 003 and 004, let me give you an example of DK military commander’s Meas Muth’s financial health: Meas Muth who is believed to a 2-star general in RCAF and “advisor” to the Ministry of Defense since his defection in 1999 owns a house, at least 6 hectares of farmland, a villa in Tuol Kork, and an SUV. He contributed most of $100,000 toward the building of Ta Saing Chas pagoda near his house.
Take heart as legal justice is not all there is; other forms of justice take place in the public sphere, less susceptible to realpolitik. Let me give you a sampling:
Books
1. Excerpts from The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (Ben Kiernan, 1996 Yale University).
U.S. Intervention
(Introduction, p. 16-24)
Although it was indigenous, Pol Pot’s revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilization of Cambodia which began in 1966 after the American escalation in next-door Vietnam and peaked in 1969-73 with the carpet bombing of Cambodia’s countryside by American B-52s. The was probably the most important single factor in Pol Pot’s rise. […]
Since the early 1960s, U.S. Special Forces teams, too, had been making secret reconnaissance and mine-laying incursions into Cambodia territory. In 1967 and 1968, in Operation Salem House, about eight hundred such missions were mounted, usually by several American personnel and up to ten local mercenaries, in most cases dressed as Viet Cong. One Green Beret team “inadvertently blew up a Cambodian civilian bus, causing heavy casualties”…and from early 1969, the number of these secret missions doubled… In a total of 1,835 missions…
Starting exactly a year before the coup (on 18 March 1969), over thirty-six hundred secret B-52 raids were also conducted over Cambodian territory…codenamed Menu…
By 1971, 60 percent of refugees surveyed in Cambodia’s towns gave U.S. bombing as the main cause of their displacement. The U.S. bombardment of the Cambodian countryside continued until 1973, when Congress imposed a halt. Nearly half of the 540,000 tons of bombs were dropped in the last six months […]
In March 1973, the bombardment spread west to envelop the whole country. Around Phnom Penh, three thousand civilians were killed in three weeks… Days later, U.S. bombardment intensified reaching a level of thirty-six hundred tons per day. As William Shawcross reported in Sideshow, the “wholesale carnage” shocked the chief of the political section in the U.S. embassy William Harben. One night, Harben said, “a mass of peasants” went out on a funeral procession and “walked straight into” a bombing raid. “Hundreds were slaughtered.” […]
… eighty people died when B-52s hit the village and its pagoda. Nearby Wat Angrun village was annihilated; a single family survived. Peasants claimed that 120 houses were destroyed in the air raid […]
Chhit Do was a CPK cadre near Angkor Wat in northern Cambodia. In 1979, he fled the country. Journalist Bruce Palling asked him if the Khmer Rouge had made use of the bombing for anti-U.S. propaganda:
Chhit Do: Oh yes, they did. Every time after there been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged and scorched… The ordinary people…sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came… Their minds just froze and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over… It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge… the bombs fell and hit little children and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge […]
Another report to the U.S. army in July 1973 stated that “the civilian population fears U.S. air attacks far more than they do Communist rocket attacks or scorched-earth tactics.” Up to 150,000 civilian deaths resulted from the U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.
The China Connection (p. 125)
Aid from China (p. 128)
[Ieng Sary] also negotiated a Chinese military aid package for Cambodia of 13,300 tons of weapons… China was prepared to extend to Cambodia a total of U.S. $1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid, including an immediate $20 million gift… In all, China’s aid to Cambodia during 1975 included 61,000 tons of rice, 30,000 tons of fuel, 3,000 tons of kerosene, 200 tons of machine oil, 250 tons of pesticides, 3,300 tons of cloth, 60 tons of medicines, 1.8 million hoes, 200,000 shovels, 5,000 pesticide sprays, and 20,000 bicycles.
[Note: Nayan Chanda’s book Brother Enemy detailed a very nuanced, more complex and more extensive relationship between China and Democratic Kampuchea. Below at no. 3 is an excerpt.]
6 comments:
Dear Theary,
Whether you like it or not that you are set up as a pawn of other NGOs and foreign intelligence agencies benefitting you in penny and nickel for self supporting lifestyle.
The big picture is the UN knew and the sponsors of UN knew damn well that ECCC is just a puppet show to keep Cambodia instable and an accomplice of the world guilts and negliegence during the struggles for self rule and independence.
All of your efforts are pitiful but insignificant in shaking the roots of the well planned genocide in Cambodia.
Kissinger,a Jewish by tradition, will laugh in his grave despite he isn't dead yet about the drama of Cambodia justice and destruction.
I felt angry as you are but the perpetrators are too keen to make us confuse and bought in their penny and nickel efforts to keep the hungry baby from crying.
Please reflect hard harder,when the US gave a damn about its atomic bombs dropping on Japan?
Dear Ms. Theary Seng,
Thank you for all the hard work and please continue with what you are doing and do not be discouraged by those who share different opinions.
You have many silent supporters out there who are certainly proud of you and your work!
i support theary seng . you are a brave cambodia weman
i support theary seng . you are a brave cambodia weman
Theary promotes herself not anyone else. without outside funding for her NGO, she wouldn't be in Cambodia.
I read about Seng Theary's bigography and it is similar to mine in that we were orphans that were brought to the US and had the opportunity to make a decent life for ourselves and took advantage of that.
However, I have been dismayed at the involvement of Seng Theary in political discussion regarding Cambodian matter. She should do something good for our birth country instead of serving the interest of a foreign country.
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