Sok Khemara, VOA Khmer | Washington, DC
"...leaders must be brave and take responsibility for what happened in the regime they led.”
Former Khmer Rouge commanders in Cambodia say the government should stick by an amnesty deal it made with the guerrillas in 1996, as a trial for top leaders of the regime is expected to start in earnest later this year.
A preliminary hearing this week has brought the amnesty question to the forefront, as lawyers for Ieng Sary, former foreign minister of the regime, argued he was exempt from trial under the government’s amnesty.
Sok Pheap Dep, a two-star general who is on Cambodia’s joint border committee and former Khmer Rouge commander at Phnom Malai, told VOA Khmer by phone Wednesday he had defected with Ieng Sary and was watching the tribunal closely. While amnesty was a state affair, he said, finding justice is the job of the court.
“The nation requires what should be done accordingly,” he said. “The promises or whatever is another issue. But the issue of people complaining? What to do?”
Yim Phanna, the a former rebel and current chief of Anlong Veng district in Oddar Meanchey province, said the hearings demonstrated how top leaders “must be brave and take responsibility for what happened in the regime they led.” Soldiers these days, he said, are more concerned with making a daily living and were not surprised by the arrests of the top leaders.
Thousands of former Khmer Rouge still live in the country’s northwest region, the last stronghold of the regime before mass defections to the government crippled its effort in a conflict that had lasted 20 years. In exchange, the government promised none of them would be prosecuted, and one leader, Ieng Sary, was granted a royal pardon over guilty charges handed down by a Vietnamese-supported court in 1979.
Tribunal spokesman Huy Vannak said one of the court’s main purposes is to seek justice for victims and to understand how the killing fields came about.
A former Khmer Rouge administrator now living in the northwest, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he wanted the leaders tried as soon as possible.
“They can still tell the truth,” he said. “Otherwise, we lose that.”
4 comments:
let the court do its job!
one step at a time, be patient, please! the court is doing its job now, calm down, ok! take a deep breath and don't forget to inhale and exhale slowly, o k!
While acknowledging the mass atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime, we should never forget the level of atrocities committed during the US secretive bombing of Cambodia from 1968-1973. A declassified telephone discussion between Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig, Nixon's deputy assistant for national security affairs, recorded that Nixon had ordered a “massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [to use] anything that flys [sic] on anything that moves”.
The map of US bombing targets released by Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program shows that more than half of the country was affected by the indiscriminate bombings. Professor Ben Kierman, director of the program, puts the casualties figure from the bombing at 150,000 deaths, while Edward Herman, a professor of Wharton School, and Noam Chomsky put the toll at 600,000 using figures provided by a Finnish Commission of Inquiry.
Based on this, we can never naively claim that US bombing led to the mass executions by the Khmer Rouge or refuted the regime's mass atrocities. But, to certain extent, the blanket bombing, which directly led to the destruction of livestock and agricultural land, could have definitely played a role in the mass starvation.
From new data released during the Clinton administration, Taylor Owen, a doctoral student at Oxford University, and Professor Kierman noted that 2,756,941 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia.
To put the figure into perspective, just over 2 million tons of bombs were dropped by the allies during all of World War II. The bombs dropped in Cambodia represented about 184 Hiroshima atomic bombs combined, making Cambodia the most bombed nation in the world. Based on the new data, Professor Kierman also stressed that the casualties might be much higher than his earlier predicted 150,000.
Based on this, the bombing contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. The number of Khmer Rouge cadres rose from a group that had an insignificant prospect ousting the US-backed Lon Nol’s regime, roughly from 1,000 in 1969 to 220,000 in 1973.
Don't forget the fact that bombing targeting the Viet and the Khmer Rouge armies prolonged the 1970-1975 war up to 5 years and without doing so by the U.S. the Vietnamese army will would run over Lon Nol Army in two weeks. If that's the case Khmer Rouge would rule the Cambodia from around April, 1970 instead of April, 1975. If you asked all Khmers who were affected by the war at that time, they blamed the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge and not the American. Had the U.S. not giving up Cambodia because of Lon Nol regime's corruption, the Khmer Rouge would not win the war. Blaming and poing fingers should start with inept Khmer Leaders from Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Pol Pot, and Hun Sen for leading the Cambodia into what we are today.
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