School of Vice's response to a reader's question

"School of Vice,

Would you be kind enough to put below into plain and simple English for me please? Sincerely, call me dumb if you want to, thanks:

"Khieu Samphan [first right, along with Nuon Chea et al now standing trial] maybe the only person in this picture to be feeling genuinely hard done by both politically and on a personal level..."...

Dear reader above,

No, it's not you or any reader being "dumb"; it's just School of Vice being rather inarticulate in this case! For that, apologies are in order.

I had a feeling the comment you highlighted above might be open to misunderstanding or to varied interpretations according to one's place in Cambodia's political spectrum. But to answer your question, the inserted phrase merely refers to the contrast in political fortunes of all of these actors who had for a while in their past political careers traversed the same path, or had been bonded by a marriage of convenience perhaps. But since then [the early –mid 1990s] the marriage had dissolved and the respective partners had found new partners of convenience in another marriage!

Except, perhaps, the likes of Khieu Samphan and Noun Chea who appear not attractive enough to enable them to find new suitors to marry! Apparently, the "gold cage" I mentioned is not open to everyone; someone has to ‘account’ for the genocide and mayhem which most members of the current Phnom Penh hierarchy had a part in initiating, including the men sitting in the front row in the above picture. Note: Hun Sen and Hor Namhong sitting at the far end of the row from right.

Are you still with me? Why had these men knowingly walked into that "gold cage"? Well, partly it's because they knew their collective historical guilt and complicity before the Khmer people would have meant that they would be more vulnerable to legal/ physical prosecution outside of it than they would be inside of it where their immunity from such prosecution would be, and is, de facto guaranteed. Now those standing before the KRT are not enjoying this privilege. This is the main difference which my inserted comment that you brought up for elaboration infers; and not any surmised innocence that Mr Khieu or his apologists may claim vis a vis the other actors mentioned.

Mr Ieng Mouly is of a younger generation and could not have possibly complicated himself in the genocide of the 1970s; his own marriage of convenience has probably been driven by factors of a more personal nature such as self-advancement and ambition.

This arrangement also works out to the interest of all the other main third parties as well, in particular, the US, China and Vietnam who had some involvement in the Cambodian killings and genocide of the seventies. Hence their avoidance of the use of the term "genocide" in the drafting of treaty documents on Cambodian peace settlement, preferring terms like "policies and practices of recent past" instead.

So this marriage of convenience is working out in everyone's best interest? Yes, except the interests of all Cambodia as a sovereign nation, which is anything but 'sovereign' since it exercises no independent polity or body politics of its own, but must rather bend to the will of someone else -  someone who holds the key to that "gold cage".

To be ruled by an authoritarian regime or a dictatorship - terrible as it is -  is not a country's worst misfortune. But to be ruled over by an irresponsible tyrant who is at the same time lacking of sovereign right before his own nation and people and who is sheepishly subservient to an external ruler who stands above him and engineers his behaviour patterns, well, that is the ultimate humiliation and tragedy of Cambodia, of which the on-going territorial violations in the East is a prime case in point. 

[NB: I hope this answers your question. I'll try to keep things shorter and clearer next time! Take care]