Wednesday, November 21, 2007By Elizabeth Becker
Posted by The International Herald Tribune (France)PHNOM PENH:
On a clear tropical morning last week, the police arrived at a villa here and arrested Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, carefully explaining legal procedures to the elderly Khmer Rouge leaders.
It had been nearly 30 years since the overthrow of the regime of the infamous "killing fields," in which an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished. Yet in all those years no one had been held accountable for one of the worst crimes against humanity of the last century.
Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, died a free man in 1998. Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister, and Ieng Thirith, the former minister of social affairs, both close associates of Pol Pot, had lived openly under an amnesty granted them in 1996 - one likely to be raised in their trials for crimes against humanity.
They are among five Khmer Rouge leaders, regarded as the most culpable for the killing fields of those still alive, who are to be tried by a special court created with United Nations assistance. The tribunal held its first open hearing this week.
But this trial comes far too late. The decades of impunity have already taken a heavy toll on attitudes toward law and justice.
I covered the rise of the Khmer Rouge and was in Cambodia for two harrowing weeks once they were in power. In the years that followed, I was appalled at the ability of the leaders to avoid prosecution.
There was more than enough evidence against them. But in the final days of the Cold War, China and the United States needed the Khmer Rouge to oppose the Soviet Union. After that, the regime of Hun Sen, himself a former low-level Khmer Rouge leader, resisted a trial, saying it was not necessary to open old wounds.
In fact, the last thing Hun Sen wanted was a fair trial. His regime had cemented its own power and wealth by ignoring justice and the rule of law.
The legacy of that lawlessness will make it difficult to render justice at the Khmer Rouge trial, and even more difficult to translate it into the betterment of Cambodian society.
In today's Cambodia, justice goes to the highest bidder. Cambodian and foreign monitors have chronicled countless examples of clerks openly accepting large stacks of dollar bills before the judge renders a verdict. Political rivals of the government have been murdered and their assailants never arrested. Police officers take handsome payoffs to look the other way as young Cambodian girls and boys are sold as prostitutes to foreign men.
"In many ways, I think Cambodian justice is going backwards," said Naly Pilorge, the director of Licadho, a human rights organization that has documented many of these abuses.
The special Khmer Rouge tribunal is based on Cambodian law, enhanced to international standards, and a majority of the judges and lawyers are Cambodians. That was the only way the government would agree to the trials.
Robert Petit, the foreign co-prosecutor, admits that Cambodian law "is very sketchy." He is also worried about the way the trials will be perceived in Cambodia. Since the court will try only the most senior surviving officials, Cambodians will never know who actually killed their relatives, nor will they receive any compensation.
"The courts will not convict those who killed my parents, my five sisters or my two brothers," said Roland Eng, a former Cambodian ambassador to the United States. "At best, the trial will help future generations understand their country's history."
Those born since the Khmer Rouge period seem to agree. For them, there is a direct connection between the corruption they see in their daily lives and the silence and half-truths they had been told about the Khmer Rouge.
Solyn Seng, a recent accounting graduate of the country's leading business school, told me: "Khmer people have to know what is right and what is wrong. It begins with who made the Khmer genocide - Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan."
Her classmate Chirattana Leng, a graduate in finance, said a successful tribunal "would show the world that there can be justice in Cambodia, and that would mean more foreign investment."
Not that there's any shortage. At a recent conference for foreign investors it was standing room only. The word is out: Cambodia has cheap labor and lots of empty land.
The country is booming. The economy is growing at 10 percent a year. Apartment buildings and skyscrapers are rising all over the capital. Golf courses and zoos are planned for islands off the southern coast. Oil has been discovered and rigs will soon appear in Cambodian waters of the Gulf of Siam.
But much of this new wealth has gone straight into the pockets of a small group tied to the regime. They have razed nearly one-third of the forests, evicted countless peasants from their land to make way for huge plantations of rubber, palm oil and acacia nuts and evicted poor homeowners to raise new apartment complexes.
When the peasants and urban poor have tried to bring their cases before the courts, they have nearly always lost.
That is the unbroken chain of impunity.
When the Khmer Rouge can escape responsibility for the death of almost two million people, it is hardly surprising that those who follow them act as if they are free of legal restraints. If the tribunal succeeds in convicting a few of the old Khmer Rouge, that could finally start to change.
Elizabeth Becker is a fellow at the German Marshall Fund and author of "When the War Was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution."
