New Film Tells Story of One Woman's Escape

A new film explores one woman's dramatic escape from the Khmer Rouge. "The End/Beginning," written and narrated by Cambodian-American Sophal Ear, tells the story of his mother's flight from Cambodia through Vietnam. Sophal Ear says he sees it as "a chance to extend the legacy of my mother to thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people." The short film follows Sophal Ear as he retraces his mother's escape route from the Cambodian countryside through Vietnam. (Men Kimseng interviewing the writer.)

With Trial Under Way, Tribunal Faces Questions of Legacy

Monday, 05 December 2011
Say Mony, VOA Khmer | New Jersey

“We have to show a good example to young lawyers.”

The international prosecutor at the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal says the court must work to ensure the practice of law if its legacy to Cambodia is to be assured.

“We have to show a good example to young lawyers,” Andrew Cayley told VOA Khmer in an interview.

Cayley spoke after a talk he gave to law students at Rutgers, in the US state of New Jersey, last month.

“We have to show them how to practice law in an honorable and decent way,” he said. “I think we can do that.”

UN Prosecutor Says ‘Clouds’ Hang Over Tribunal

Andrew Cayley, the international prosecutor for the tribunal, who is currently in the US, spoke to VOA Khmer while giving a talk at Rutgers University, in New Jersey. (Photo: VOA Khmer)

Tuesday, 01 November 2011
Sok Khemara, VOA Khmer | Washington, DC

“Are they serious about justice, or are they simply going through the motions to have what appears to be an experience, and to spend $150 million, possibly $250 million, in contributions from the world in the pursuit of justice?”

The international prosecutor for the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal says all the cases before the court need to be properly considered to lift the “cloud” currently hanging over it.

The court is preparing for its biggest trial to date, for four jailed regime leaders, but it has faced a rash of criticism in recent months over the investigating judges’ handling of two more cases at the court.

The international investigating judge announced his resignation last month over repeated statements by top officials in opposition to cases 003 and 004, and two international judges issued a harsh criticism for the investigating office’s improper handling of court documents related to both cases.

“It is certainly a problem,” Cayley told VOA Khmer in an interview this week at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, where he was holding a talk. “I warned people a while back that if cases 003 and 004 were dealt in that way they were being dealt, we would end up in this situation with fairly critical judgments.”

Cambodia's Teflon Tribunal

28 Jul 2010
By Simon Roughneen
for ISN Security Watch (Zurich, Switzerland)

The first conviction against one of the lead perpetrators of mass murder under the Khmer Rouge was issued on Monday, but questions remain about the tribunal process, Simon Roughneen writes for ISN Security Watch.
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The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid UN-Cambodian war crimes tribunal, sentenced 'Comrade Duch', a former Khmer Rouge chief jailer and executioner to 35 years in prison Monday for overseeing the deaths of thousands of people in the gristly 'S-21' detention and torture center during the height of the Pol Pot regime.

An estimated 1.7 million people, a quarter of the country's population, were killed during the Communist Khmer Rouge era, as Pol Pot and his lieutenants sought to return the country to 'Year Zero', abolishing money and property and herding people out of cities and into massive labor camps. Across the country, an estimated 5 million survivors of the Khmer Rouge era remain, alongside thousands of Khmer Rouge officers and foot soldiers.

Small time for big crime

Relatives of victims wept as the verdict was handed out, but for some, the catharsis turned to anger and disappointment as it became apparent that Kaing Guek Eav, to give his real name, may serve no more than 18-19 years, by which time he will be 85-86 years old. He has already spent 11 years in jail, since Irish journalist Nic Dunlop discovered the executioner living quietly under a pseudonym in rural Cambodia. The sentence took into account time already served, meaning that Comrade Duch could one day leave jail as a free albeit elderly man.

Dr Sophal Ear is a Cambodian-American political economist and a survivor of the genocide. He is now a TED Fellow based in Monterey, California, and, stressing that these were his views alone, told ISN Security Watch that "No sentence can be sufficient in this lifetime or the next. How do you sentence someone responsible for a place that killed up to 16,000 people?"

Speaking to media after the sentence was announced, prosecutor Chea Leang said that the prosecution team could "reserve our right to review," after they had sought a 45-year term for Comrade Duch, but added that "This sentence is a clear message to those who commit crimes - those who took many lives cannot avoid justice."

One judge, Jean-Marc Lavergne, issued a dissenting statement after the sentence, which concluded that "I am therefore of the opinion that in this case, the law does not allow the Chamber to sentence Kiang Guek Eav to more than 30 years imprisonment.”

During his 77-day proceedings, Duch admitted to heading S-21 - now a genocide museum - where the worst ‘enemies’ of the paranoid and murderous Khmer Rouge state were held and brutalized. More than 16,000 people passed through its gates before they were killed. Torture used to extract confessions included pulling out prisoners' toenails and electrocution. Duch personally signed off on the executions, which he usually documented beforehand by photographing the accused before having them taken to a nearby orchard, one of Cambodia's Killing Fields, to be murdered.

According to the indictment against Duch, executioners threw victims to their deaths, bludgeoned them and then slit their bellies, or slowly bled inmates to death. Duch himself allegedly oversaw the atrocities, which included dropping children from the third floor of the building.

Unlike the other four defendants whose trials are due to take place next year, Duch was not part of the Khmer Rouge leadership and is the only major figure of the regime to have expressed remorse, even offering at one point to face a public stoning and to allow victims to visit him in jail. But he made a surprising request on the final day of his trial in November 2009, asking to be acquitted and freed, which left many wondering if his contrition was sincere.

Politics of justice

The sentencing will likely bolster the view that the tribunal has been a slow, politicized process.

Andrew Cayley, who was appointed international prosecutor late in 2009, has said that the court will move to bring the other four other defendants to trial by 2011. The accused are some of the most notorious figures from the Khmer Rouge leadership - Khieu Samphan, former head of state; Nuon Chea, known as 'Brother Number Two' and the regime's chief ideologist; Ieng Sary, the regime's foreign minister; and Khieu Thirith, Ieng Sary's wife and minister for social affairs under Pol Pot, who died in 1998 without ever facing trial. All are aged between 78 and 86, and are reportedly in poor health.

The possibility that the four will not see a day in court is real, and underscores some of the problems inherent to the tribunal throughout its existence, with allegations of political interference and kickbacks compounding the sheer slowness of the proceedings and the limited number of indictees in a country where tens of thousands of former Khmer Rouge members are at large over 30 years after the regime was felled by the invading Vietnamese Army.

Attempts to have the caseload doubled to 10 were dismissed by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge member, who said "If the court wants to charge more senior Khmer Rouge cadres, the court must show the reasons to Prime Minister Hun Sen."

The tribunal has been criticized in some quarters for failing to account for the role of US bombing runs in Cambodia during the years leading up to the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975, which some historians allege facilitated the rise of Pol Pot, who was supported at various times by the North Vietnamese and by China.

Sophal Eal summed up the court so far as "the Teflon tribunal," saying that "nothing sticks to it." He described the verdict as "the first down-payment for the international community's failure to deal with the Khmer Rouge in the first place," with the tribunal likely to limp on, dependent on the financial backing of donor states.

In the hours after the first verdict was handed down, one of the three known survivors of Comrade Duch's murder-camp stood on the steps outside the court and let his feelings be known. Chum Mey was tortured in S-21, while his wife and children were killed by the Khmer Rouge. "I ask if Cambodians are happy and the world is happy that millions of people died, a lot of money has been spent on the court - and the perpetrator is free in 19 years? I am not happy with that," he said.

Chum Mey's dismay may be deepened by an announcement on Tuesday by Duch's lawyer, Kar Savuth, who told the AFP news agency: "We will appeal against the decision."
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Simon Roughneen is an ISN Security Watch senior correspondent, currently in Southeast Asia. His website is www.simonroughneen.com.

Khmer Rouge Tribunal vs. Karmic Justice

March 17, 2010
By SOPHAL EAR
The New York Times

When my mother — who saved me and four siblings from starvation under the Khmer Rouge in 1976 — passed away in October 2009 at the age of 73, I realized that for her justice delayed had become justice denied. (I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the words “justice delayed is justice denied” had never really sunk in until my mother’s passing.)

As an observant Buddhist, however, my mother probably had the last word. She always said that no matter what happened to the Khmer Rouge leadership in their current lifetime, Karmic justice would prevail in the next: They would be reborn as cockroaches.

I am certain that this belief has helped millions of survivors cope with the reality that, after more than three decades since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, not a single leader has been held to account.

Indeed, Cambodians will largely be yawning when the Khmer Rouge tribunal, known formally as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and jointly organized with the United Nations, issues its first verdict, on the guilt or innocence of Kaing Guek Eav, widely known as Comrade Duch.

The man who headed S-21, a torture center to which an estimated 16,000 people were sent and where less than a dozen survived, confessed his crimes seven years before the tribunal started, saying: “My confession is rather like Saint Paul’s. I’m the chief of sinners.”

Even during the tribunal itself, Duch declared: “To the survivors, I stand by my acknowledgment of all crimes inflicted on you at S-21. I acknowledge them in both the moral and legal context.”

After nine months of testimony and millions of dollars spent, what verdict but guilty can there be when the defendant has made such statements under oath? What purpose has going through the motions served?

Whether the issue is degree of guilt (no one claims Duch was in charge of policy and he has testified that “even though I knew these orders were criminal ... it was a life and death problem for me and my family”) or plain punishment (the maximum sentence is life in prison), each day that has passed is itself an injustice.

If, after four years and $13 million in contributions to the Cambodian government from Japan, the Europe Commission and others, and $76 million in contributions to the United Nations by more than 21 donors, one guilty verdict is all the tribunal has to show, survivors of the Khmer Rouge may just as well consider justice denied.

Plagued by corruption, the tribunal was essentially hijacked to advance domestic and international agendas. For domestic politicians, the goal was to control the process by placing it in a heavily secured military base some 20 kilometers from Phnom Penh and to reduce its scope by limiting the number of individuals it could indict (five) while currying international favor for addressing, superficially at least, crimes against humanity.

The Cambodian government has even sought to limit the witnesses the tribunal could call to testify under the oft-repeated claim of the threat of another civil war. “If the court wants to charge more former senior Khmer Rouge cadres, [it] must show the reasons to Prime Minister Hun Sen,” the prime minister said, referring to himself in the third person. In any case, the tribunal has no independent means of enforcing its subpoenas without government cooperation.

For many of the foreigners involved, Cambodia served as yet another venue for pushing hybrid models of transitional justice while creating jobs for international civil servants and a stage for foreign lawyers whose careers depend on adding another tribunal to their curriculum vitae. If nothing else, they can pat themselves on the back for showing the Cambodians how justice is done.

But what has happened is the reverse. The tribunal was plagued by corruption, lack of judicial independence and shattered integrity. The appointment of a devout Marxist-Leninist as head of the Victims Unit in May 2009, fully endorsed by the U.N. head of the tribunal, sealed the tribunal’s fate as an international and domestic farce.

Thus, the euphemistically “streamlined” participation of about 4,000 “Civil Parties” (tribunal-recognized victims, including me) who shall be represented in court by only two “civil party lead co-lawyers” (with as yet undefined internal procedures of accountability and selection) imposed by the tribunal on Feb. 9, 2010, came as no surprise.

When I filed my civil complaint in 2008, I was required to outline what compensation I wanted. When I said I didn’t want any compensation and that this isn’t about money, it’s about justice for the past and accountability for the future, you could have heard a pin drop. I should have said that I would like my father and brother back; no amount of compensation can do that.

Justice in that sense is meaningless, but my hope was that in the not-too-distant future the next Pol Pot might have to think twice about genocide.

A truth commission would have been a marked contrast to the combative style of the current tribunal, which has seen denials by anyone potentially indictable and even those ready to confess. Indeed, as South Africa’s experience has shown, truth commissions can work under the right circumstances.

But I doubt the circumstances were ever right in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge had a sense of irony when they created a Ministry of Truth. Ever since then, the first casualty of Cambodian politics has been truth.

Lost in all this are those very Cambodians for whom the tribunal was supposed to enact international standards of justice and be a cathartic experience. Instead, the tribunal has been corrosive. Jaded from a failed 1993 U.N. exercise in democracy that led inexorably toward authoritarianism, Cambodians have learned their lesson: Don’t believe in international promises; they are not kept.

Sophal Ear is an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is writing a book on the unintended consequences of foreign aid in Cambodia.

Propagandist for Pol Pot

January 14, 2010
By Oliver Kamm
Times Online (UK)

I linked this week to Andrew Anthony's salutary article from The Observer on Malcolm Caldwell, a Scottish Marxist academic and enthusiast for the regime of Pol Pot. My thanks go to a couple of commenters for pointing out published articles I wasn't aware of.

Shortly before his murder in Cambodia, Caldwell reviewed a book by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter called Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, published in 1976. It's a repugnant book that systematically denied the accumulated evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Caldwell predictably wrote in the far-left magazine Race and Class (not online, as far as I know):

"This brief but powerfully argued and moving book deserves the warmest of welcomes. No revolution in history has had so much calumny heaped upon it as Kampuchea (Cambodia) since its liberation in April 1975. It excited Bernard Levin (The Times, 2 February 1977) to some of his most malicious sneers and barbs.... What lies behind this orchestration of hate and fear?"

(Note that it was Levin - wrong on many things, but utterly right and heroic in his judgements on totalitarianism - who exposed this charlatan. John Pilger was nowhere to be seen, for reasons I hinted at here.)

What, indeed, lay behind this orchestration of hate and fear (and, amazingly, Caldwell was not referring with that phrase to Pol Pot's regime itself)? To answer that question I recommend a paper by Sophal Ear, a political scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School and a refugee from Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Professor Ear writes of the Porter-Hildebrand (P-H) thesis: "Having rationalized the more gruesome Khmer Rouge actions, P-H legitimized the leadership and sang its praises."

When I pointed out in an earlier post, about this newspaper's exposure of the nuclear deceptions of Iran, Porter's apologetic for the worst regime of the 20th century - for which he was compared to a notorious Holocaust denier by Congressman Stephen Solarz in Congressional hearings in 1977 - he posted an extraordinary comment to this blog. Porter referred me to his Wikipedia entry, apparently believing that I would regard this as an unimpeachable reference source. The point he presumably wanted to highlight was that from 1978 (two years after publication of his book) Porter had belatedly accepted the fact of "mass killings" under the Khmer Rouge.

I don't know if Porter was aware of this, but my reader David Irving accepts that there were mass killings of Jews in Poland under the Nazis. Under cross-examination in his libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000, Irvng "accepted that the killing by shooting had been on a massive scale of between 500,000 and 1,500,000 and that the programme of executions had been carried out in a systematic way and in accordance with orders from Berlin" (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). But that belated acceptance of the very partial truth didn't prevent Irving from being exposed in court as a Holocaust denier.

So why did Porter refer to the great scholarly resource Wikipedia? If you have a look at his entry, and in particular the version that inaugurated it, the pattern of Wikipedia edits made by the person who wrote it, and the warnings he's received as a result, I think it's a reasonable inference that the original author was someone with a consuming interest and extensive personal knowledge of Gareth Porter.

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times. He joined the paper in 2008, having been an investment banker and co-founder of a hedge fund. His main areas of interest include economic policy, foreign affairs and European literature. He also writes a weekly column about language.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal Should Treat Victims with Respect

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009
Letter to The Wall Street Journal
By Youk Chhang

Regarding Sophal Ear's op-ed "Cambodian 'Justice'" (Sept. 1): I agree with the author's concerns that recent changes in personnel at the Khmer Rouge War-Crimes Tribunal have placed unqualified persons in charge of the critical tasks of the Victims Unit, which oversees the participation of civil parties in the tribunal. Despite seemingly good intentions, the court's attempt to include victims as civil parties in an international criminal trial has failed.

With an estimated five million survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide still living, any serious attempt to include victims in the process would have resulted in overwhelming submissions to the Victims Unit. The Victims Unit was nevertheless established late, without sufficient staffing and financial resources, and was never able to catch up with processing the proportionately small number of applications it received.

The Judges now stand ready to substantially reduce or eliminate the role of civil parties in advance of the second trial due to concerns about the time involved in adjudicating the large number of expected defense challenges.

Whatever the Court's ultimate decision about the scope of victim participation in the second trial, it has the obligation to explain the changes directly to affected victims and to respectfully hear their views. I would encourage the Court to write civil party applicants individually to acknowledge their applications, notify them of any anticipated change in procedure, and assure them that their participatory role will remain historically significant. Additionally, the Court should invite each applicant to Phnom Penh to hear about proposed changes from judicial officials and be given an opportunity to voice their opinions. Finally, if representative victims are called to testify during the second trial, a number of these persons should be voted for by the current civil party applicants from among a group pre-selected by a Victim's representative.

Youk Chhang
Director, Documentation Center of Cambodia
Phnom Penh

Cambodian 'Justice'

(David Klein)

Without major personnel changes, the Khmer Rouge trial risks descending into farce.

AUGUST 31, 2009
By SOPHAL EAR
The Wall Street Journal

While my mother, four siblings and I escaped Pol Pot's Cambodia in 1976, my father died of dysentery and malnutrition after a brief stay at a mite-infested Khmer Rouge "hospital." Although I have harbored grave doubts about the ability of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal underway in Phnom Penh to punish the guilty, I hoped for the best and even filed a civil complaint with the Tribunal's victims unit last year.

But I can no longer in good conscience sit back in silence and watch this theater of the absurd. As with so many other donor-financed projects, the Tribunal—set up in 2006 to bring justice to millions of Khmer Rouge victims—has been mired in an endless stream of corruption and mismanagement allegations.

The latest news came on August 11, when Uth Chhorn was named to the court as an independent counselor. Mr. Chhorn is Cambodia's auditor-general and heads the seven-year-old National Audit Authority, which is supposed to audit the government's activities. It has yet to make a single report public. His appointment was sanctioned by the United Nations, which manages the court alongside the Cambodian government.

This news is only the most recent window-dressing in the Tribunal's brief history. In February 2007, a kickback scheme was exposed by the George Soros-funded Open Society Justice Initiative. Two years and seven international investigations later, basic questions of accountability remain unanswered. The Cambodian authorities have stonewalled and denied wrongdoing.

Confidence in the Tribunal was further shaken by the resignation in May of Keat Bophal, the Cambodian head of the victims unit and an experienced human-rights defender. She was replaced on May 18 by Helen Jarvis, an Australian citizen, in a move to "strengthen" the Tribunal. Several years ago Ms. Jarvis was awarded Cambodian citizenship for her many years of loyal service to the authorities.

Ms. Jarvis's independence came under further question in May when Michiel Pestman, a defense lawyer for one of the Khmer Rouge defendants, Nuon Chea, discovered a 2006 open letter written by the "Leninist Party Faction" of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, an Australian political party, and signed by Ms. Jarvis and her husband. It provides a disturbing window into the mind of a person who played a key role in the Tribunal as its chief of public affairs until her redeployment earlier this year to handle victims' complaints:

"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. Against the bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don't respect their laws and their fake moral principles." Ms. Jarvis refused to comment publicly about the letter. At a June 10 press conference, a U.N. legal communications officer said that Knut Rosandhaug, deputy director of the Tribunal and coordinator of U.N. assistance to the Tribunal, "fully supports the appointment of Dr. Jarvis as the new head of the victims unit." Never mind victims, their concerns, and their rights.

To be sure, a coterie of other left-leaning academics and contemporaries of Ms. Jarvis were to varying degrees little more than apologists for the Khmer Rouge during their reign of terror, including the late Malcolm Caldwell and linguist Noam Chomsky. At the time, Mr. Chomsky hedged his statements of support for the Khmer Rouge with caveats that could later provide plausible deniability. But he and others praised the work of Caldwell and Khmer Rouge groupies George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter whose "Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution" (Monthly Review Press, 1976) ranks with Walter Durranty's New York Times coverage of Stalinist Russia.

Although the Tribunal has shuffled personnel, the wrong people are leaving. Ms. Keat's exit deprives the court of both credibility and a passionate defender of victims' rights. International co-prosecutor Robert Petit will retire from the court next week because of obligations to return to work for the Canadian government. Mr. Petit gained acclaim for insisting that the Tribunal try more than five individuals—contrary to the Cambodian authorities' wishes. The bungled testimonies in mid-July of witnesses such as a nurse and a deputy head of S-21, a notorious Khmer Rouge torture center, were an embarrassing comedy of errors for the Tribunal's judges, lawyers and victims alike.

The record of the past two years suggests the Tribunal isn't serious about delivering real justice. The best way to correct this course is for the court to reboot with a new set of personnel, including the director of administration, deputy director and head of the victims unit. We, the victims, deserve no less.

Mr. Ear is an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Sophal Ear: Escaping the Khmer Rouge

Exchange Magazine

TED Fellow Sophal Ear shares the compelling story of his family's escape from Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. He recounts his mother's cunning and determination to save her children.

Sophal Ear leads research on post-conflict countries -- looking at the effectiveness of foreign aid and the challenge of development in places like his native land, Cambodia.

TED Fellow Sophal Ear is an Assistant Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School. He has taught on the hospital ship USNS Mercy in support of the Pacific Partnership 2008. He completed his postdoc at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, where he taught Policy and Administration in Developing Countries.

Before entering academia, he consulted for the World Bank and worked for the United Nations Development Programme. Early in his career he traveled to the West Bank and Gaza, and to Algeria, on social protection projects, where he gained a firsthand understanding of the realities of foreign aid on a national scale. Having grown up on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, he personally knew there were pitfalls to welfare system.

He came to the US at the age of 10 as a Cambodian refugee via France after his mother escaped with him and his four siblings from the Khmer Rouge by posing as a Vietnamese woman. She recounted her journey to him in an article in The New York Times.

Revisiting the human-rights horror in Cambodia

The prison at Tuol Sleng, Cambodia (bottom), a former high school converted to a genocide museum in 1980 (above right), housed thousands of opponents of the Khmer Rouge regime during the 1970s. Inmates of all ages (above left) spent weeks or even months here being tortured to provide “confessions,” following which — if they survived their interrogation — they were executed. (Clockwise: Yale University Cambodian Genocide Program, Adam Carr, Ben Kiernan)

It’s taken this long to bring just five likely Khmer Rouge killers before a tribunal. Wouldn’t it be easier simply to ‘bury the past’ and move on? Sophal Ear isn’t sure

18 September 2008
By Barry Bergman, Public Affairs
Berkeleyan (UC Berkeley, California, USA)

Sophal Ear was an infant when Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia in April of 1975, plunging the country into a four-year hell in which hundreds of thousands of mostly urban residents (whom the regime dubbed “New People”) were executed and dumped in the infamous “killing fields.” Some 1.5 million more — young Sophal’s father included — died of disease or starvation.

He wasn’t yet 2 when his mother, leveraging her Vietnamese-language skills, fooled cadres on both sides of her homeland’s eastern border into “repatriating” her and her brood to neighboring Vietnam, newly unified under Communist rule after decades of war with the West.

The drama of Ear’s life levels off a bit after that — how could it not? — but the story itself never flags. With the help of a relative living abroad, the family resettled in France in 1978, and finally in Oakland; after graduating from Berkeley High School, he enrolled at UC Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s in economics and political science in 1995 and “learned the value of scholarship.”

Following a return to Cambodia in the summer of 1996 — ending a 20-year absence — he was back at Berkeley, where he picked up not one but two master’s degrees (his third is from Princeton) and, in 2006, a Ph.D. in political science. He has consulted for the World Bank, the U.N., and USAID, with missions not only to Cambodia but to East Timor, Algeria, Gaza, and the West Bank, and visited dozens of countries and territories in the guise of tourist and amateur photographer. Last year he joined the faculty of Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School as an assistant professor in the Department of National Security Affairs.

A poster encourages survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime — including many of those who served it — to support the genocide tribunal now under way.

Like Cambodia itself, Ear today is wrestling with how to move beyond the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge during their bloody reign of terror. In a well-attended talk last week in Moses Hall — hosted by the Institute of International Studies and co-sponsored by the campus’s Religion, Politics and Globalization Program, the Human Rights Center, and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies — he traced his interest in the question of Cambodian justice to a lecture he attended at Berkeley as a 14-year-old high-school sophomore. That led to an undergraduate thesis in which he sought to discover why “a generation of Western scholars” — led, notably, by linguist-turned-political-activist Noam Chomsky — seemed so willing “to defend the Khmer Rouge or rationalize their policies” during the 1970s.

“I was completely flabbergasted,” he recalled, “that there were such people.”

What the Khmer Rouge and their apologists billed as a “peasant revolution,” Ear said, was in fact “one of the biggest experiments in social engineering the world has ever seen,” a nightmare in which the Southeast Asian nation’s agrarian-minded rulers “literally killed all the lawyers” (along with others branded as intellectuals), ultimately wiping out as much as one-quarter of the population through a combination of starvation and disease — as in the case of his own father, who succumbed to dysentery — and “taking people away and killing them, as in the case of my wife’s dad.”

“There is not an ability to come to terms with all of that,” he said. Yet Ear, a slight man with an easy charm and a wry smile, evinces no desire for vengeance — though he confesses to anger at Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, who in 1998 dismissed the idea of bringing the guilty to justice. Putting the Khmer Rouge on trial, announced the longtime leader — a one-time KR member himself who insists he was, like many of those under their rule, merely a soldier — “will not benefit the nation, it will only mean a return to civil war.”

“We should dig a hole,” declared the prime minister, “and bury the past.”

In some respects, said Ear, that is just what is happening. Due largely to the depredations of the 1970s, more than half the Cambodian population is now under 21 years of age, too young to have lived through the heyday of the Khmer Rouge; many college students think the Cambodian holocaust “never happened,” or that it’s “not their problem.” Textbooks, he added, “don’t talk about what happened during that period.”

“In Cambodia,” Ear explained, “people basically survive by not talking about it.”

A number of other factors serve to compound the problems of justice and forgiveness, he observed. After the Vietnamese invaded and threw out the Khmer Rouge in 1979, for example, countless KR village chiefs were killed by villagers in a nationwide fury of retribution, and other top officials fled the country, leaving much of Cambodian society in the hands of lower-level soldiers and functionaries of the hated regime. (Pol Pot, “Brother No. 1,” died in 1998, while Ta Mok, aka “the Butcher,” died awaiting trial in 2006.)

Add to that the fact that Cambodians are overwhelmingly Buddhist — holding to a belief in karma and a sense, as Ear put it, that “justice is already built into the fabric of life” — and the nature of “justice” grows murkier still. Nor is it clear that it makes economic sense to devote limited resources to show trials in a country beset by widespread poverty and food shortages.

Such considerations notwithstanding, a United Nations-sanctioned genocide tribunal last year began hearing evidence and testimony in the case against the first of five defendants deemed “most responsible” for the human-rights crimes of the Khmer Rouge. A decade of delay in launching the tribunal — whose cost is estimated at $50-plus million and counting — speaks to the highly controversial nature of the effort.

In his own conversations with Cambodians, Ear has encountered the full gamut of opinion, from the view of one young woman that “no justice in the world will bring my family back,” through the belief that prosecution is an essential step toward the goal of “true forgiveness,” and on to the lingering desire for vengeance — one Cambodian suggested that the defendants, who “everyone knows” are guilty, “be executed right away” on national television.

And where does he himself come down on the question of justice, forgiveness, and the Khmer Rouge tribunal?

The court, he said, is “the last, best hope we’ll have, as flawed as it is.” Although he and his wife have registered with the victims’ unit, he would have preferred a tribunal modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aimed at healing the nation’s wounds by giving victims of apartheid the right to be heard. He fears that Cambodia’s more limited, legalistic approach may lead to neither justice nor forgiveness.

“I certainly am not expecting anything out of this process other than to register a complaint, to say, ‘For the record, this happened,’ ” he explained. “I don’t care what happens after this. But I lodged my complaint, and I don’t want it forgotten.”

Cambodia and Thailand's Standoff Threatens Regional Stability

Aug 01, 2008
New America Media, Commentary
By John Hall and Sophal Ear

Editor's Note: A disputed 11th century temple that straddles the Thailand-Cambodia border has caused an armed stand-off between the two nations, with each side claiming the temple as its own. An intervention by international courts could perhaps stave off possible bloodshed.

In the dense jungles on the border between Thailand and Cambodia, thousands of troops are involved in a tense armed standoff. A long-simmering dispute over which nation has claim to a 900-year-old temple has in recent days become far more sinister. Thousands of Thai nationalists descended on the temple and a confrontation with Cambodian authorities quickly escalated. Cambodia claims that Thai troops have crossed the border. One Thai soldier has been seriously injured. There is a real danger, and unless cooler heads prevail a disaster could unfold that has serious implications for the stability of the region.

The temple in question, the 11th and 12th century Shiva-dedicated Preah Vihear, is widely considered one of the masterpieces of ancient Khmer architecture, sharing the Hindu-influenced style of the more famous Angkor complex. Unfortunately, the temple sits astride the border between Thailand and Cambodia, and both countries have claimed the site. Thai forces occupied the temple in 1954 when the French withdrew from Cambodia. In response, the newly independent Cambodia asked the International Court of Justice to rule that the temple was within Cambodian territory.

In a landmark ruling in 1962, the ICJ upheld Cambodia's claim to the temple and the land on which it sits. Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson represented Cambodia in the Hague, arguing that a 1907 survey map drawn by French officers established the border's precise location. That map, which had been supplied to Siamese authorities, showed the temple as being on the Cambodian side of the border. Thailand's legal team, which included former British attorney general Sir Frank Soskice, argued that the map was invalid, was not an official document of the border commission and did not reflect the understanding of the commission that the border should follow the watershed. Crucial in the ICJ's ruling in favor of Cambodia was the fact that Thailand had failed to object in international forums to the map's depiction of the border, despite ample opportunity to do so, and had benefited from other parts of the border treaty. Despite massive protests in Thailand, Cambodia took possession of the temple in 1963.

The 1962 ICJ ruling remains deeply unpopular in Thailand, and has been used as a trigger of crude nationalist and anti-Cambodian sentiment. The issue remains a hot-button political topic, and for many Thais, the temple is an embodiment of stolen Thai history and culture.

For Cambodians also, the Preah Vihear temple has a particular cultural resonance that fosters fervent nationalism. The temple symbolizes what is seen by Cambodians as the determination of their more prosperous and powerful Thai neighbors to claim as their own the greatest achievements of ancient Khmer culture. In addition, it was within this vicinity—the Dangrek Mountains— in 1979 that Thai soldiers forced thousands of Cambodian refugees back across the border into an area known to be infested with landmines and Khmer Rouge guerrillas. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – of the refugees died. Hundreds or thousands more were robbed and raped by Thai forces before being returned to Cambodia and their fate. It is a shameful episode largely unknown in Thailand, but vivid in the memory of Cambodians.

The spark that ignited the current confrontation was the recent decision by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee to formally recognize Preah Vihear as a World Heritage site — only the third such designation for Cambodia, after the Angkor temples and traditional Khmer dance. Cambodia has submitted an application for Preah Vihear, including surrounding land, perennially since at least 2001, but had thus far been thwarted by Thailand. In 2008, this time with the support of the Thai government, Cambodia resubmitted for just the temple and not the surrounding, disputed land.

The reaction among Thai nationalists was angry and swift: Protesters swarmed to Preah Vihear, and on June 22, Cambodia closed the border. Thai protests at the border were spearheaded by anti-Thaksin opponents of embattled Prime Minister Samak Sudaravej. Accusations were made that Thai government support for Cambodia's World Heritage application for Preah Vihear was the result of cross-border bribery. The members of Samak's cabinet, his opponents claimed in the press and in court, had effectively sold Thailand's legitimate claim to this symbol of Thai culture for a pocket of Cambodian gold. After a legal challenge, the Thai foreign minister resigned three days after the World Heritage Committee approved Cambodia's application, and following a damning decision against him in the Thai Constitutional Court.

Following the committee's decision to support Cambodia's application recognizing Preah Vihear as a World Heritage site, thousands of Cambodians marched through the streets of Phnom Penh and attended an outdoor concert at Wat Phnom in the city center. For them, this was a moment of national pride in the international affirmation of the significance of Cambodia's cultural heritage. For many Cambodians, angered by what they perceive as the racist basis of Thai animosity, the decision also upheld Cambodia's rights while snubbing Thai claims.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has issued public statements that have attempted to calm the potential fallout with Thailand, and that have urged "patience to protect the national interests and make peace with the Thais as good friend and neighboring country." Similarly, Deputy Prime Minister Sok An has affirmed that Cambodia-Thai relations will not be effected by the listing, and that Cambodia is not attempting to alter the demarcation of the border. Nevertheless, this is a regime that has on prior occasions whipped up anti-Thai sentiment in the streets for its own political purposes, resulting in the burning of the Thai Embassy and Thai businesses in January 2003. It is apparent that Hun Sen's ruling political party has benefited from the standoff: It won last Sunday's national election in a landslide, in part thanks to a wave of nationalism generated by pro-Hun Sen media that portrayed him as a defender of Cambodian rights at Preah Vihear.

In Thailand, anti-government nationalists are playing a dangerous and shameful game, and the government has pandered to popular sentiment by issuing inflammatory and bellicose anti-Cambodian statements of its own. What had been a domestic political crisis for Thailand has rapidly escalated into an international crisis. Thailand has thus far spurned Cambodia's request for regional and international mediation, arguing that it is too soon to involve outsiders. Cambodia, which had asked the U.N. Security Council to meet on July 28 in order to discuss the matter, has acquiesced by postponing a formal meeting in order to permit the foreign ministers of both countries to meet instead that same day. That meeting in Siem Reap failed to resolve the standoff or the underlying dispute.

The danger is real and blood has been spilled — a Thai soldier lost a leg to a landmine. Thankfully, he is the only casualty to date. But with thousands of Thai and Cambodian troops amassing — each side claiming the other has violated their territory — and facing each other just a few feet apart with their weapons leveled, a tragedy is one breath away. An alcohol ban has been put in place in hopes of avoiding any acts of drunken aggression, but this is a disaster waiting to happen as nationalist passion grips the citizens of both nations. Cooler heads must prevail. If Thailand maintains that it has a legitimate legal claim to the territory in question, there are clear and well-travelled judicial mechanisms for asserting that claim. Indeed, resolving border disputes — amongst the most politically heated disputes between nations — is the bread and butter of international courts and mediation and arbitration panels. By ignoring those legal mechanisms and instead resorting to military confrontation, the Thai government risks being seen as purposefully undermining the rule of international law in order to pander to volatile domestic sentiment. This is an extraordinarily dangerous and self-serving gamble in a region with a history of political instability and military conflict.


John Hall is an associate professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, and a research fellow at the Center for Global Trade & Development. Sophal Ear is an assistant professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and a director for the Om Radsady Memorial Fund for Cambodian Democracy.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Naval Postgraduate School, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This article appears courtesy of the Daily Journal Corp.