Clear and Convincing Evidence

July 2006

Article written by KA Golden West Press

KI-Media would like to thank the author of the article
for graciously allowing us to publish it here.

Looking at Cambodian historical events in retrospective, regardless of the loss of nearly 3 millions innocent Cambodian lives and Cambodian border violations, Vietnam has incessantly been and is continuing to exploit Cambodia for their national political and security interests. The great powers, on the other hand, appeared to show an intense interest in helping to rebuild Cambodia; however, with their own political agenda, their aid has been mismanaged by the Hun Sen government.

It is noteworthy that since the 1960’s, the great powers had been taken Cambodia for granted and used Cambodia as a pawn for their continuing containment policy in the Southeast Asia Region - to reinforce their communist policy on one side and to anti-communist political ideology on the other side. Both sides, were and continue to recruit other countries to be their allies, provide logistical support, and globalize their economy. As a result, it cost the lives and the well-being of nearly 3 millions innocent Cambodian people who perished, and it was imperative that they decided whether the trouble caused by the Cold War Policy/Vietnam war is still worth the price.

In 1978, using “genocide” as pretext, Vietnam diplomatically proposed to ASEAN that they grant them the authority to invade Cambodia. Despite the unanimously rejection voted by the ASEAN against their political scheme, the Hanoi Government of Vietnam executed their vicious political strategy and illegally invaded Cambodia.

In December 1978, of over a hundred thousand Vietnamese troops with heavily arms included armored units, tanks, and aerial bombardment, and accompanied by the lightly armed and brainwashed paramilitary Khmer Rouge defectors, forced their way into Cambodia. Within two weeks, the Vietnamese troops, not only they had occupied, Phnom Penh, capital city of Cambodia, but also swept their Khmer Rouge counterpart up across Cambodia to the jungle in the Northwestern, Cambodia-Thailand border.

The Hanoi Government with a crafty political blueprint at hand, chose not to inform the international community authorities about the atrocities that they had witnessed after they had completely taken over Cambodia, instead, they resolutely planned their political scheme on how to: (1) frame Pol Pot and among a few other Khmer Rouge leaders as the Angkar Leu of the Higher Organization and (2) issue political propaganda to rake up all the Khmer Rouge leaders to capitulate to the new installed government, and (3) the Hanoi government, as a result, was hoping to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to trial for their alleged war criminals, crime against humanity, and “genocide”.

For that evidentiary reason, in January 1979, the two Vietnamese military photojournalists, Ho Van Tay and Mai Lam, discovered the corpses of several murdered people at the compound/facility, later was identified as “Tuol Sleng Center”, they then informed their Vietnamese authority in Hanoi, Vietnam. David Chandler, in his book, “Voices from S-21 – Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret prison”, page 2-6, has summed up the political manipulation and propaganda ramification by the Vietnamese authorities, which deliberately attempted to organize Tuol Sleng Center as the so-called the “The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crime” for the political purpose of deceiving the Cambodian people as well as the international community:

Sensing the historical importance and the propaganda value of their discovery, the Vietnamese closed off the site, cleaned it up, and began, with Cambodian help, to examine its voluminous archive.

A Cambodian survivor of S-21, Ung Pech, became the director of the museum when it opened in 1980. He held the position for several years and traveled with Mai Lam to France, the USSR, and Eastern Europe in the early 1980s to visit museums and exhibits memorializing the Holocaust. Although Mai Lam remained in Cambodia until 1988, working at Tuol Sleng much of the time, he concealed his “specialist-consultant” role from outsiders, creating the impression that the initiatives for the museum and its design had come from the Cambodian victims rather than from the Vietnamese—an impression that he was eager to correct in his interviews in the 1990’s.

In February or March 1979, Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel who was fluent in Khmer and had extensive experience in legal studies and museology, arrived in Phnom Penh. He was given the task of organizing the documents found at S-21 into an archive and transforming the facility into what David Hawk has called “a museum of the Cambodian nightmare.” The first aspect of Mai Lam’s work was more urgent than the second. It was hoped that documents found at the prison could be introduced as evidence in the trials of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, DK’s minister of foreign affairs, on charges of genocide. These took place in Phnom Penh in August 1979. Although valuable information about S-21 was produced at the trials, none of the documents in the archive provided the smoking gun that the Vietnamese and PRK officials probably hoped to fine. No document linking either Pol Pot or Ieng Sary directly with orders to eliminate people at S-21 has ever been discovered, although the lines of authority linking S-21 with the Party Center (mochhim pak) have been established beyond doubt.

In addition, “The Lost Executioner – A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields”, on page 184-185, Nic Dunlop is offered valuable political and conspiratorial information relevant to the “genocide”, which implicates the Hanoi government showing their deliberately attempt to deceive the international community.

There were plans to begin one, hence by Van Tay. Cambodians had only known the leadership as the Organization and not who was behind it; most knew nothing beyond their cooperatives. Ironically it was the Vietnamese, one of the sworn enemies of the Khmer Rouge, who personalized the regime. Democratic Kampuchea became ‘the Pol Pot time’.

By drawing on the parallels with the Nazi death camps, the Tuol Sleng museum was organized as a deliberate attempt to distance the Vietnamese from their former allies the Khmer Rouge. They wanted to vilify the Khmer Rouge and its leaders still further as part of a propaganda war to justify their invasion. Visitors to the museum were encouraged to think of the Vietnamese as akin to the liberators of Europe’s concentration camps.

There was no text narrating progress from room to room. Visitors viewed the museum through a series of images and objects. The intention was to provoke outrage through a primarily sensory experience rather than to enlighten. The Cold War was at its height and, for many in the West, Tuol Sleng was a propaganda tool for a regime that had seized power through an illegal invasion.

All museums are manipulations. Apart from the map made of skulls created by the Vietnamese, the raw displays were graphic and chilling and, although inaccurate in form, were real in substance. The atrocitious nature of the place itself was hard to contrive. The fact that visitors were being manipulated and that the information on display was there to serve a political purpose seemed to pale in comparison when faced with such overwhelming viciousness.

When the United Nations withdrew from Cambodia in 1994, the war between the Hun Sen government and the Khmer Rouge was still intensified in the Northwestern Cambodia. The United Nations had spent 2 plus billion dollars to help rebuild Cambodia, especially, to restore order and to promote justice and monitor fair elections. However, when the United Nations left, Cambodia had to dig her way out of internal social as well as international political issues. There was a lack of security, government safety nets, and especially, the lack of highly qualified appointed representatives in the government administrations. Inevitably, Cambodia fell to the hands of a small notorious groups who had been practicing grafts, human rights violations, and human, arms, and drug trafficking, poverty, child labor, prostitution, land grabbing, deforestation, and serious health issues (HIV/AIDS). Internationally, Cambodia also has to deal with the four plus million illegal Vietnamese immigrants that are already living inside Cambodia and hundreds, if not thousands, which are coming freely into Cambodia everyday, and the illegal border encroachment by the Hanoi government.

Given this golden opportunity and having had their men well-trained and experienced in military combat already positioned on Cambodia soil, the Hanoi Government had the best opportunity to map out their conspiratorial frameworks and politically strategy on how to build the case against Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime. So as part of the political scheme, the Hanoi government imposed on their puppet government to carry out the plans: 1) to outlaw the Khmer Rouge – the purpose of which was to weaken the Khmer Rouge by breaking up their movement, 2) amnesty to be given to the Khmer Rouge soldiers who would choose to surrender to the installed government, and 3) some of the Khmer Rouge defectors would also be rewarded with promotions within the ranks of the Cambodian army.

In 1997, having had the United Nations to help and win as the politically neutral and national reconciliation and unity figures, the two co-Prime Ministers, Hun Sen and Prince Rannaridh engaged in intense negotiations to set up a tribunal to try the former Khmer Rouge leaders. However, due to their disagreements reflecting on their political interests, the tribunal process had never got off the ground.

So as the talks about the tribunal continued, in 1998, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea and with a small group of their Khmer Rouge comrades acquiesced to the puppet government. As part of the political negotiations, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were given amnesty and were freely to live in Cambodia, and at the same time, some of their comrades were also given position in the Hun Sen government army.

The Hanoi government had successfully captured two important Khmer Rouge commanders, who had allegedly been involved in the murder of thousands of innocent Cambodian people. The Vietnamese wanted to serve their political interests by putting up some key piece of evidences in the tribunal and to profess to the world that the two alleged war criminal suspects were, in fact, the masterminds behind the mass murder of innocent Cambodian people during the period from 1975-1979. The two alleged war criminal suspects were Ta Mok (the butcher) and Kaing Guek Eav (alias Comrade Duch). Both were arrested in early 1999. Since then, they were being detained and serving time in the same military detention center, Tuol Sleng district of Phnom Penh, waiting for trial.

Voila! Even a Genie could not have granted better wishes or predicted better result. The appropriate term use to describe this political maneuver is the, “3-Hole Cylindrical Fish-Trap”. The Truo Preus Bi in Khmer, which is commonly used by Khmer farmers to trap all kinds of fish, big or small, in the rice paddy fields when water rises or recedes. The Hanoi Government, as planned, had finally auspiciously rounded up all the Khmer Rouge leaders and their comrades, like cowboys round up a herd of cows to go into the corral.

Seven years after the initial talks about the tribunal, in October of 2004, the Hun Sen Government under the Hanoi government’s political domination formed an agreement with the United Nations to try the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. It was clear that the Hanoi government was in cooperation with the puppet government and had utilized the seven-year delayed to strategize their political objection and in fact, by 1999, they trapped all the Khmer Rouge leaders. And now that the Khmer Rouge leaders are in their cylindrical fish-trap, the green light is on for tribunal.

The tribunal is set to go and the national and international judicial officers have recently sworn in, but not without the great disappointment, especially, for the Cambodian people. The Khmer Rouge tribunal will be conducted using Cambodian judicial systems rather than the international judicial standard. The legal experts, Human rights organizations, and the public have raised important legal and political concerns about this tribunal that is set to convene: (1) it would be subject to political bias, corruption, and manipulation, (2) it would be likely to go on for more than three years and by then the alleged war criminal suspects would probably be dead (due to old ages, medical problems, and/or to “mysterious” death while in jail because of the lack of proper witness protection programs), and the court would have no verdict to render to the Cambodian people other than the verdict of “no verdict” due to “technical errors”, and (3) therefore, real justice would not be forthcoming and the victims, once again, would have left with nothing but their painful memories.

For more than 30 years, the hope and dream for justice that we the victims have been waiting for is finally in the hands of those thirty judges. Although, this tribunal is set to focus on political implications and legal issues within the specific window periods (i.e., war criminal activities, crimes against humanity, and political implication that led to the death of nearly 1.7 million Cambodian people from 1975 to 1979), let’s hope the legal issue of “following orders” would come up during the trial. Although the prosecution teams may have objected to the issues of “following orders” raised by the defense counsels and the judges may have sustained the objection due to irrelevant and/or speculations, but it would be very an eye-opening for the world to at least hear from the mouths of those alleged war criminals testifying in court, “I was following orders from the Angkar Leu of the Higher Organization”. Kaing Guek Eav (alias Comrade Duch) confessed during the interviewed by Nate and Nic in Samlaut, April 1999, “Once you were given an order by the Organization, you couldn’t refuse.” Most importantly, it would be a very important testimony that could lead to the questions as to whom were the real Angkar Leu (Higher Organization) that slaughtered nearly 1.7 million innocent Cambodian people from 1975-1979.

Based on my infinitesimal legal and political observation on Khmer Rouge tribunal, regardless the result of the verdict “guilty” or “not guilty”, we, Cambodians, have already lost. We lost since the 1960’s, when the 14 SEATO Nations and the great powers denied our requested to recognize our country, Cambodia, as an independent, neutral, and territorial integrity. For most Cambodian survivors who had never seen the true light of justice for more than 30 years, the tribunal is all their only hope for closure. As for me, the Khmer Rouge tribunal is so complex and cryptic – political-motivated and manipulated as well as internationally controversial, which even the great powers would neither acknowledge nor to get involved in. Thus, what is left is our courage and conviction. We Cambodian people should come together and continue to use democratic and non-violent principles to fight for justice, peace, and freedom, and at the same time let’s we all pick up what is left and build for our Kuon Khmer future generations to come because there are many great challenges ahead of us. I personally believe a true road to a more stable, peaceful, and free for Cambodia would be for us, to bring in all the resources that we now have to help rebuild our beloved Cambodia.

Henceforth, let’s make no mistake! There is nothing affirmative about the future of Cambodia, but for the past four decades we have learned important lessons that we, Cambodians, could to prevent a similar atrocity from happening again in the future. We have also learned what really happens when the final decision in matters of war and peace is left solely in the hands of a few corrupt and ruthless dictators/political leaders. In our history, there has never been a better time, at least since the time I was born, for Cambodian people to examine the facts and to exercise our democratic right to be heard. Although, we still have one important question that remains to be answered, “How can we, the Cambodian people, best save Cambodia from future wars that could lead to another Killing Fields and lose of our territory?” The Cambodian people in this early 21st Century of democracy should at least have the power to participate in the most important decisions of our future.

Finally, it is time we recognize that ours loses were tragic and unfortunate that led to nearly 3 million deaths of our innocent Cambodian people and “possible” lost of territory (i.e. territory that was illegally encroached by Vietnamese and the 2005 “Unconscionability” Cambodian-Vietnam Border Treaty). Frankly, we would be dishonored the memory of our Khmer people who were viciously murdered, died of starvation, and illnesses under that “mysterious” regime and by the Vietnamese invasion if we now give way to feelings of “apathy”. Every one of our beloved Khmer people who had lost their lives during that dark times, deserve our gratitude, our respect, and our continuing concern.

Sources and Supplemental Readings:

David Chandler (1999): Voices from S-21 – Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison

David P. Chandler (1991): The Tragedy of Cambodian History – Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945

Nic Dunlop (2005): The Lost Executioner – A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields

http://www.aiipowmia.com/sea/nurouge.html

http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20040502-121032-5549r.htm

http://amekhmer.free.fr/index_files/1photo-choc1/K5-en.htm

http://www.dailyexcelsior.com/99jan22/inter.htm#5