IMAGINE a tsunami 10 times as destructive as the one we witnessed in southeast Asia. Imagine that nearly two million people have been wiped off the face of the earth. Surely the world would be rushing to help, pouring in millions of dollars and bundles of compassion in the wake of such an unspeakable catastrophe? Just such a tragedy did happen more than a quarter of a century ago. Yet the people most affected by it received little in international help or recognition at the time. Indeed, one of the cruel side-effects of the tsunami itself is that these people may have to wait even longer for the justice they have been seeking for so long.
In the mid-70s, the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot emptied the cities and filled the slave labour camps in his mad Year Zero experiment. About 1.8 million people died, some 22 per cent of the Cambodian population. The killing was only halted in 1979 when Cambodian dissidents backed by the Vietnamese army ousted the regime. In Phnom Penh in 1981, I witnessed Pol Pot’s legacy. Mass graves pockmarked the countryside. Every family had been affected. Which is why it seems unbelievable that in 2005 Cambodians are still waiting for those responsible to be held accountable. Before the tsunami struck, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, was about to launch an appeal to member states to raise the modest sum of $56m to fund the tribunal that would have investigated the genocide. The most delayed tribunal ever has now again been put on hold and is in danger of being forgotten, as the tsunami swamps the attention of donor nations.
In the 80s, the cold war pushed Cambodia off the agenda for a decade. It was not until 1999 that negotiations between the UN and the Cambodian government began in earnest to establish a Khmer Rouge tribunal. A final agreement to indict senior Khmer Rouge leaders and those “most responsible for atrocities” was finally ratified only in 2004.
Genocide tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone have leapfrogged ahead of Cambodia’s, but not on account of any lack of evidence. A vast quantity of documents, mass graves and Pol Pot’s torture chambers were discovered back in 1979. But where were the human rights lawyers, legal investigators and potential prosecutors? The world’s first international genocide prosecution should have started long before it was eventually launched in 1998 at The Hague.
The main reason for the 26 years of delay was that Washington and its allies persuaded UN member states to accept the credentials of the Pol Pot regime, even after it had been driven out of Phnom Penh. The voting record shows that not one western government ever opposed the seating of the Pol Pot delegation. The UN was bullied and cajoled into accepting a murderous regime functioning largely from exile in Thailand.
This travesty of diplomacy has become one of the most shameful chapters in UN history. Cambodia, already a victim of US B52 bombing and the Pol Pot regime, was made to suffer all over again because it had been liberated in 1979 by the wrong country, Vietnam. Cambodian refugees and survivors called for an international tribunal, as did Bill Hayden, the then Australian foreign minister, international NGOs and Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister. They were contemptuously ignored by the very governments that see themselves as the western guardians of global human rights.
A genocide tribunal was viewed as a dangerous diversion at a time when Washington and London were intent on backing the anti-Vietnamese insurgency of Pol Pot and his allies. In the 80s, while Oxfam was helping Cambodians recover from Year Zero with aid for clean water and sanitation, Britain was sending SAS trainers to advise the anti-Vietnamese coalition forces, including the Khmer Rouge, camped on the Thai border — so that they could more effectively sabotage Cambodia’s fragile recovery.
It was not until the Khmer Rouge finally disintegrated in 1997 that the UN and its members recognised that Cambodia had suffered genocide. Further delays have been caused by Beijing’s pressure on the Cambodian government to abandon the process, a UN walkout in 2002, and the country’s own post-election deadlock in 2003.
The ultimate enemy of justice is now memory and time. The memories of witnesses and defendants are fading, and many of those with evidence to give are dying. Several Khmer Rouge leaders, including Pol Pot, have cheated justice with their own deaths. Now, after all the time lost, Cambodians have a right to a final hearing. So many hurdles have been surmounted that it is now only a matter of funding.
Today the UN is calling on member states to make their pledges to the Cambodian tribunal. How many governments that have gleefully advertised their humanitarian credentials with competing pledges for tsunami victims will, in the coming months, remember the unresolved tragedy of Cambodia?—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
(The writer is co-author of Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal)
