Khmer Rouge crimes still unpunished

More than 25 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, none of those involved in human rights atrocities that killed millions have been brought to justice, and analysts are divided over whether a U.N.-backed tribunal can effectively close the chapter on one of the 20th century's worst cases of genocide.

During its time in power, the Khmer Rouge killed some 1.7 million people in its attempts to turn the country into an agrarian utopia.

"This tribunal will be a new beginning for a new Cambodia," T. Kumar, Amnesty International USA's Advocacy Director for Asia, told United Press International.

The United Nations is assisting Cambodia in instituting a tribunal that will try surviving members of the Khmer Rouge. In December, a U.N. team reached what Karsten Herrel, coordinator of U.N. Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials, called "a tentative agreement" with the Cambodian government on many of the logistics needed for the tribunal. Part of the agreement stipulates the trials will be public and will be accessible to the media and non-governmental organizations.

Critics, however, say the tribunal's impact will be limited.

The tribunal is "going to be tightly controlled by the Cambodian government and it's going to try only a small handful of people," Brad Adams, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division, told UPI.

He said surviving Khmer Rouge leaders had little incentive to be honest about their past.

Ben Kiernan, director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, said one reason why justice has been delayed in Washington's relationship with China, the main sponsor of the Khmer Rouge. However, U.S. policy changed in 1994 with the Cambodia Genocide Act, he said.

It is US policy to "bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice," he said in an e-mail interview.

Johan van der Vyver, the I.T. Cohen professor of International Law and Human Rights at Emory University in Atlanta, says the tribunal's format is one way for the United Nations to have its stamp upon the body while at the same time distancing itself from it.

After the Security Council's experiences with Yugoslavia and Rwanda "it seems as though the Security Council...suffers from ...tribunal fatigue," he said, "so ... the latest trend in the United Nations is to encourage the establishment of a national tribunal to punish the persons for international crimes committed in the state concerned, and to offer the assistance of the United Nations for such a tribunal."

A budget proposal should be laid out in February in a report given by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the UN. General Assembly. The Cambodian government and the United Nations will share the cost of instituting and operating the tribunal, with the U.N. share being financed by voluntary contributions.

On Jan. 7, Cambodians celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Vietnamese takeover of Phnom Penh and the ensuing collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled the country from 1957 to 1978.

Many Cambodians rejoiced when the Khmer Rouge fell from power.

Youk Chhang, head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penn, recalled to United Press International in an e-mail the mood when the Khmer Rouge lost control of the country.

"I was then free to look for food to eat in the rice fields without fear of being arrested by the Khmer Rouge guards," he said. "In fact, when all the Khmer Rouge comrades ran away from the villages, we had a party."

Although the Vietnamese ousting of the Khmer Rouge was a welcome change for most Cambodians, not all completely accepted Hanoi's rule.

Last Wednesday, 40 forty students protested against the Vietnamese occupation outside the Cambodian National Assembly before being arrested.

But the Vietnamese defended the position.

Chien Bach, a press attaché at the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, called the Vietnamese capture of Phnom Penh on Jan. 7, 1979, a "humanitarian intervention."

"The Khmer Rouge attacked the border areas between Cambodia and Vietnam and they killed a lot of Vietnamese civilians," he said. "So we had the right to self defense."

When asked about the lessons today's leaders could draw from the 25th anniversary of this event, Frederick Brown, associate director of the Southeast Asia Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, said the rebuilding of Cambodia and the reconciliation with its past shows national recovery from a traumatic past is a lengthy process.

"You're seeing the same thing in the Balkans today...And certainly we see that in Iraq," he said. "...Most observers think that it will be a matter of many years for Iraqi society to recover from the Saddam Hussein regime, to recover from the war and the American coalition occupation and all the reconstruction that must follow from that."