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| Home Page The Voice of the Minority of One "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." Arnold J. Toynbee; British Historian - (1886-1975) “As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.” Arnold J. Toynbee; British Historian – (1886-1975)
"I am only one, but I am still one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do."
Edward Everett Hale
Ten Times One is Ten
"Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."
Attributed to a Chinese proverb
Statement of Purposes I. To Seek Real and Lasting Justice for the Cambodian People , as the New York Times had reminded us that "Justice delayed is Justice denied." II. To help Rebuild a shattered Society and curing a traumatized Cambodian people by searching for a Lasting Real Justice and Peace through an internationally accepted standard of legal and judicial system, and not according the so-called "Practical Justice," as advocated by the corrupt system under Hun Sen and his CPP, and supported by people like theary Seng, Craig Etcheson, Ronnie Yimsut. III. To provide a thorough analysis of Vietnam's "Nam Tien" or "Southward March," a well-conceived, well-organized, well-managed, and well-implemented strategy to colonize Champa, Cambodia and Laos, by allowing, temporarily, those Cambodians like Hun Sen and Sihanouk, to proclaim themselves to be the leaders of Cambodia and its people; but in reality, they are serving Vietnam's national interests . IV. To express opinions openly, constructively, without fear, based on scholarly written documents, on the most important and sensitive issues affecting Cambodia's destiny by a very small group of Cambodian expatriates around the world.
A Warm Welcome to all our Friends and Visitors Have Happy, Healthy, and Productive Year 2012 The 10 Mistakes Investors Most Commonly MakeBy CHARLES WALLACE Posted 6:00 AM 12/05/10 Columns, Investing, Investing Basics, Books All investors make mistakes. Otherwise, we'd all be millionaires. The trick is figuring out what our investing mistakes are -- and then trying to avoid them. Meir Statman, one of the nation's leading experts in behavioral finance (the study of why people do irrational things with their money), has written a new book on the topic. In What Investors Really Want, published in October by McGraw-Hill, Statman goes a long way toward helping investors understand that many of their mistakes are caused by their own deep-seated emotions rather than, say, a company's unexpectedly poor earnings. In an interview with DailyFinance, Statman, a professor of finance at Santa Clara University in California, shared his top 10 errors that trip up average investors:  1. Hindsight error. "One of the most pernicious mistakes," Statman says. Because you can see the past clearly, you think you have a similar ability to tell the future. Hindsight error is common at the moment, Statman says, because many people are convinced they saw the crash coming in 2007. In reality, they may have thought a crash was possible, but they also thought the market might continue to zoom upward. Now, investors are convinced they actually saw the problem in 2007 but just didn't act on it. So, they believe wrongly that they can act correctly today. They think they know to sell at the precise moment the market is high and buy when the market is low. Based on their hindsight of 2007, portfolio diversification doesn't protect you from losses. But market timing rarely works, Statman says. 2. Unrealistic optimism. This is loosely related to overconfidence. Psychological studies have shown that when you ask people if they think they have the ability to pick stocks that will have above-average returns, men tend to say yes more often than women. "It's not because men are so smart. It's because men are unrealistically optimistic about their abilities," Statman says. This quality is great for job interviews, where you need to stand out from a crowd, but lousy for investing. "When you are unreasonably optimistic in the stock market, you are just readying yourself for an accident," he says. 3. Extrapolation errors. People expect that trends that existed in the recent past will continue in the future. For example, the fact that gold has gone up for the last 10 years has led many to believe it will always go up. But a study of a longer period -- going back to 1971 when President Richard Nixon ended the gold standard -- shows that gold hit a high of $850 an ounce in 1980 but was selling for $345 as long as 10 years later. 4. Framing errors. Often, Statman says, investing is like a game of tennis. People tend to see themselves hitting a ball against a wall, which seems easy. But that's the wrong frame. Investing is really like playing against another player -- when the other player is Warren Buffett or Goldman Sachs. Investors make framing errors when they see a CEO on TV talking up his stock. If it sounds good and you buy that stock, that's a framing error. Instead, you should be asking yourself: "Who else is watching this program, and what do I know that is uniquely mine?" "The answer is nothing," Statman says. 5. Availability errors. This refers to what information is available in your memory. Investors are often lulled into this error by investment companies. When you see an advertisement for a fund, it's almost invariably for one that has a four- or five-star rating from Morningstar. That way, the one- and two-star funds, with lackluster results, aren't available in your memory. "You say to yourself that there's a 90% chance I will be a winner," Statman says. Instead, look at results of entire fund families -- including the losers, not just the winning funds for a particular period, he says. 6. Confirmation errors. Investors tend to look for information that confirms their hypothesis, but they disregard evidence that contradicts it. Gold bugs, for example, constantly remind us that gold is a good hedge against inflation and a declining dollar. But when confronted with the evidence that gold actually fell price for an entire decade, they dismiss that as a different era because Ronald Reagan changed the rules of the investing game, and that problem won't be repeated. 7. Illusion of control. This is a sense investors have that they can make the market go up or down. It's like gamblers blowing on their dice before rolling. "These investors think they're riding the tiger, when in fact they're holding the tiger by the tail," Statman says. If you think you have a trick that can get the market to go your way, you better think twice: This is the illusion of control. "When you realize the market is actually a wild beast that can devour you, you try to put it in a cage," he says. A much safer approach. 8. Anger. This is an emotion we all know: It leads to things like road rage. In investing, you try to get even with the market. You do such things as double down or even sell all your stocks impulsively. "If you feel angry, it's better to wait 10 days before buying or selling, or you'll regret it later on," Statman says, 9. Fear. The other side of exuberance. When you're afraid, everything looks like a threat, and when you're exuberant, everything looks like an opportunity. Lots of investors are still afraid because of the market crash two years ago. They're sitting on the sidelines in cash earning no return or investing in things like Treasury bills, which aren't much of a bargain. "Risk and return go together," Statman says. "So, if you think the market is risky today, then you should also think the market has a good potential for high returns." 10. Affinity of groups. Also known as herding. You hear from your pediatrician that he's buying gold, so you think you should, too. But what do these people really know? What is the analysis based on? Statman notes that some herds are worth joining and some aren't. Many investors follow Warren Buffett's investment decisions and buy similar stocks. Since Buffett is usually a winner, perhaps that's a herd worth joining. But buying Internet stocks in 1999 or houses in 2005 based on what everyone else was doing was a horrible mistake. Statman makes no grand conclusions in his book, but he does point out repeatedly that the average investor can rarely beat the market. Therefore, he recommends small investors put their money in index funds that provide average, if not spectacular returns -- and not catastrophic losses "But if you like the pizazz of investing," he says, you might take a shot on individual stocks. Just be careful. See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/fnPaUM Number of visitors to this site Last updated of this website; Febuary 03, 2012 Number of visitors to this web site since its inception on February 28, 2007; as of Febuary 03, 2012; ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 26,384
Table of contents of this web site To read any of these topics, please, click on any of these titles pasted below; alternatively, please go to the panel on the upper left-hand side column of this page, listing all the same headings of the pages starting with 'Home Page:' - Receent News and Analeses, 2010 Part II
- Recent News and Analeses 2010 Part I
- Recent News and Analeses 2009
- Vietnam Tributary System; a More Lethal Version of the Sino-centric Tributary System
- In Search of Heroes in the Land of the Absurd
- Khmer Rouge Trial Chronology
by Milton Osborne - 21 November 2011 9:24AM The Interpreter; Lowy Intstitute for International Policy I highly recommend that all those who are interested in knowing more about Cambodia and its tragedy to read Professor Milton Osborne's numerous articles and books on Cambodia; he is a true friend of Cambodia and the Cambodian people, and he is an old friend of mine. Please, click on this link pasted below, to read more articles on current affairs on Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries, by Professor Milton Osborne http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/author/Milton%20Osborne.aspx 
Throughout the long, drawn-out course of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC) detailed in various Interpreter posts, observers have repeatedly expressed concern that the age of the four defendants before the court in Case 002 could mean that death could intervene before a verdict is reached in their trial. Nuon Chea, chief ideologue in the Pol Pot regime, is 84; Ieng Sary, the regime's foreign minister, is 85; Khieu Samphan, the regime's head of state, is 79; and Ieng Thirith, Ieng Sary's wife and minister for social affairs, is 79. Now, not death but mental illness has intervened in the case of Ieng Thirith (pictured) On 17 November the ECCC announced it would not proceed further in its case against her as she is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Shortly after, both the Cambodian and international co-prosecutors filed an appeal against this decision, arguing that it involved errors in law and calling for further consideration to be given to the possibility that Ieng Thirith's condition could improve. Whatever happens now in relation to Ieng Thirith, this may not be the last occasion mental illness becomes an issue in the trials, since Nuon Chea has for some time been claiming difficulty in following the court's procedures. None of this will concern the Cambodian Government, which only reluctantly agreed to the establishment of the tribunal. But the prospect of further delays in proceedings will be regretted by those observers who have hoped that some measure of justice would flow from the trials that have finally occurred. Photo courtesy of the ECCC.
Justice Denied The U.N.-sponsored tribunal established to prosecute those responsible for the Khmer Rouge’s crimes is in shambles, and the United Nations doesn’t have a clue how to fix it. Foreign Policy Magazine: BY DOUGLAS GILLISON | NOVEMBER 23, 2011 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/23/cambodia_court_justice_khmer_rouge?page=full
NEW YORK/PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In the evening hours of a sweltering Friday at the end of April, a team of U.N. lawyers in Cambodia alerted Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to a crisis at a tribunal built to serve the millions of victims of the Khmer Rouge, arguably the most important court functioning in the world today.
That day, the lawyers' bosses -- a judge from Germany and a prominent Cambodian appeals judge -- had shut down an investigation of two Khmer Rouge military leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity before it had even really begun. "It is our duty to notify you that we consider, as a matter of law and procedure, that the co-investigating judges did not conduct a genuine, impartial or effective investigation and as such did not discharge their legal obligation to ascertain the truth," the lawyers wrote. "In our view, the decision to close the investigation at this stage breaches international standards of justice, fairness and due process of law." The families of countless victims in the case would be denied justice. The leaders of Pol Pot's navy and air force -- accused among other crimes of eliminating more than 4,500 of their subordinates -- would never be held to account for their alleged involvement in torture, executions and forced labor. And this would undoubtedly appear to have been done under pressure from the Cambodian government, which had publicly announced that the case, as well as another larger investigation, was not "allowed." The team told Ban that it was writing "to seek your guidance on how to proceed in these circumstances." In the seven months since the letter was written, the United Nations has not offered a substantive answer to these problems. Indeed, as matters continued to worsen, officials at headquarters in New York determined that their hands were tied, leaving matters to deteriorate to the point of scandal. It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 2006, the United Nations and the Cambodian government jointly established the court, known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, to deliver justice for the crimes of a regime that had left up to 2.2 million Cambodians dead between 1975 and 1979 and devastated an entire nation. The trials were to consider the greatest number of victims of any since Nuremberg, a half century earlier. Opening arguments began on Nov. 21 in the court's second case, a landmark of international law involving senior leaders of the former regime charged with crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes for their alleged roles in a revolution that caused mass movements of millions of people at gunpoint, enslaving virtually all Cambodians in a regime of forced labor, imprisonment, hunger, torture and execution. Only three accused are likely to stand trial, as trial judges declared that a fourth defendant, former Social Action Minister Ieng Thirith, is mentally unfit (though prosecutors are appealing). The leader of Pol Pot's secret police, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, was convicted in 2010 in the court's first case of crimes against humanity, for overseeing the brutal extermination of an estimated 14,000 people. But as the court came to two other politically sensitive cases at the end of last year, Dr. Siegfried Blunk, hand-picked by the United Nations to serve as one of two co-investigating judges, began a crude attempt to whitewash five suspects accused in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including immediately telling his staff to seek new employment and that their office would likely close by the end of 2011. In addition to the case closed in April, Blunk all but publicly announced his intention to dismiss a fourth case in which prosecutors said three mid-level officials were tasked with a wave of criminality that swept Cambodia in 1977 as the regime began to falter, resulting in forced labor, genocide and an estimated number of executions that added up to between 250,000 and 300,000 people killed. Blunk remained equally opposed to a thorough investigation in this case, too, confining his inquiries to a handful of witnesses per suspect, whom he interviewed personally instead of delegating this task to investigators, and taking the unusual step of using the world "insolent" twice in a confidential order refusing a request from U.N. prosecutors to put evidence on file. One witness interviewed by Blunk described conditions that appeared less than likely to elicit candor -- he was conspicuously summoned to testify in front of local government officials and denied knowledge of any crimes, before changing his story when private researchers visited him later. Blunk resigned in October this year amid calls for an investigation into allegations of his own misconduct. Judge Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, a Swiss financial crimes investigator, is now preparing to take office as his replacement. But he inherits an office now deserted by its legal staff and a situation in which all sides have dug in their heels for more than three years. Court officials and observers say that, rather than strengthening the rule of law and holding the Khmer Rouge accountable for their crimes, the U.N.-sponsored effort has risked reinforcing the notion that powerful people can dictate the law. "This is the worst possible example that we can set here. If you have the right judge, you can secure impunity," a U.N. staff member who worked under Blunk told me. "We came here to do exactly the opposite." "No one believed what we were saying ... until the whole thing blew up." Blunk, by the accounts of some who have interacted with him, is a bizarre man. Upon taking office in December 2010, he refused requests for interviews and quickly recalled his investigators from the field. On Dec. 16, he wrote a rambling letter to billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the founder of the Open Society Foundations, complaining of the "insolence" of its subsidiary Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), which monitors the court, and threatening to denounce Soros publicly. "One of your female staff recently tried to invite me by e-mail ‘for breakfast' at the luxury hotel Raffles Le Royal. Is this the kind of ‘technical assistance' you envisaged?" he wrote. "I would appreciate a timely answer to these troubling questions to avoid going public on them." Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Foundations and chair of OSJI's board, responded by calling the letter's claims "not well considered." Reached by telephone, Blunk hung up on this reporter. According to the contents of official records and allegations made in interviews with senior court employees, in his 10 months on the job, he deliberately avoided collecting information, distorted the law, and repeatedly threatened his own staff, the news media, the chief U.N. prosecutor and anyone else who got in his way with disciplinary measures and even criminal sanctions. On his arrival, he told his office that his inquiries would be "suspect-based," seeking first to determine the guilt or innocence of defendants before examining the facts and allegations, a backwards approach his staff said appeared designed either for a frame-up or a cover-up. The method would be as if, upon discovering a dead body, police in a small town first attempted to clear a bystander of murder before even determining the cause of death. Blunk's decision to close the investigation into the Khmer Rouge military came immediately after hearing damning evidence. On April 27, two days before he closed the investigation, Blunk and his Cambodian counterpart Co-Investigating Judge You Bunleng heard their last witness in the case -- Duch, the convicted former leader of the secret police. The suspects in the military case, known officially as Case 003, were Sou Met and Meas Muth, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge air force and navy, who stood accused, among other crimes, of sending thousands of their subordinates to die as suspected subversives at the hands of the secret police at their headquarters in Phnom Penh. No one alive could have been better placed to provide the information Duch was asked to give, and, though speaking cautiously, he quickly implicated both Met and Muth in the military purge with the late Defense Minister Son Sen, who himself was murdered 14 years ago. "Before making any decisions, Son Sen always asked for comments and assistance from the heads of the divisions," said Duch, according to a confidential record of the interview. The remark clearly indicated that Met and Muth would, as a matter of routine, have been consulted throughout the period of arrests and executions, even though he knew of no documentation proving this. Division secretaries such as Met and Muth also had the power to spare lives, said Duch. But, he said, they "bore responsibility" in the eyes of their superiors for making any such requests. Rather than pursue these inviting comments, the judges abruptly ended the interview. Blunk and Bunleng ended their investigation in the next 48 hours -- at 4:49 pm, the close of business before a holiday weekend. The case had hardly been touched: Only 20 witnesses had been interviewed. The suspects had not even been questioned. The next working day, Blunk received an email that sent shudders through his office. Ysa Osman, a Muslim member of the Cham ethnic minority whose suffering was among the worst of all ethnic groups under the Khmer Rouge. "I feel extremely sad after learning that you have concluded investigations on the Case 003. Last night I tried to close my eyes and forget about it so I could sleep well. But how hard I tried, how suffer I endured in heart," wrote Osman, who worked as an analyst in Blunk's office. "For myself, I still remember very well on the day that my little sister was crying for food until she died," he wrote. "After arrival at a hospital, she was taken to a morgue while she was still alive. My mother and I followed her to sleep in the morgue with many dead bodies around us. Until morning, the sister died without having a bite of food. Then, some people came to take her body. They threw it on a truck, and drove away." According to staff members, Judge Blunk replied by saying that he had been too busy dealing with disloyal subordinates to read Osman's email, but warned him of sanctions if he communicated with other colleagues in his office. By May, the court's staff began to quit. Two days after Osman's email, Dr. Stephen Heder, a consultant widely viewed as an unparalleled historian of the Khmer Rouge, resigned, citing in his parting email to Blunk a "toxic atmosphere of mutual mistrust generated by your management of what is now a professionally dysfunctional office." In early June, members of the legal team began to walk off the job, believing their position had become untenable. The team had been told in late May by U.N. headquarters that, following their letter to Ban, Blunk had himself written to New York, accusing his own staff of interference with the administration of justice -- a crime in many jurisdictions -- and asking for their dismissals for disloyalty, according to people with knowledge of the matter. When the departures became public in the middle of that month, judges responded by announcing that the lawyers would be replaced with consultants. But the consultants too began to leave: Amy Eussen, a lawyer formerly of the Yugoslav Tribunal at The Hague, departed after less than a month. Blunk justified his resignation in October by claiming that public remarks by Cambodian officials who were opposed to the cases under his review had made his work impossible. But U.N. officials in Cambodia claim that his resignation actually arose from his own dirty secrets -- that he had been investigated by his own staff and confronted in the final days with evidence of his own alleged misdeeds, and that his resignation almost immediately followed those allegations. According to two officials briefed on the matter, Blunk and Bunleng began an inquiry in mid-September for contempt of court after the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a repository of Khmer Rouge archives and research, revealed that it had interviewed a witness who had previously been questioned by Blunk at the scene of a former labor camp in western Banteay Meanchey province. While the precise motives for such an inquiry are unclear, police investigators assigned to the task turned the inquiry on Blunk himself, allegedly uncovering indications of the falsification of evidence, including witness tampering, and the back-dating of orders, according to people briefed on the matter. "People would go out and interview people and then the rogatory letter is issued," said a U.N. official describing the findings of the police working against Blunk. A rogatory letter is a document empowering investigators to collect evidence. Issuing it after an interview could make it appear that a witness had been interviewed with prior authorization when in fact this had not been the case -- perhaps offering the judges the chance to pick and choose which testimony to enter into the record and which to ignore. Such a practice would appear to jibe with a minority opinion produced last month by U.N. pretrial judges at the tribunal, which found that Blunk and Bunleng had secretly removed an order from the court's case file and replaced it with a corrected, back-dated version in rejecting a motion filed by a New Zealander seeking reparations for the death of his brother. According to the pre-trial judges, this hid the fact that they had rejected the request while apparently considering the wrong case. The minority opinion, which was unsurprisingly opposed by the three Cambodian judges on the pretrial bench, was the first occasion when allegations of impropriety against Blunk and Bunleng became part of the official public record. The ruling clearly made an impression at U.N. headquarters in New York, where a spokesman said that U.N. legal officers would consider the minority opinion and "consult and consider carefully with senior colleagues here at Headquarters about any appropriate future steps." What motivated Blunk remains a mystery. In an unprompted denial, the United Nations volunteered in June, months before his resignation, that the judge had not been instructed to scuttle his own cases. But whatever the case, Blunk's actions seem to fit with the Cambodian government's desire to sweep Met and Muth's case under the rug. It is a desire the U.N. secretary-general should understand quite well, because he was met with a rude shock when he went to Phnom Penh to visit the tribunal at the end of October 2010. After Ban's private meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen, who himself defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977, Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong announced to waiting reporters that the prime minister had definitively refused to allow the court to expand its prosecutions beyond the two cases already underway. "Successful convictions will finish with case two," Namhong declared. The court's Cambodian judges and prosecutors, who are more numerous but whose votes are given less weight in deliberations, have sided with this view at every opportunity. Hun Sen, who rose to power on the back of a Vietnamese military intervention in 1979 that toppled the Khmer Rouge government, has been a vocal opponent of trying more than a handful of Khmer Rouge suspects since at least 1999. He made his first and loudest public objections to the new cases in March 2009, when the taking of evidence began in the court's first trial. "I will allow this court to fail but I will not allow Cambodia to have another war," he said, claiming that if more than a handful of suspects were tried, the country could return to the civil war that had ended by 1998. "This is an absolute stand. Please prosecute only those people," he said, referring to the five defendants already in detention. Hun Sen loudly repeated such statements throughout the following years, even expressing displeasure with a Japanese donation because it could allow the court to continue functioning. U.N. officials in New York made no response to his outbursts -- a stance that only changed in October when U.N. legal counsel and Undersecretary General for Legal Affairs Patricia O'Brien traveled to Phnom Penh and for the first time "strongly urged" Cambodian authorities not to make such remarks. The reasons for the Cambodian government's objections to the additional cases are open to interpretation. A possible motive is that members of Cambodia's governing class once occupied positions under the Khmer Rouge that are of similar rank to those under suspicion of crimes, making the prospect of broader prosecutions an embarrassment that threatens party unity. Following his meeting with Hun Sen, according to U.N. officials briefed on the visit, Ban retired to a hotel where he gathered with a small group of people in his delegation, including O'Brien. At one point in the conversation, O'Brien floated the idea of convening a conclave of the tribunal's judges, who she imagined could unanimously do away with the two cases that Hun Sen did not want. This idea apparently went nowhere. Clint Williamson, the American prosecutor appointed as Ban's advisor on the court, revealed on multiple occasions during discussions with tribunal officials that he and perhaps others had likewise considered (but rejected) the possibility of negotiating a political settlement with Cambodian authorities to do away with the unwanted cases. "It's really only with the wisdom of hindsight that we can now say, unpalatable as it is, it's a million miles better than what we have got now" said a court official, who claimed that Williamson, who stepped down in September, had passed on this information, albeit disapprovingly. Through a U.N. spokesman, the Office of Legal Affairs said it could not discuss the contents of O'Brien's consultations with Ban, but said there was "never any negotiation with the Cambodian government or any other person or entity concerning the termination of cases 003 and 004." Williamson did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. In public, U.N. officials insisted that the court was independent and rejected "media speculation" that Blunk was biased -- a posture that appeared to transfer blame from the Cambodian government to expressions of concern from the public and news media. Privately, they decided they could do nothing even if they wanted to. On June 22, O'Brien, the U.N. legal counsel, replied on Ban's behalf to the lawyers' emergency letter to headquarters. Due to judicial confidentiality, the letters' authors had themselves declined to elaborate on their circumstances when New York sent emissaries to Phnom Penh in May to examine the matter, she noted. The lawyers' complaints could not be separated from matters "that are currently or can be anticipated to be sub-judice." According to O'Brien, the United Nations simply could not touch a pending case. "[T]he United Nations believes that its commitment to non-interference with the judicial process requires that we refrain from intervening in the matter at this stage," wrote O'Brien. Grave as their problems might be, they were on their own. As problems worsened, Cambodia's allies -- the foreign governments who were paying the court's bills -- were no more vocal than the United Nations. A week after Ban's incident with Hun Sen, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Cambodia, where a centerpiece of U.S. aid is judicial reform, but avoided directly addressing the controversy. Pressed by a reporter, she said the Cambodian government's attitude to cases three and four should be subject to consultations with the international community. "[T]he first piece of business is getting 002 to trial," she said, referring to the remaining case that is not opposed by the government. One senior diplomat representing a donor country said that if the cases the government does not like were to be dismissed, those paying the bills would be "relieved." "I think there are many people who would actually like cases three and four to go away for a number of reasons," the diplomat said, citing the cost and length of the trials. "But that doesn't mean that we are pressuring for that outcome." "The whole process is a compromise, and it's a compromise that the international community knew about from the outset," the diplomat continued. The United States in October gave the court's U.N. side $1.65 million, part of $5 million allocated for the 2012 fiscal year. But the court remains perennially short of cash. Stephen Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, said in an interview last month that the United States had expressed support for the court's judicial independence but denied that the United States had stayed silent in order to placate the Cambodian government. Was the U.S. position toward the court affected by the fact that it would be in its "geopolitical advantage" to see cases three and four dropped? "Absolutely not," said Rapp, who previously served as chief prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. "The court has to make its decisions independently on the facts and the law." As for whether to support an investigation of the events occurring under Blunk, "we haven't decided," he said. But OSJI, the court monitoring group, believe that the need for such an inquiry is incontrovertible. James Goldston, a former federal prosecutor who serves as OSJI's executive director, said the current allegations represent "a stain" on the tribunal and "they are potentially a stain on the United Nations and the international community." "The goal of an investigation would simply be to establish the truth, to what extent these allegations are founded that the co-investigating judges deliberately shut down the Case 003 investigation without attending to the facts and the evidence," Goldston said. Some sectors of the Cambodian public, particularly enclaves of former Khmer Rouge, appear jittery -- even baffled -- by the prospect of additional Khmer Rouge trials. But a survey by the Documentation Center in 2009 found that 57 percent of Cambodians favored more prosecutions rather than fewer. For Soeung Lim, a 75-year-old rice farmer and layman at a pagoda in Kampong Cham province's Prey Chhor district, the court is a far more distant reality than his memories of the murder and madness that once surrounded him. In an interview at his hut -- a stone's throw from the former Met Sop Security Center, one of the 29 distinct crime scenes identified by U.N. prosecutors in 2009 where executions stretched into the hundreds of thousands -- he recounted the atrocities of Khmer Rouge rule. "They killed children like they killed a frog. They killed like a beast, animals," he said. As the court struggles to bring justice to those responsible for these crimes, it comes closer to affirming the Khmer proverb: Omnach khlaing cheang chbab. "Power is stronger than the law." Save big when you subscribe to FP. TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP/Getty Images SUBJECTS: JUSTICE, SOUTHEAST ASIA
"That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy. " R.J. Rummel "HOW MANY DID COMMUNIST REGIMES MURDER?* --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This web site is about rebuilding a shattered society and curing the traumatized people of Cambodia. It also intends to be a well-informed and serious information center for all Cambodians inside and outside Cambodia, as well as for those non-Cambodians who are interested to know about the tragedy of the Cambodian people, in order to understand that only by bringing the Khmer Rouge to trial, can Cambodians rebuild their shattered society into a democratic, just, normal, peaceful, healthy, compassionate, and dignified community (See the article by Tirith Chy titled "Coping with the Psychological Trauma of the Khmer Rouge.". At the moment, the Khmer Rouge trial is being stalled and hijacked by Hun Sen, an ex-Khmer Rouge senior military officer, and the current dictator of Cambodia, whose only interest and objective is to remain in power as long as he wants, and to serve the Vietnamese interests. (See the two Pen Sovann interviews in the 'Khmer Rouge trial Chronology' page.) According to the recent statements by the majority of those international experts and observers, who are involved in the Khmer Rouge trial, this trial is now at the point of near total collapse. Unless, we, Cambodians, living at home or abroad, do something about it soon and en masse, we will be denied justice, forever, to all of us innocent victims of that horrible genocidal regime. (See the BBC report on the reasons why the Khmer Rouge Trial is near collapse, in the 'Khmer Rouge Trial chronology' page) The only way to achieve this long-awaited and deserving justice for the vast majority of Cambodians inside and outside Cambodia, is to relocate the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia to another place, such as the Hague, the Netherlands, where the International Criminal Court of Justice is now located. The Hypocrisy and false pretense of the Vietnamese to claim that they did not invade but liberated Cambodia can be understood only if we put these claims and the implementation of the doctrine of Communism from a historical and ideological context, and through the experiences of those communist countries from the words of their own former defenders and activists who knew best about this evil doctrine. These high priests of Communism includes luminaries such as: former Communist intellectual, Stephane Courtois and by a serious member of the academic community such as professor Rudolph J. Rummel who had done a thorough analysis as to how many did communist regimes murder, while former French Communist intellectual, Stephane Courtois and his colleagues had shown that Communism is the only doctrine which had justified the use of mass murder to reach the Nirvana of Communism as a perfect society when each member of that society will be able to be physically satisfied ," according to his or her need and ability." (See posted below in this page; "The Black Book Communism" by edited by Stephane Courtois, "How many did Communist Regimes Murder?" by Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, the European Council's condemnation of Communism as a doctrine of evils, and an excellent review of Stephane Courtois's book by Claire Wolfe ). Vietnam, on its own admission, is still a true Communist country, and one of the only five remaining Communist countries in the whole wide world (China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam). Also, history has shown that Vietnam has been systematically destroying its weaker neighbors, amounting to a genocide according to the 1948 Geneva Convention on Genocide (Champa, Southern Cambodia or Kampuchea Krom, Laos) since it started to move out of the Red River Delta in the 10th century when it started to expand its power and territories southwards, known as "Nam Tien.". (For more up-to-date news on the Vietnamization process of Cambodia go to another page titled "Vietnam Tributary system with deadly Twist," in this web site, by clicking the link posted below; Vietnam Tributary System with Deadly Twist We warmly welcome, our friends from the Cambodian and international communities, for any comment and suggestion, in any way and form, they may have on the presentation and/or the content of this web site, in order to help me achieve my ultimate objective, which is to have real y our group please go to this link: Contact Us P.S. for additional news and activities of our group, please, go to this link: http://www.wccpd.org/ Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. March 2, 2007
The Beleaguered Cambodians
Margo Picken The New York Review of Books JANUARY 13, 2011 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/beleaguered-cambodians/?page=1 (Comments: this informative article titled “The beleaguered Cambodians” together with the article written by Barbara Croissette, titled “Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Jeopardy,“ provide a very comprehensive analysis of the whole current tragic situation of Cambodia under Hun Sen and his CPP. It is important to note that it is also a very good piece of information for those who want to revive the 1991 Paris Agreements. There is no way the Paris Agreements can be revived. To understand what I meat, just read this quotation from this article: “The end of the cold war, and exhaustion among Cambodians after so many years of war, made possible an internationally brokered peace agreement in 1991—the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict4—and the deployment a year later of the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC), the largest peacekeeping operation the UN had ever mounted. UNTAC was charged with overseeing an end to armed conflict, disarming the armies of the fighting factions, repatriating refugees, and creating a neutral political environment for fair elections, which it was to organize. The royalist party won the May 1993 elections.5 When Hun Sen threatened armed secession, a power-sharing arrangement was brokered to meet his demands, resulting in an unwieldy coalition government that he came to dominate. Cambodia became the Royal Kingdom of Cambodia under a new constitution, and Norodom Sihanouk returned to the throne. UNTAC left in September 1993, its departure dictated by the UN Security Council, not by conditions in Cambodia where violence and fighting against the Khmer Rouge, which had boycotted the elections, continued. For the outside world, the main objective had been achieved, namely to enable the former cold war powers to disengage from a country in which they no longer had any interest.” If the Cambodian people want to have any chance to regain their freedom back from the Vietnamese aggressors and colonialists, they must wake up and stop relying on foreign super-powers (China, France, former Soviet Union, USA) and international institutions such the United Nations to help them. The habit of depending on foreigners to help Cambodia getting out of any trouble, is the most dangerous and vulnerable national character of the Cambodian people. However, this does not mean that Cambodians should not use (and not to be used) foreign super-powers and international institutions, as the Vietnamese have been doing, to promote and defend the Cambodian causes. The other weakness of the Cambodian people is the lack of ability to know what kind of moral characteristics a good leader must have. Finally, The habit of compromising (Chhen Chhay) is another deadly sin of the Cambodian people, especially regarding the main moral characteristics for the choice of a good leader; such as courage, honesty, bravery, intelligence, fortitude, compassion, care, and patience. Unless the Cambodian people can change and quickly, there is no chance to regain their freedom from the Vietnamese onslaught, anytime soon. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. December 20, 2010) --------------------------------------------------------------------------
The causeway across the moat at Angkor Wat; photograph by Steve McCurry More than thirty years after an estimated two million people died at the hands of Pol Pot’s regime of Democratic Kampuchea, trials of senior Khmer Rouge leaders and those most responsible for the deaths are at last taking place in Cambodia. On July 26, the first to be tried, Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity—a sentence that he and the prosecution have since appealed. Duch directed Security Prison 21, also known as Tuol Sleng, where at least 14,000 prisoners, mostly Khmer Rouge cadres and officials, were tortured and killed.1
Even more important, the next trial, which will probably begin in 2011, involves the four most senior Khmer leaders still alive: Nuon Chea, known as Brother Number Two; Ieng Sary, who was foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirith, minister for social affairs; and Khieu Samphan, who was president of Democratic Kampuchea. Now in their late seventies and early eighties, all four were arrested in 2007 and on September 16 were formally charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and related crimes under Cambodian laws. While the trials have refocused international attention on Cambodia’s dark past, little attention has been given to how the much-watched proceedings relate to the troubled politics of Cambodia today. Will they lead to a new era of justice and accountability for a beleaguered people or end in another betrayal? Cambodia is ruled by longtime Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party. They govern with absolute power and control all institutions that could challenge their authority. Opposition political parties exist, giving the illusion of multiparty democracy, but elections have not been fair and the opposition no longer poses any threat to Hun Sen. The monarchy has survived but has little influence. The freedoms of expression, association, and assembly are severely curtailed. Human rights organizations are intimidated, and a draft law aims to bring them under the regime’s authority. The judiciary is controlled by the executive, and the flawed laws that exist are selectively enforced. Hundreds of murders and violent attacks against politicians, journalists, labor leaders, and others critical of Hun Sen and his party remain unsolved. The regime’s violence against political opponents has been flagrant. In March 1997 Hun Sen’s bodyguards were clearly implicated in a grenade attack on a peaceful rally in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, led by opposition leader Sam Rainsy.2 Sixteen people were killed and over 140 injured, including a US citizen. No serious inquiry was ever completed. Royalist opponents of Hun Sen were murdered when he deposed Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh in a coup on July 5–6, 1997. More people were killed during the July 1998 elections, which Hun Sen won. In January 2004, the popular labor leader Chea Vichea, an outspoken critic of the government, was shot, one of several contract killings in Phnom Penh before and after the July 2003 elections, carried out in broad daylight by helmeted gunmen on motorbikes. In October 2005, in an attempt to encourage prosecution of these murders and other serious crimes, Peter Leuprecht, at the time the United Nations secretary-general’s special representative for human rights in Cambodia, issued a report tracing a continuing and accepted practice of impunity since the start of the 1990s. However, open discussion of the report and its recommendations was not possible in Cambodia and it was ignored. By confronting the crimes committed between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge trials offer hope of breaking the pattern of impunity that has characterized Cambodia’s recent history. But they could also allow Cambodia’s leaders to claim a commitment to justice and the rule of law while avoiding accountability for their own crimes and repressive practices. Cambodia was once one of Asia’s greatest empires. The only existing account of life in what we now call Angkor was written by Zhou Daguan, a Chinese envoy, after he spent almost a year there at the end of the thirteenth century. What he saw and described was an extraordinary civilization still at its height, the outcome of five centuries of political and cultural continuity. His stories are taught in schools and scholars draw on them to gain a picture of life and society in Angkor.3 Angkor’s ancient glory is reassuring to a people whose history after gaining independence from France in 1953 has been so perilous. Drawn into the cold war and the war against Vietnam, they endured the Nixon administration’s covert and illegal bombing in the late 1960s in pursuit of the Vietcong; the overthrow of their head of state and former king, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in 1970; and years of more bombing and civil war that culminated in the Khmer Rouge taking absolute control when it captured Phnom Penh in April 1975 and founded the state of Democratic Kampuchea. It ruled until it was ousted in January 1979 by Vietnamese troops who installed the People’s Republic of Kampuchea with Soviet backing. Hun Sen, formerly a Khmer Rouge regimental commander who fled to Vietnam in 1978, emerged as a principal leader of the new government, serving first as foreign minister and then as prime minister. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had retreated to camps on the Thai border, allied itself with other opposition forces, and continued to claim power. Since the US and other nations did not want to recognize a Cambodian government dominated by Vietnam, these disparate forces were supported and armed by China, the US, and Thailand, among others, and recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate government of Cambodia. The end of the cold war, and exhaustion among Cambodians after so many years of war, made possible an internationally brokered peace agreement in 1991—the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict4—and the deployment a year later of the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC), the largest peacekeeping operation the UN had ever mounted. UNTAC was charged with overseeing an end to armed conflict, disarming the armies of the fighting factions, repatriating refugees, and creating a neutral political environment for fair elections, which it was to organize. The royalist party won the May 1993 elections.5 When Hun Sen threatened armed secession, a power-sharing arrangement was brokered to meet his demands, resulting in an unwieldy coalition government that he came to dominate. Cambodia became the Royal Kingdom of Cambodia under a new constitution, and Norodom Sihanouk returned to the throne. UNTAC left in September 1993, its departure dictated by the UN Security Council, not by conditions in Cambodia where violence and fighting against the Khmer Rouge, which had boycotted the elections, continued. For the outside world, the main objective had been achieved, namely to enable the former cold warpowers to disengage from a country in which they no longer had any interest. The stage was set for a series of deceptions and disappointments. In 1993, the UN Commission on Human Rights asked the secretary-general to appoint an independent expert to serve as his special representative for human rights in Cambodia and to establish an office in the country. The UN office and the special representative were jointly charged with assistance to the government, monitoring the human rights situation, and reporting annually to the commission and UN General Assembly. This mandate, one of the strongest ever given to a UN human rights operation, deserved support, but many governments regarded it as too intrusive. Wary of setting precedents that might be followed elsewhere, they gave little help, making an already difficult task almost impossible. For a decade and a half, four successive special representatives tried to get the Cambodian government to set up the laws, institutions, policies, and practices necessary to uphold and protect elementary rights. From the outset, Hun Sen, who was steadily consolidating his power over the country, swung between reluctant cooperation with the representatives and vindictive personal attacks on them.6 He spoke of Yash Ghai, the last representative—a distinguished academic and constitutional lawyer from Kenya—with utter contempt and refused to meet him. In his reports, Ghai regretted that deliberate and systemic violations of human rights had become central to the government’s hold on power. Hun Sen’s ruling party still dominated Cambodian politics; the constitution and legal and judicial system were regularly subverted; corruption was entrenched; and government impunity and threats against those who criticized the status quo continued. Hun Sen demanded that Ghai be dismissed and that the position of special representative of the secretary-general be abolished. In the end he got his way. Yash Ghai resigned in frustration in September 2008, and the UN Human Rights Council, which had replaced the Commission on Human Rights in 2006, eliminated the position. The council established instead its own “special rapporteur,” thereby bringing this office under its direct control. The human rights office has also not been exempt from criticism, and Hun Sen has asked that it be closed down on several occasions, first in 1995 and most recently when Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visited Cambodia in October. Despite the country’s poor record on human rights, Hun Sen and his party boast that Cambodia has the most liberal and open economy in Southeast Asia. Economic growth has indeed been rapid since the mid-1990s, averaging 7 percent a year. But the new wealth is concentrated in Phnom Penh, a city with its back turned on rural Cambodia, where over 80 percent of Cambodia’s 14.6 million people live. One in three Cambodians lives below the poverty line. Many more live just slightly above it. Most subsist on farming tiny plots of land and by foraging. About nine million hectares, half of Cambodia’s surface area, are estimated to be reasonably productive. Under the Khmer Rouge, all land was expropriated, entire populations uprooted, and land records destroyed. During the Vietnamese occupation that followed, land remained largely collectivized. The Land Law of 2001 could have helped to bring about equitable land distribution and security of tenure; instead, under a compliant judiciary, well-connected investors and companies have grabbed land at an alarming rate, rapidly destroying the livelihood of the rural poor. Those living on the land are simply told that it now belongs to someone else and they must go. The urban poor also suffer, notably in Phnom Penh where thousands have been evicted from their homes to desolate settlements outside the city.7 The Land Law allows the government to lease land to national and foreign companies for plantations and commercial agriculture for up to ninety-nine years under terms tantamount to ownership. Basic information about these “economic land concessions,” such as the identity of companies and shareholders, is hard to obtain. The largest lease was awarded in 2000 to Pheapimex Company Ltd., which is owned by close friends of Hun Sen. It spans two provinces and is over 300,000 hectares, far exceeding the 10,000-hectare ceiling stipulated in the Land Law. The leaseholders of these concessions have seldom adhered to the conditions and safeguards stipulated in the law; nor have they contributed to state revenue, reduced poverty, or increased rural employment, which was the government’s rationale for granting them.8 Most often the concessions have been held for speculative purposes or have provided a cover for cutting down forests, which are protected under other laws. Since 1994, the government has also handed over vast tracts of land to the military as “military development zones,” ostensibly to provide land and jobs to demobilized soldiers. It refuses to say how much land it has allocated or where these zones are. The World Bank has advised the government to support small farms and smallholder agriculture, which, it argues, would be as or more economically beneficial than Cambodia’s leasing policy.9 But the government has ignored this advice, and still more concessions are in the offing. Concessions for gem and mineral exploration, hydroelectricity dams, special economic zones, and tourism development have raised similar concerns. For over a decade, the UK-based organization Global Witness has courageously exposed widespread illegal logging, asset stripping, and corruption involving highly placed government and military officials. Its reports have been confiscated, its staff threatened, its recommendations dismissed; and it can no longer operate in Cambodia. Its report “Cambodia’s Family Trees,” issued in June 2007, provides shocking evidence that the country is run by an elite that generates much of its wealth from the seizure of public assets. It shows how a relatively small group of Cambodian tycoons with political, business, or family ties to senior government officials have benefited from the allocation of forest concessions.10 “Country for Sale,” issued in February 2009, finds the same patterns of corruption and patronage in the management of Cambodia’s oil, gas, and minerals. It deplores the rapid parceling up and selling off of the country’s land and resources, with millions of dollars in company payments to secure contracts unaccounted for.11 “Shifting Sand,” issued in May 2010, records the wholesale removal of Cambodia’s sand to Singapore where it is used to extend the island’s landmass.12 These policies have wrought havoc on Cambodia’s environment and driven vast numbers of poor people out of the city and off the land, their meager livelihoods destroyed. With nowhere to go, they become a source of cheap labor for plantations and factories in special economic zones. When members of desperate communities protest, their villages come under ever stricter control and their leaders are arrested on charges such as incitement or damage to property. Roughly half of Cambodia’s national budget is provided by foreign governments and development agencies. Known collectively as “the donors,” they form a large and diverse presence in Phnom Penh. Yash Ghai repeatedly underlined their moral and legal responsibility toward Cambodia, urging them to be far more active in demanding progress on human rights and democratic and accountable institutions. While several voice the need for “good governance,” “participation,” “transparency,” “accountability,” and “the rule of law,” these concepts lack the clarity of human rights standards defined in law, and Cambodia’s leaders have become masters at interpreting them narrowly. Hun Sen has routinely criticized and threatened organizations advocating for human rights, accusing them of pursuing a politically partisan agenda and inciting the people to unrest. Donor nations ranging from Japan to France have typically advised human rights groups to engage in a more “constructive” dialogue with the government. Many are inclined to view human rights as far too ambitious a concern for a country like Cambodia, and are more at ease with the UN’s 2000 Millennium Development Goals than with human rights treaties that are legally binding. In any case, the donors have competing interests. China, which stands apart, is the largest contributor and does much to keep the ruling party in power.13 Japan is next, vying with China for influence. It is also largely supportive of the regime, and takes a lead role in UN deliberations on the Khmer Rouge trials and human rights. France, the former colonial power, is pragmatic and influential in the European Commission, a significant contributor. In 2008, the US resumed direct government aid, cut off after the 1997 coup. It has funded civil society organizations like the Community Legal Education Center and has sought to improve the functioning of political parties and the electoral system, but lately has given increasing priority to counterterrorism measures and military training and cooperation.14 The UN Development Program and other UN agencies, which together contribute a considerable amount, are supposed to give human rights central attention in their programs; but they have been hesitant to take on human rights violations. The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have generally steered clear of human rights altogether.15 While donor nations have called for measures to strengthen the rule of law—primarily to improve the environment for foreign investment and private business development—the results have been disappointing. The judiciary remains the creature of the executive, and an anticorruption law, under discussion since 1994 and then rushed through parliament in March 2010, is extremely weak. Meanwhile the discovery of potentially significant deposits of oil and natural gas has made concerns about corruption ever more pressing. For all but a few Cambodians, the supposed “beneficiaries” of overseas development aid, the donor world is remote and hard to comprehend, and such organizations as Human Rights Watch and Global Witness urge donors to be far more exacting about the way their funds are used. Despite these concerns, in June, donor nations including Japan, the US, and members of the EU pledged a record $1.1 billion with few questions asked. The Khmer Rouge trials capture what little attention the outside world has to give Cambodia. The country’s citizens remain bewildered about the killings, deaths, and enormity of suffering under Democratic Kampuchea, and the forthcoming trial of the four senior Khmer Rouge leaders may provide some of the answers and understanding they are looking for. But it is far from clear that the proceedings will have a useful effect on Cambodia’s current predicament. The prosecution, with the title Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), was formally set up by the UN and the Hun Sen government in 2006 to prosecute “senior leaders of Democratic Kampuchea and those who were most responsible for the crimes and serious violations of Cambodian penal law, international humanitarian law and custom, and international conventions recognized by Cambodia, that were committed during the period from 17 April 1975 to 6 January 1979.” The ECCC is a hybrid court, with Cambodian judges and staff in the majority, assisted by international judges and staff recruited through the UN. Its complex structure was initially established in a 2003 agreement, the result of years of wearisome negotiation between the representative of then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Hun Sen’s government. Many more hurdles had to be overcome, including the court’s location. The government persuaded the UN to agree to a location not in central Phnom Penh but instead at the site of the new Military High Command Headquarters, some ten miles from the city center, arguing that it would have advantages for security and would reduce costs. Meanwhile, Kofi Annan’s recommendation that the trials be funded through the UN’s regular budget and not exposed to the vagaries of voluntary contributions was disregarded, leaving the court in continuing financial difficulties, dogged by corruption, and open to meddling from donors and the government alike. The court’s budget was increased in 2008 from the original $56.3 million to $135.4 million to allow the trials to continue until the end of 2010. Many more millions will be needed to keep them going after that date. The court continues to be mired in political interference and delay, and Hun Sen has made clear his opposition to extending prosecutions beyond the present five defendants.16 The judges and staff assigned by the UN to assist the court face familiar dilemmas, among them how to avoid lending legitimacy to a process in which Cambodia’s judiciary is not independent and the country’s leaders have set out to limit and control the trials. The ECCC agreement allows the UN to withdraw should the government cause the court to function in a manner that does not conform to UN standards. But most certainly the UN, not the government, would be blamed. One of Hun Sen’s main claims is that the UN has a history of betraying Cambodia. Why, he asks, did it do nothing during Pol Pot’s regime? Why did it give the Khmer Rouge a seat in the General Assembly in the 1980s, when his own government in Cambodia went unrecognized? If the UN withdraws from the trials, or additional funds are not forthcoming, he will ask why the international community is abandoning Cambodia and failing to confront one of the most horrendous atrocities of the twentieth century, when a quarter of the country’s population died, even though the ECCC is set to accomplish little that the ordinary Cambodian courts could not accomplish themselves. If the trials are to serve justice, one outcome must be the transformation of the “ordinary” system of justice in Cambodia today and an end to impunity for government and military officials and their friends once and for all. The trials must also establish as complete a record as possible of the crimes committed under the Khmer Rouge, and open the way to dispassionate examination of what happened before and after. Cambodia’s recent history continues to be intensely contested, and the questions it raises cannot continue to be buried if Cambodians are to build a decent future for their nation. For most foreigners, Cambodia seems to be a relatively stable country, hospitable to outside investment and welcoming for expatriates and visitors touring Angkor’s temples and the killing fields. Hun Sen, now one of the world’s longest-serving prime ministers, maintains good relations with China, Japan, the US, Australia, and France. Unlike the Burmese generals, he has managed to manufacture an outwardly acceptable face, and has used international assistance to gain legitimacy at home and abroad. Taking credit for ridding Cambodia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen cooperates with the trials, as long as they don’t diminish his power. He talks of sustainable development and reducing poverty while he and his party have exploited the country’s resources and pocketed the payoffs. He tolerates the UN human rights presence, provided it limits itself to overcoming the legacy of Cambodia’s tragic Khmer Rouge past. He uses Pol Pot’s record as the yardstick to measure progress, thereby making failure impossible. The trials reinforce this message. No outside governments care to ask too many questions. Their economic and security interests are more important, as Hun Sen knows, and human rights are treated as dispensable. Some believe that sooner or later Cambodians will rebel, but it seems more likely that their discontent will instead be channeled into extreme forms of nationalism, as under the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia has been divided and preyed upon for much of its modern history. Many Cambodians fear Vietnam and Thailand as predatory neighbors, and passions against both countries can become quickly inflamed.17 In the 1991 peace agreements, the “international community” assumed special responsibilities to the people of Cambodia that have yet to be properly honored. Cambodia today is a corrupt and cruel semi-dictatorship that should be getting much more scrutiny from the rest of the world. The Cambodian people deserve better. Thirty years after the appalling transgressions of the Khmer Rouge, much of the country still lives in fear. Duch will serve nineteen years of this sentence. He benefits from deduction of the eleven years he has served since his arrest in May 1999, and a five-year reduction to compensate for the time he spent in military detention without trial before his transfer to the court in July 2007. His trial divulged little information that was not already known about his responsibility for the systematic torture and killing of thousands. Now being held in the special prison complex built for the trial, he has appealed his sentence and is seeking acquittal, while the prosecution is asking for life imprisonment. A detailed account of Duch can be found in Richard Bernstein's " At Last, Justice for Monsters ," The New York Review , April 9, 2009, and in Stéphanie Giry's " Cambodia's Perfect War Criminal ," NYR Blog, October 25, 2010. ↩ In January 2010, Sam Rainsy was sentenced quite unjustly to two years' imprisonment in absentia, which Cambodia's Appeal Court upheld in October—for damage to property and incitement to racial discrimination in connection with the demarcation of Cambodia's border with Vietnam, a highly volatile issue. In September he was sentenced, again in absentia, to ten years' imprisonment on related charges of disinformation and falsifying public documents. ↩ The first rendition into English from the original Chinese of Zhou Daguan's A Record of Cambodia: The Land and its People was published in 2007 by Silkworm Books. Peter Harris, the translator, provides a fascinating introduction setting Zhou in his time and place, along with meticulous notes, maps, and photographs to explain the text. ↩ The peace agreements were signed in Paris on October 23, 1991, following the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops in 1989. They laid down a blueprint for a liberal democratic political regime. They were signed by Cambodia and eighteen other nations, including Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the USSR, the UK, the US, and Vietnam. Cambodia was represented by a twelve-person Supreme National Council, chaired by Sihanouk, with members from the State of Cambodia (the renamed People's Republic of Kampuchea); the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge); the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, which became the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party; and the royalist party, Funcinpec, established by Sihanouk in 1981. Funcinpec is the French acronym for Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif, or the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia. ↩ Four and a quarter million Cambodians voted in the election, representing 90 percent of the registered electorate. Funcinpec received 45 percent of the vote, the Cambodian People's Party 38 percent, and the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party 4 percent, with the rest shared between seventeen other political parties. William Shawcross's "A New Cambodia " provides a firsthand account of the election and its immediate aftermath: see The New York Review , August 12, 1993. ↩ The special representatives were Michael Kirby, Thomas Hammarberg, Peter Leuprecht, and Yash Ghai. They served without remuneration, discharging their mandate through regular missions to Cambodia. Their reports can be found on the website of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia: cambodia.ohchr.org. ↩ Reports recording the impact of these policies on Cambodia's poorest people include "Rights Razed: Forced Evictions in Cambodia," Amnesty International, February 2008; "Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian Land Sector," issued in October 2009 by Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the Jesuit Refugee Services; and "Losing Ground: Forced Evictions and Intimidation in Cambodia," September 2009, the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, a coalition of national nongovernmental organizations. ↩ Reports with these findings include "Land Concessions for Economic Purposes in Cambodia: A Human Rights Perspective," Special Representative of the Secretary-General for human rights in Cambodia, November 2004. This report was updated in June 2007 with much the same overall findings. ↩ Cambodia: Halving Poverty by 2015? Poverty Assessment 2006," report of the World Bank, February 2006. ↩ "Cambodia's Family Trees: Illegal Logging and the Stripping of Public Assets by Cambodia's Elite," Global Witness, June 2007. The report includes a detailed case study of illegal logging in Prey Long Forest, the largest lowland evergreen forest in mainland Southeast Asia, which has allegedly involved Hun Sen, his minister of agriculture, the director of forest administration and families and friends. ↩ "Country for Sale: How Cambodia's Elite Has Captured the Country's Extractive Industries," Global Witness, February 2009. In a statement of March 5, 2010, Global Witness urged donors to condemn a new policy announced by Hun Sen in late February whereby private businesses will support particular military units through voluntary donations. Its concern was that this policy officially sanctions and legitimizes a practice of companies hiring soldiers to protect their business interests. Cambodian businessmen Ly Yong Phat and Mong Reththy, who figure prominently in "Country for Sale," were among those named as sponsors. ↩ "Shifting Sand: How Singapore's Demand for Cambodian Sand Threatens Ecosystems and Undermines Good Governance," Global Witness, May 2010. ↩ China has only recently begun to put figures to the development assistance it provides. Its pervasive economic presence in Cambodia is described in François Hauter's" Chinese Shadows ," The New York Review , October 11, 2007. ↩ According to Human Rights Watch, the US has provided more than $4.5 million worth of military equipment and training to Cambodia since 2006, some of which has gone to military units and officials with records of serious human rights violations. In a statement of July 8, 2010, the organization called for a halt to US military aid pending thorough vetting of Cambodia's armed forces to screen out individuals and units with records of human rights violations. Its call was prompted by Angkor Sentinel, a regional military exercise held in Cambodia in July as part of the US Defense and State Departments' 2010 Global Peace Operations Initiative to train peacekeepers, and the selection of the ACO Tank Unit, which has been involved in illegal land seizures, to host part of the exercise. ↩ Other donor nations include Australia, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the UK, and Denmark, and aid agencies such as AUSAID, USAID, JICA, and Sida. ↩ Hun Sen reiterated this position during his meeting with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on October 27, 2010. See also "Political Interference at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia," Open Society Justice Initiative, July 2010, and "Salvaging Judicial Independence: The Need for a Principled Completion Plan for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia," Open Society Justice Initiative, November 2010. ↩ Anti-Thai riots were set off in the lead up to the July 2003 elections by ill-founded rumors that a Thai actress popular in Cambodia had said that Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand and that Cambodians were dogs. Anger against Thailand erupted again just before the July 2008 elections over Preah Vihear, a disputed eleventh-century Angkor temple on the Thai-Cambodian border, a source of continuing tension. ↩ Copyright © 1963-2010 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Jeopardy
Barbara Crossette
The Nation; November 15, 2010
http://www.thenation.com/article/156444/khmer-rouge-tribunal-jeopardy (Comments: this article written by Barbara Croissette, a former correspondent of the New York Times in Phnom Penh, is the most enlightening, truthful, and encompassing reporting on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT). Please, the link pasted below to watch a trailer titled "Enemies of the People" a trailer on a fascinating but horrible History of the Khmer Rouge that won so many prizes. http://enemiesofthepeoplemovie.com/watch-clip/ However, what she did not say is the fact that the whole KRT is a parody of justice from the beginning, and its real purpose was to demonize the demons so as to make the Vietnamese and Hun Sen more acceptable to the international community, and not to render justice to the million of victims slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge, mostly Cambodians (To get a more complete picture of this intricate and evil strategy used by the Vietnamese and Hun Sen, to demonize the demons, please, click the link pasted right here; Cambodia perfect war criminal.docx ). But, her other main contribution was to point out the negative role of the United Nations and the USA in this botched up attempt to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice, when she observed that: “Though the Cambodian government has usually been cast as the villain in this long-running story—the court was first proposed formally in 1997 and took a decade to be fully functioning—both the UN and the United States are complicit, given their missteps in the years leading to the tribunal’s creation.” One important point she missed is the fact that she did not explain why there was a coalition government with two prime ministers. This is a very crucial historical fact, and it has to do with Sihanouk’s devious and destructive character in manipulating the victory won by his son, Ranariddh, in the 1993 UN-sponsored elections to bring Hun Sen back into power. Now, it is history. But, it is important for me to point out these historical facts for the sake of the future generation of Cambodians about Sihanouk’s tragic and disastrous role in contemporary Cambodian history (For more details on this important historical background on the devious role of Sihanouk in the Cambodian tragedy, please, read a book review, posted right below, titled "Dansing in Shadows": by Benny Widyono, and excerpts from a book titled "Distant Voices" by John Pilger, and this link to another page of this web site titled; Sihanouk and his Tragic Role in Contemporary Cambodia). She also contributed in pointing out the true nature of the role of Hun Sen in doing everything in his power not to allow the KRT to proceed beyond the trial of the four senior Khmer Rouge leaders, namely; Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, and Nuon Chea. Here again, she unfortunately did not make the link between the real purpose of the KRT, and Hun Sen and the Vietnamese, which is to demonize the demons. However, she left out the important issue whether Sihanouk should either be a witness, or be tried at the KRT (Please, read the article posted below, titled; "Will Sihanouk Appear at Khmer Rouge Trials?" Now that that purpose has been achieved, by the public confession by “Duch,” the butcher of Tuol Sleng, I don’t see any reason whatsoever, for Hun Sen to allow the KRT to proceed, especially to bring to trial other Khmer Rouge leaders who are now senior members in the Hun Sen’s CPP and government. Finally, as I have said so many times before, Cambodians must learn how to cont only on themselves to have any chance to get out of this Vietnamese death trap. But, to do this, the Cambodians need to have a good leader. And to have a good leader, Cambodians must not compromise on the moral qualities that a good leader must have as revealed in the personality of Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, or Mahatma Gandhi. (For more details on what kind of moral character a Cambodian needs to have to really give Cambodia a good chance to get out of the Vietnamese death trap please, see this link titled: In Search of Heroes in the Land of the Absurd It is up the Cambodian people to liberate themselves from the Vietnamese death trap, and not to continue to be rescued by foreign powers, especially by the Vietnamese. It is not a leader with such low moral quality that Sam Rainsy has been showing that would allow Cambodia to get out of the Vietnamese death trap. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. November 16, 2010) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Surrounded from its inception by squabbles between the Cambodian government and the United Nations, mired in charges of corruption and perennially short of cash, the tribunal set up to judge surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime is once again in jeopardy. The question of where the tribunal is headed arose again in early November because of two events: an unusually candid and critical farewell message from the departing chief of the defense support section and the publication by the New York–based Open Society Justice Initiative of a report acknowledging that the court will sooner or later be wound down, and that plans should be made now to avoid having its work cut short by the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has made no effort to hide his distaste for it. In a third, separate but not unrelated development, Hun Sen has told the UN that unless it removes its chief human rights representative in Cambodia, Christophe Peschoux, the government will close down the Phnom Penh office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the first of its kind to be established in a national capital. Peschoux, who is accused by officials of favoring opposition politicians, has been outspoken on threatened political and economic rights, including the beating of protesters and the practice of "land-grabbing," when poor Cambodians' properties are seized illegally for the use of politically well-connected people or foreign companies. The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights said on November 2 that the dual threats to the Khmer Rouge tribunal and the UN human rights office "seriously question the state of the rule of law and the development of democratic institutions in the country." Though the Cambodian government has usually been cast as the villain in this long-running story—the court was first proposed formally in 1997 and took a decade to be fully functioning—both the UN and the United States are complicit, given their missteps in the years leading to the tribunal’s creation. Cambodia’s autocratic and uncooperative government, and Hun Sen himself, might not be so strongly and willfully entrenched if the UN, running a transitional administration in the early 1990s, had not so readily given in to his bullying. Hun Sen was a holdover from a government installed under virtual Vietnamese occupation after Hanoi’s troops overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and he stood for reelection in 1993, under UN oversight. His Cambodian Peoples Party lost decisively to a royalist party led by Nordom Ranariddh, a son of King Norodom Sihanouk. In the years that followed, Hun Sen, as co-prime minister with Ranariddh in an unworkable coalition, simply pushed the victor aside by claiming key ministries—with UN acquiescence—and finishing the job with a coup after the UN was no longer in charge. From the American side, UN legal experts say that there was intense pressure on them to set up a tribunal to try Khmer Rouge figures. The United States and Southeast Asian nations had in the 1980s backed an armed opposition arrayed against Hun Sen and the Vietnamese that included the defeated Khmer Rouge. There was something exculpatory about the way Washington campaigned for a tribunal to try leaders of the monstrous regime after that fact. The State Department also funded the Cambodia Genocide Project, an archive of Khmer Rouge atrocities based at Yale that later moved much of its operation to Phnom Penh. Kofi Annan, then UN secretary-general, and his top legal advisor, Hans Corell, a Swedish judge, were skeptical of the odd hybrid of a tribunal being created, and wanted to back out at one point, but the United States pressed on, at times in almost a threatening manner, UN officials said. What resulted was a court based in Cambodia (on a military outpost no less) that is officially part of the Cambodian justice system. It is a half-and-half setup, with the UN supplying half the professional legal staff and the Cambodians the other half. Prosecution and defense teams have to work in tandem, one local and one international, literally side by side. Judges are an international mix. To make life even more complicated, the court uses three languages: Khmer, English and French. Finding quality translators and interpreters have been persistent problems. On November 10, Richard J. Rogers, the British-born international lawyer who has been chief of the defense support section—not an easy mantle to wear when the Khmer Rouge are the defendants—said in his departing statement that the court operates "in a country where the institutions of justice and respect for the rule of law are still developing." He added that "the greatest challenge for the defense remains the threat of political interference that may undermine the independence of the court." Rogers and others working in the defense section were not only under constant scrutiny by the government (which has former Khmer Rouge figures in its ranks) but also faced strong public reaction against the very idea that Khmer Rouge leaders should have their day in court. A weak and politically manipulated judicial system has not taught Cambodians the principle of fair trial. Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge regional official himself who fled to Vietnam when the movement split in the late 1970s—is content to see the biggest names of the "other" faction on trial, but wants to leave it at that. The danger to him seems to be that more prosecutions would sooner or later focus on some people in his government. As the showcase trial of four top Khmer Rouge leaders still alive looms in the new year, pressure is mounting on the court to wind up its business and not indict any further figures from the 1975–79 experiment the revolutionaries called Democratic Kampuchea, which left up to 2 million Cambodians dead or in exile. So far only one trial has been completed, that of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, the commander of Tuol Sleng prison and torture center, who was convicted in July and is appealing a jail sentence. Next on the docket—combined into one case—are Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two” to Pol Pot, who died in 1998; Khieu Samphan, the regime’s head of state, and the powerful couple of Ieng Sary, foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, minister for social affairs. All are in their 80s or late 70s, none of them in robust health, and there are concerns that one or more of them may die before the completion of their trials, due to start in mid-2011. Prosecutors for the court want to add another round of cases, with a total of five more defendants, none of them named so far. That provoked Hun Sen, who told Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October that new cases beyond that of the big four now preparing to go on trial will not be allowed. The report from the Open Society Justice Initiative, part of the Open Society Institute (See an article titled "Update: Khmer Rouge Tribunal final Case," posted below) founded and funded by George Soros, suggests that additional trials would not necessarily have to prolong the tribunal’s life, since they could take place parallel to the one beginning in 2011, which is bound to be dragged out, possibly over a year or more. The report—Salvaging Judicial Independence: The Need for a Principled Completion Plan—strongly rejects the proposal that any new cases should be turned over to Cambodian national courts. The Justice Initiative, which has a Cambodian branch in Phnom Penh, says that both the UN and donor countries, chafing at perennial demands for more funds, would be failing in their responsibility to insure that trials would meet international standards if cases were transferred entirely to Cambodian jurisdiction from the hybrid tribunal, formally titled Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC. This would amount, the report says, to the tribunal risking the appearance that it is "dumping" new cases "because it is unwilling or unable to deal with the political interference that has come to haunt the ECCC." The Nation Since 1855Copyright © 2010 The Nation.
Update: Khmer Rouge Tribunal Final Cases The Open Society Justice Initiative has been monitoring the progress of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal since its inception. We’d like to update you on our latest report, examining how the court can best conclude its work. High-level war crimes cases should be tried by the UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, rather than transferred to local courts, said a report released this month by the Open Society Justice Initiative. Ordinary domestic courts cannot guarantee international fair trial standards, given the intense political interference of Cambodian leaders. Four cases—involving a total of ten accused persons—are currently pending before the tribunal. Case 001 is under appeal; Case 002 is set to go to trial in mid-2011. Cases 003/004, involving persons alleged to be “most responsible” for Khmer Rouge crimes, are currently under investigation, but Cambodian leaders have repeatedly sought to block their progress. Last month, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen publicly repeated his view that the cases should not continue and vowed to stop them. In light of this direct political interference, the Justice Initiative has called on the United Nations and international donors to help ensure that any completion plan for the court guarantees fair trials and appeals in all remaining cases on its docket. While a few different proposals are under discussion among policymakers, the Justice Initiative argues that it is possible for the existing hybrid tribunal to keep expenses in line and bring all cases to a close while still upholding the principle of judicial independence. To do this, the Justice Initiative recommends conducting simultaneous trials for Cases 002 and 003/004. This is practical because the aging leaders accused in Case 002 would need to have a less than full-time trial schedule in any event. While more expensive in the short run, simultaneous trials will ultimately reduce the cost and time required to complete all cases with the current structure. Maintaining robust international involvement in the court is crucial at this stage, given the relentless political pressure placed on the court by Cambodian leaders. The full report is available online.
Justice for Cambodia? Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunals for the Future Direction of International Criminal Justice By Rebecca Burns March, 2010 http://www.beyondintractability.org/case_studies/justice_for_cambodia.jsp?nid=6831 in the Coalition government led (Comments: this article is an independent and relatively objective assessment of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT) also known as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)), by providing the political background especially the role of the United States during the Vietnam War and its backing of the Khmer Rouge as a member of the Cambodian resistance movement headed by Sihanouk, against the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979. However, unfortunately, this article did not put any blame on the Vietnamese role in the creation of the Communist movement in Indochina under Ho chi Minh guidance and leadership to implement the whole historical Vietnamization process of Cambodia and Laos, known as “Nam Tien,” or the “Southward March.”. Also important, this article pointed out the negative role of Senator John Keery from Massachussets, a close and supporter of Vietnam, in politicizing and diluting the objective and operation of the ECCC , by allowing Hun Sen to gain control of the KRT with his corrupt and politicized judicial system. As I have often said that the ECCC is is now is no longer to render justice to the those Cambodians and non-Cambodians who were slaughtered by the Khmer rouge, but "to demonize the demons," in order to make Hun Sen and his boss, the Vietnamese, less evils than they really are. Nevertheless, it provides a good summary of the problems facing the ECCC, resulting in the weakening of the conceptualization and operation of that international institution. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. December 07, 2010) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This piece was written while the author was completing a Master of Arts degree in Peace Studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Introduction In the summer of 2008, an observer in the Cambodian capital could see an "I support the KR trials" bumper sticker appear occasionally on the back of rickshaw or motorcycle winding through the dusty streets of Phnom Penh. There was little other indication in the city center of the origin of this tacit reference, but in an adjacent suburb, the Extraordinary Chambers of the Court of Cambodia (ECCC), the tribunal tasked with trying crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-1979 reign of terror, was continuing its pre-trial investigations. The bumper stickers were part of an education and outreach campaign that deployed materials to each province with slogans such as, "Everyone can be involved in the process," "It's time to set the record straight," and, perhaps to quell fear about the nature of the trials, "Only the senior Khmer Rouge leaders and those most responsible for committing serious crimes will be tried."[1] What factors will ultimately determine the significance of the Khmer Rouge tribunals? Certainly, there is a potential disconnect between international justice as a current area of academic and political fascination and international justice as an abstraction that may occupy very little space in the consciousness of a struggling post-conflict society. The efforts by the ECCC outreach department, however, represent an attempt to make the trials visually present in peoples' everyday lives, an indication that the space between the global and local relevance of the tribunals is not absolute. As of writing in 2010, the significance of the trials to Cambodian society is still very much being negotiated. A number of groups seek to increase access to and participation in the proceedings and to attach practical meanings to the "justice" that the ECCC seeks to provide, even if it is coming a quarter-century after the crimes were committed. The meaning of war crimes tribunals anywhere, of course, is a contested matter. Debates are ongoing as to whether tribunals contribute to deterrence, either in settings of ongoing conflict or in international society more generally.[2] Also disputed is whether the uneven application of international justice renders it ineffective or even illegitimate,[3] and whether war crimes tribunals and punitive justice more generally are capable of meting out justice that is acceptable and meaningful to victims. In the case of Cambodia, many of these issues are brought into sharper relief because of the extremely belated time frame of the trials and their location within the country where the crimes took place. This proximity is one of the ostensible benefits of "hybrid," or nationally-run but internationally-supported, tribunals. These tribunals are also referred to as the "third generation" of international justice, following the first generation of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and the second of the ad hoc international tribunals for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.[4] Regardless of the achievements of the ECCC, the potential relationship between these tribunals and the International Criminal Court, created by the Rome Statute in 2002, is yet uncertain. Some have pointed to the ICC's potential to make hybrid courts like the ECCC obsolete,[5] while others have emphasized the fundamental differences in their jurisdiction.[6] As the ICC continues to be developed in an effort to standardize norms and procedures of international justice, it is worth reflecting more deeply on the experience of Cambodia. What does the ECCC reveal about the politics of international criminal justice? What can be learned about the unresolved tensions that arise in the pursuit of criminal accountability and the political consequences those tensions may engender?[7] Lastly, what can be learned about the potential of criminal justice proceedings to contribute to ongoing local reconciliation and restoration efforts? The Politics of International Criminal Justice in the Creation of the ECCC That an internationally-supported tribunal for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge was not established until now, nearly thirty years after these crimes were committed, was largely the result of Cold War geo-politics. The Vietnamese-backed Peoples' Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) government that ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979 was viewed with hostility by western powers. With support from member states which were approaching policy towards Cambodia from an anti-Vietnamese standpoint, the Khmer Rouge was able to retain Cambodia's seat in the United Nations until 1990.[8] Between 1979 and 1989, only one formal UN investigation into the human rights situation under Pol Pot was undertaken. It was not until 1997 that the UN provided Cambodia with a mechanism for trying the crimes of the Khmer Rouge during their reign over the country they re-named Democratic Kampuchea.[9]
Given that Cambodia is now widely considered a paradigmatic case of genocide,[10] many have interpreted the establishment of the ECCC as a face-saving effort on the part of powers who for years supported the Khmer Rouge politically and militarily.[11] The radical reversal of the position of the United Nations with regard to Khmer Rouge crimes is also sometimes explained by what Christopher Rudolph labels a "dramatic turn in the 1990s towards legalization."[12] This term refers to the proliferation of recent efforts to prosecute internal crimes in international or internationally-supported forums, creating what Luftglass has called an "institutional momentum of the atrocities regime."[13] With high-profile efforts to prosecute some of the other widely-known atrocities of the latter half of the 20th century underway (primarily Bosnia and Rwanda),[14] Cambodia in many ways represented a glaring example of atrocities that had been ignored by the international community. The timing and format of the Khmer Rouge trials also have very much to do with national politics, both within Cambodia and within the United States. The United States, hoping for a defeat of the Vietnamese-backed PRK government, gave an estimated $85 million in aid to the Khmer Rouge between 1979 and 1986.[15] In addition to a strategy conceived of from more general geo-political considerations, US hesitancy to discuss Khmer Rouge crimes in the 1980s and early 1990s has also been interpreted as an attempt to prevent information about its secret bombings in Cambodia, which were part of its strategy during the Vietnam war, from becoming part of public record.[16] The 1994 signing of the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, however, began a period in which the United States took the lead in pushing for a Khmer Rouge tribunal.
The actual format and mandate of the tribunal has resulted from a long series of negotiations between the Cambodian government and the UN, with the occasional intervention of the US. George Chigas has interpreted the Khmer Rouge tribunals as a mechanism pursued to restore international legitimacy and donor funding to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen's government, which took power through a heavily criticized coup in 1997.[17] Sen's government made the initial request for international assistance in creating a tribunal, but negotiations stalled for many years over Sen's insistence on measures that were interpreted as allowing his government too much influence over who would be indicted and convicted.[18] In response to two subsequent Cambodian rejections of UN proposals for a tribunal, United States Senator John Kerry suggested a trial format in which there would be a majority of Cambodian judges, but the agreement of at least one international judge would be needed to proceed. The prosecution and defense teams would each be comprised of an international and a Cambodian lawyer working together as counterparts. After a visit to Cambodia by Senator Kerry, this proposal was accepted and integrated into the structure of the ECCC.[19] What this history reveals is that the timing of the Khmer Rouge tribunals does not merely represent a "delay in providing accountability."[20] The political factors that prevented serious confrontation of Khmer Rouge crimes have been reconstituted so that it is now politically possible and appropriate to do so. While this may not render the tribunals less meaningful either nationally or internationally, it is important to recognize the influence of these political factors in the timing and format of the ECCC and in international criminal justice more generally. In the case of the ECCC, the influence of political interests is particularly evident in the conflicts that have emerged between international and Cambodian personnel. Hybrid Tribunals — Learning from the Limitations
Negotiations between the UN and Cambodian government finally resulted in a structure in which the Khmer Rouge tribunal would be situated within the Cambodian judiciary as an "extraordinary chamber," with support from the UN to ensure that international standards of law are upheld. Internationalized, or "hybrid" tribunals had already been in established in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo and have been advanced as more accessible, cost-effective, and locally-owned alternatives to the ad hoc international tribunals that had been set up to try crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.[21] Hybrid tribunals have several acknowledged drawbacks, however, including the potential limitations of smaller budgets and lower legal standards.[22] There have also been serious concerns about the independence of the Cambodian judiciary and, therefore, the legitimacy of the ECCC.[23] The close of the ECCC's first trial in December 2009 has been cited as an example of the compromised nature of the tribunal.[24] On the final day of the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, director of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, the defendant and his Cambodian defense lawyer changed strategies, questioning whether the ECCC had jurisdiction to try him and calling for the defendant's release. This strategy was pursued without the approval of the international defense lawyer, who stipulated that his Cambodian counterpart's position was consistent with and potentially the result of pressure from the Cambodian government, which has to the date of writing opposed the indictment of any individuals beyond the four high-level Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried in the ECCC's second case.[25] This conflict over the jurisdiction of the ECCC has also occurred in other organs of the courts, leading in another instance to a situation which has never occurred elsewhere in a war crimes tribunal: the inability of the co-Prosecutors to agree over whether to continue investigations of additional individuals.[26] After the indictments of the five initial Khmer Rouge members, the international co-Prosecutor prepared to submit evidence containing new facts and crimes to the co-Investigating Judges, thus opening the possibility for further indictments. The Cambodian co-Prosecutor objected on the grounds that a wider investigation could jeopardize national reconciliation, which is listed as among the ECCC's objectives in the Preamble of the Agreement signed between the Cambodian Government and the United Nations.[27] Prime Minister Hun Sen also announced his opposition to the potential investigation of additional individuals almost immediately, and this opposition continued to be emphasized by members of the Cambodian Peoples' Party.[28] Such disputes have led some commentators to dismiss the ECCC as inherently flawed. "No one in the UN or elsewhere will ever copy the Cambodian model," Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch told The LA Times. "It's the lowest standard the United Nations has been willing to go."[29] While by many accounts the legal standards in the proceedings have been lacking, a broader problem of the ECCC is the often divergent priorities of international and national actors. The dispute between the Cambodian and the international co-Prosecutor may represent an instance of political interference, but it also points to the unresolved question of how to prioritize legal accountability and political concerns, particularly claims supposedly made in the interest of "national reconciliation."[30] While this is implicitly an issue in many war crimes tribunals, the ECCC has been required to grapple with this question in legal terms. The Pre-Trial chamber of the ECCC ruled in favor of allowing the international co-Prosecutor's submission of new evidence to the co-Investigating Judges. However, as noted by Neha Jain, this decision may only have "postponed the inevitable" of determining whether the alleged interest of national reconciliation represents a sufficient rationale to refrain from prosecution of individuals beyond those originally indicted.[31] Civil Society Engagement with the ECCC-Evaluating the Benefits Despite the potential logistic and procedural drawbacks of hybrid tribunals, two of their ostensible benefits are that their proximity to the locale in which the crimes were committed may make them more accessible to victims and the broader society, and may make them more capable of building legal capacity in the host country. These benefits largely failed to accrue in East Timor, where, due to under-funding and lack of coordination between the UN and Timorese government, a sufficient outreach function was never established.[32] The tribunals in Sierra Leone, by contrast, were able to obtain outside funding for this task and to establish an Outreach Office that has produced radio and television programs, developed educational materials, and held town hall meetings across the country to increase awareness and discussion of the Court's proceedings.[33] It is clear, therefore, that the simple presence of a tribunal in the country where crimes were committed is not sufficient to render it more impactful. There are several areas in which the potential outcomes of the ECCC on Cambodian society can begin to be evaluated: (1) its impact on the Cambodian judiciary, (2) its ability to provide a sense of justice to the Khmer Rouge's victims, and (3) its role in the production of new historical narratives and new normative visions for the direction of Cambodian society.[34] One ostensible benefit that the ECCC could bring is development of legal capacity and training of legal personnel. It is possible to exaggerate the potential impact of the ECCC on the domestic judiciary, however, and assertions such as those of Deputy Prime Minister Sok An that the ECCC could serve as a "model court"[35] for Cambodia seempotentially over-stated considering that Cambodian courts are unlikely to come into the vast resources available to the ECCC.[36] However, it has also been argued that the trainings in international law that Cambodian lawyers have received in conjunction with the ECCC will contribute positively to Cambodian participation in the international legal arena in the future. A conference held in Phnom Penh in October 2009 emphasized the progress made in Cambodia in establishing international legal standards. The meeting, "Rome Statute and Cambodia: Implementation of International Standards in Cambodia," highlighted Cambodia as the only Southeast Asian country to have ratified the Rome Statute and identified its importance in increasing Asian representation at the International Criminal Court.[37] The tribunal has also provided a space around which many Cambodian civil society groups are organizing. For example, the Cambodian Human Rights Human Action Committee (CHRAC), which describes itself as "a coalition of 21 NGOs working in the fields of human rights, democracy and the rule of law,[38] has been involved in efforts to assist victims in filing civil party applications, to lobby for changes in the role of civil party participants in the proceedings, and to ensure adequate protections through victim-oriented programs. A second area in which to evaluate the effects of the ECCC is its ability to mete out justice which is acceptable and meaningful to victims of the Khmer Rouge. CHRAC notes that they have aided almost 4,500 victims in submitting complaints or applications to the court, asserting that this represents a "clear indication of the strong interest and the desire of victims to actively participate in the legal proceedings."[39] Moreover, attendance to the tribunal's proceedings at some of its key points has been considerable. On the last day of Duch's trial, for example, more than 4,000 people attended the closing arguments.[40] A larger concern is whether this participation is sufficient to achieve something that could be considered as "reconciliation" in broader Cambodian society. Some have argued that the establishment of a truth commission alongside the court could render proceedings more inclusive and successful in the aim of producing a historical record of crimes committed in Democratic Kampuchea,[41] but Bickford concludes that "a truth commission is unlikely because local NGOs and the international community have put so much energy into the creation of the Khmer Rouge trial that they are now dedicated to making it work."[42] The reparations mandate of the tribunal is also quite narrow; the court may only award "collective and moral reparations," which may be sought only through participation as a civil party; no material or individual reparations will be made available, and the tribunal will therefore not enhance the material well-being of victims.[43] A final dimension of the ECCC's potential impact is its contribution to the historical record. Despite fairly extensive (largely English-language) knowledge of the Khmer Rouge period, the mechanisms through which to interpret and come to terms with the past in Cambodian society have been relatively few and often manipulated by political elites.[44] The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) has been particularly active in creating educational programs and a "Living Documents" project which sponsored individuals from rural areas in Cambodia to attend the trials as representatives of their communities for a week and then worked to establish discussion forums in these communities led by the representatives and DC-Cam staff members.[45] While efforts like these seem quite promising, a broader problem is how apt a mechanism the tribunal is to provide a complete picture of historical events. This relates fundamentally to the question of the effect of international politics on the tribunal. The mandate of the ECCC is restricted to investigating crimes between 1975 and 1979 and crimes committed by senior Khmer Rouge members. This mandate thus avoids authorizing investigation of crimes committed during the civil war in Cambodia, including subjects such as the US bombing of Cambodia, which occurred before 1975 but is often discussed as a key factor in the rise of the Khmer Rouge.[46] It also excludes crimes committed after 1975 that may have been committed in the on-going war with the Khmer Rouge,[47] as well the potential role of prominent members of the Cambodian government in the Khmer Rouge.[48] How sufficient will this mandate be in bringing to light areas of the historical record important for reconciliation? The Phnom Penh-based Centre for Social Development, as part of its Khmer Rouge and National Reconciliation project, gave participants in Phnom Penh, Battambang and Sihanoukville a questionnaire that asked them to answer the question, "Which solutions can bring about a true national reconciliation?" More than 56 percent of respondents chose "The trial should apply to persons from all regimes both before 1975 and after 1979 and not just to the Khmer Rouge leaders" as their first answer.[49] Similarly, DC-Cam compiled a list of responses from participants in their tours of the ECCC who had been asked what further questions they had about the tribunal. Examples of typical questions included "if countries which supported the Khmer Rouge will be tried," "if former Khmer Rouge village leaders who directly carried out killings will be tried," "if other countries knew about the genocide while it was occurring," and "why the Khmer Rouge were given the seat representing Cambodia in UN General Assembly."[50] These areas, unfortunately, remain difficult political questions with which Cambodia and the international community more generally will have to continue to grapple. Conclusion: Lessons for the Future Direction of International Justice The flaws in the ECCC's legal proceedings thus far have led some commentators to dismiss it as substantiating the need for the standardization of international justice proceedings under the auspices of the International Criminal Court. "The hope with establishing the ICC," Beth van Schaak, a law professor at the University of California Santa Clara told The LA Times, "was that it would obviate the need for ad hoc courts."[51]
Others, however, do not expect the ICC to make ad hoc tribunals obsolete, at least any time in the near future. A number of legal scholars have pointed towards possible complementary relationships between the ICC and hybrid tribunals; both in the short-term to strengthen local judiciaries in conjunction with the emergence of an effective international judiciary and in the long-term to enforce accountability for lower-level perpetrators and crimes outside of the ICC's jurisdiction.[52]
The ECCC demonstrates, however, that the format of war crimes tribunals remains, in reality, more a function of political possibility than the ability to assess objectively the costs and benefits of different models. Moreover, it suggests that the benefits of international punitive justice to post-conflict societies are by no means a foregone conclusion. Regardless of where these proceedings are located, there is contradictory evidence regarding their impact and a lack of clear standards for assessing this impact. Finally, the conflicts emerging within the ECCC between international and national legal personnel forebodes issues that the ICC as the first permanent ex ante tribunal, will almost certainly have to face repeatedly in the future.[53] This suggests that whatever models of international justice are pursued, more sophisticated methods of negotiating apparent contradictions in legal and political factors are needed in the theory and practice of international criminal law.
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[1] Extraordinary Chambers of the Court of Cambodia. "Publications," http://www.eccc.gov.kh/english/publications.aspx, accessed 12 February 2010. [2] See Kenneth Rodman. "Darfur and the Limits of Legal Deterrence," Human Rights Quarterly, 30 (2008): 530-560. [3] See Mamdani. "The New Humanitarian Order," The Nation, 29 Sept. 2008: 17-22. [4] Project on International Courts and Tribunals. "Hybrid Tribunals," http://www.pict-pcti.org/courts/hybrid.html, accessed 20 February 2010. [5] See Brendan Brady. "Flaws Mar Cambodia's First Khmer Rouge Trial," The LA Times, 6 Dec. 2009, 33. [6] The ICC has jurisdiction only when national courts or unable or unwilling to prosecute those responsible for grave crimes, a point emphasized in an October 2009 conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia entitled: "Rome Statute and Cambodia: Implementation of International Standards in Cambodia." See Michael Marien. "The Khmer Rouge Tribunal in International Perspective," http://cambodia.ded.de/cipp/ded/custom/pub/content,lang,2/oid,13838/ticket,g_u_e_s_t/~/The_Khmer_Rouge-Tribunal_in_international_perspective.html, accessed 20 Februrary 2010. [7] For a discussion of this tension in the ICC, see Mahnoush Arsanjani and W. Michael Reisman. "The Law-in-Action of the International Criminal Court," The American Journal of International Law, 99 (2005): 385-403. [8] Ben Kiernan. "The Inclusion of the KR in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences," in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, ed. Ben Kiernan, New York: Yale University, 1993, 201. [9] Hurst Hanum. "International Law and the Cambodian Genocide: the Sounds of Silence," Human Rights Quarterly 11.2 (1989), 136. [10] For example, see Terrence Duffy. "Towards a Culture of Human Rights in Cambodia," Human Rights Quarterly, 16.1 (1994): 82-104. [11] Particularly following criticism over inaction during events in Bosnia and Rwanda, the international community has been described as pushing for the trials in order to restore its "moral credibility," as in George Chigas. "The Politics of Defining Justice After the Cambodian Genocide," Journal of Genocide Research 2.2 (2000): 260 or as being "motivated by collective guilt," as in Scott Luftglass. "Crossroads in Cambodia: the United Nations' Responsibility to Withdraw from the Establishment of a Cambodian Tribunal to Prosecute the Khmer Rouge," Virginia Law Review 90.3 (2004): 906. [12] Christopher Rudolph. "Constructing an Atrocities Regime: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals," International Organization 55.3 (2001): 657. [13] Luftglass. "Crossroads in Cambodia: the United Nations' Responsibility to Withdraw from the Establishment of a Cambodian Tribunal to Prosecute the Khmer Rouge," 675. [14] Early documents between the UN and the Cambodian government discussing the possibility of a tribunal made reference to the high-profile tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda. See Luftglass. "Crossroads in Cambodia: the United Nations' Responsibility to Withdraw from the Establishment of a Cambodian Tribunal to Prosecute the Khmer Rouge," 949. [15] Kiernan. "The Inclusion of the KR in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences," 201. [16] Rudolph. "Constructing an Atrocities Regime: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals," 675. [17] Chigas. "The Politics of Defining Justice After the Cambodian Genocide," 257. [18] Stephen Heder and Brian D. Tittemore. Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge, Phnom Penh: 2004. Documentation Series No. 4 Documentation Center of Cambodia, 16. [19] Seth Mydans, "Cambodia Agrees to Tribunal Setup for Khmer Rouge Trials," New York Times, 30 April 2000. [20] David Cohen, "Hybrid Justice in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia: Lessons Learned and Prospects for the Future," Stanford Journal of International Law 43 (2007): 27. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid. [23] For a discussion of some of the perceived flaws in the tribunal design, see Kathryn M. Klein. "Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: the Challenges and Risks Facing the Joint Tribunal in Cambodia," Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 4.3 (2006): 561-562. [24] Brady. "Flaws Mar Cambodia's First Khmer Rouge Trial," 33. [25] Thierry Cruvellier. "Duch Trial Ends with a Twist," International Justice Tribune, 9 Dec. 2009, available at http://www.rnw.nl/int-justice/article/duch-trial-ends-twist. [26] Neha Jain. "The Khmer Rouge Tribunal Paves the Way for Additional Investigations," The American Society of International Law, 2 December 2009, available at http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/images/CTM/asil%20insight%2012-2-09.pdf. [27] Neha Jain. "The Khmer Rouge Tribunal Paves the Way for Additional Investigations," 4. [28] BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific. "Cambodian Peoples' Party Warns Court Trying Former Khmer Rouge Leaders," translation from Reaksmei Kampuchea, Phnom Penh, 8 Jan. 2010. [29] Brady. "Flaws Mar Cambodia's First Khmer Rouge Trial." [30] Jörg Mezdel notes rightfully that "Reconciliation is a term that has been widely used and abused in Cambodia and around the world in order to legitimize political deals that would otherwise be considered unethical." See Jörg Menzel. "Justice Delayed or Too Late for Justice: The Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the Cambodian 'Genocide' 1975-1979," Journal of Genocide Research 9.2 (2007): 225. However, the question of how to adjudicate claims made on the basis of national reconciliation is one for which the ECCC has been required to produce a determination, and this issue is by no means resolved in the broader tradition of international criminal law. [31] Neha Jain. "The Khmer Rouge Tribunal Paves the Way for Additional Investigations," 5. [32] Cohen. "Hybrid Justice in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia: Lessons Learned and Prospects for the Future," 18. [33] Ibid., 22. [34] Jörg Menzel, drawing from statements of the Cambodian NGO community, suggests four areas in which to evaluate the tribunal: justice for victims, reconciliation, historical truth, and exercise in law. See Menzel. "Justice Delayed or Too Late for Justice: The Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the Cambodian 'Genocide' 1975-1979," 225-226. [35] qtd. in ibid., Menzel 227. [36] Ibid. [37] Marien. "The Khmer Rouge Tribunal in International Perspective." [38] Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee. "CHRAC Urges ECCC to Consider Victims' Rights with Care," 1 February 2010, available at http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/images/CTM/chrac%20press%20release_7th%20plenary_29%20jan%202010%20english.pdf. [39] Ibid. [40] The Extraordinary Chambers of the Court of Cambodia. "Outreach Program," available at http://www.eccc.gov.kh/english/outreach.aspx, accessed 25 Feb. 2010. [41] See Jaya Ramji. "Reclaiming Cambodian History: The Case for a Truth Commission," Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 24 (2000). [42] Louis Bickford. "Unofficial Truth Projects," Human Rights Quarterly 29.4 (2007): 1022. [43] Carranza, Ruben. "Imagining the Possibilities for Reparations in Cambodia." International Center for Transitional Justice, available at http://www.ictj.org/images/content/9/5/950.pdf. [44] The PRK government established such rituals as "National Anger Day" and established a tribunal to try Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia for the crime of genocide. This has sometimes been discredited as a "show trial" designed to consolidate PRK power, although foreign lawyers participating in the proceedings have challenged this interpretation. See Helen Jarvis. "A Personal View of the Documents of the People's Revolutionary Tribunal," Eds. Howard J. De Nike, John Quigley, and Kenneth J. Robinson, in Genocide in Cambodia: Documents from the Trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. [45] Documentation Center of Cambodia. "Living Documents," available at http://www.dccam.org/Projects/Living_Doc/Living_Documents.htm, accessed 28 Feb. 2010. [46] See Ben Kiernan. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979, New Haven: Yale University, 2002, 7. [47] Menzel. "Justice Delayed or Too Late for Justice: The Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the Cambodian 'Genocide' 1975-1979," 218. [48] Heder and Tittemore. Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge, 16. [49] Hayes, Michael. "Cambodia: Trial of Khmer Rouge Takes Shape After 27 Years." IRIN. [50] See Dacil Q. Keo. "Report on the 8th ECCC Tour: Sept. 25-26, 2006," 3 Oct. 2006, available at http://www.dccam.org/Projects/Living_Doc/8th_ECCC_tour_report.pdf, as well as other DC-Cam ECCC tour reports. [51] Qtd. in Brady. "Flaws Mar Cambodia's First Khmer Rouge Trial." [52] See Maria Carmen Colitti and Luigi Condorelli and Theo Boutruche in Cesare P.R. Romano, Andre Nollkaemper, and Jann K. Kleffner, eds., Internationalized Criminal Courts and Tribunals: Sierra Leone, East Timor, Kosovo, and Cambodia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. [53] Jain, 5.
Book Launch: " Dancing in shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge and the United Nations in Cambodia" http://www.csis.or.id/events_past_view.asp?id=351&tab=0 (Comments: Benny Widyono (whom I know) is an Indonesian diplomat who was a member of part of the United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia (UNTAC). I had corresponded with him by email, on this book as he had asked me to put the review of this book in my web site. Widyono’s writing is in general, accurate with one exception; as typical of all Indonesian politicians since Sukarno’s time, by tradition of common stand on anti colonialism, are sympathetic to Vietnam, and Widyono is no exception. Having said that his description and observation on Sihanouk’s behavior in his book titled “Dancing in Shadows” is very real and true. However, the most interesting part of his book is in this observation about Sihanouk role in the Cambodian affairs and his relation with his son Ranariddh and Hun Sen. But, he did not know that Sihanouk switched his support form his Coalition government to Hun Sen since 1987, when Sihanouk met with Hun Sen at village near Paris named Fère-en-Tardenois. Widyono description of Sihanouk real ambition is well captured by tis sentence from his book; “Sihanouk wanted to be the King that rules, not just reigns. Sihanouk had no faith in Ranariddh’s capacity and Hun Sen’s presence is a threat to him, until Khmer Rouge came. He saw Khmer Rouge’s attack to the capital as an opportunity to deal with the pebbles in his shoes. Then a coup d’état happened when Khmer Rouge was declared as outlaws.” Sihanouk is well-known for his ability to survive. But, one can ask the next question, in maneuvering the situation and by switching sides, he was always able to survive, but, at the great expense of the majority of the Cambodian people. Sihanouk, according to many objective observers, is main person responsible for the endless tragedy of Cambodia and its people. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. December 2, 2010) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CSIS hosted the launching of a book on Cambodian politics by Benny Widyono, entitled “Dancing in Shadows”. The book is a memoir of his five years in Cambodia. From 1992 until 1993 he was member of UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia) and from 1994 until 1997 he served as the United Nations Secretary-General’s Representative in Cambodia. Wydiono’s description of this collusion between Hun Sen, Ranariddh, and Sihanouk was well captured by this sentence from this review: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The author started his speech by reminiscing King Sihanouk’s comment about his own country as a country stuck between crocodile (Vietnam) and tiger (Thailand). The author continued by explaining the reason behind the title of the book. He saw King Sihanouk, Khmer Rouge and the United Nations (UN) were dancing in the shadows and prolonging the sufferings of the Cambodian people. Cambodia had due to its geopolitical location, seen itself subjugated to the ongoing power struggles for hegemony in Southeast Asia. As a result, prior to the arrival of UNTAC in March 1992 Cambodia was, for more than twenty two years, plunged into chaos, turmoil, civil war and deep despair. Khmer Rouge during its reign from April 17 1975 to January 7 1979 has massacred an estimated 1.7 million people or one third of the population. Khmer Rouge also effectively abolished private property, family life, religion, money, and urban life. He described Sihanouk’s role as King that helped the meteoric rise of the Khmer Rouge from a small communist movement to a formidable force which ruled the country from 1975 to 1979. Such support was appreciated by China and aid was poured in. Khmer Rouge was cruel throughout the period, torturing and killing people, enforcing child soldiers from the poorest of the poor. When Cambodia was liberated by Hun Sen with the help of the Vietnamese army in 1979, the UN still acknowledged the Khmer Rouge as the government. China and U.S. conspired to continue recognizing the genocidal regime because they were anti-Vietnam. Situation continued for 11 more years until 1991 when the Paris Agreements were signed. In New York where the author served in the United Nations, the flag of the Khmer Rouge continued to fly for eleven more years which was an insult to the Cambodian people who have suffered so much. Meanwhile in Phnom Penh, the PRK under Hun Sen, though de facto ruling the country, went unrecognized, received no aid and was politically isolated, thereby prolonging the suffering of the Cambodian people for eleven years after the Khmer Rouge was ousted. The book differs from others in that it argues that the dancing in shadows among the three actors, Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge and the United Nations continued during the UNTAC period. He contended that the Paris Agreements carried original sins because it did not put Khmer Rouge as the enemy but the legitimate ruler or the country. Reference to “genocide” or any term related to the cruelty was taken out and changed to “situations in the past”. The first of the coalition, pressed by the United States, China and their allies, was that the Democratic Kampuchean "faction" was to play a legitimate role in Cambodian politics as one of four factions with whom UNTAC had to deal. The other three factions were the FUNCINPEC (Royalist party), the KPNLF (anti communist pro US faction) and the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) headed by Premier Hun Sen which had ruled the country for eleven years. UNTAC was given executive governance powers by the Supreme National Council, headed by Sihanouk, a symbolic entity consisting of the four factions with no real power. Although the UN did not recognize the PRK under Hun Sen, he was de facto the only real government. One can imagine the chaos which this caused for the UNTAC operations. The Paris Agreements placed some heavy burdens on the UNTAC operation. UNTAC failed to disarm the four factional armies because the Khmer Rouge refused to be disarmed. The Bamboo pole incident is when UNTAC failed to control the four “existing “administrative structures”. However UNTAC is not without successes. 360,000 refugees were returned from the Thai border and participated in the elections. UNTAC’s elections in 1993 were successful with more than 90% eligible voters participating. A new government was established with two prime ministers Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen. Sihanouk wanted to be the King that rules, not just reigns. Sihanouk had no faith in Ranariddh’s capacity and Hun Sen’s presence is a threat to him, until Khmer Rouge came. He saw Khmer Rouge’s attack to the capital as an opportunity to deal with the pebbles in his shoes. Then a coup d’état happened when Khmer Rouge was declared as outlaws. Sihanouk continued to manipulate Cambodian politics, engaging in dancing in shadows with Hun Sen, gradually losing power until he abdicated in 2004 leaving Hun Sen as the new dominant power in the country or what the author called the salami approach. When Hun Sen and Ranariddh finally cooperated, they were named “whispering government” because though Ranariddh do the public speaking, Hun Sen did the whispering on the back telling him what to do. Coalition continued until Hun Sen kicked Ranariddh out of his seat. Hun Sen amended the Constitution that guaranteed his party’s position without having to continue with any coalition. Many blamed the UN for not allowing Ranariddh to rule after he won in the election. “How do you allow Ranariddh to rule when the whole country is controlled by Hun Sen, who held the whole military?” The story in the book ended in 1979 and Hadi Soesastro added the more recent history of Cambodia, surrounding the event of Cambodia being refused as member of ASEAN. All in all, especially for the last 10 years or so, Cambodia has actually consolidated its position as an autocratic regime with the dictatorship of Hun Sen. With regard to the Khmer Rouge’s international tribunal, the author compared the trial with the Nuremberg trial. It will take long time and it will be different from the Serbian or other recent trials. Hun Sen insisted to have a Cambodian Court and have very little trust to UN after being manipulated in the past. The author maintains that such manipulation still continues. He mentioned the US’ refusal to contribute financially to the trial until all Khmer Rouge was put on trial. But it is complicated because King Sihanouk and Hun Sen were also Khmer Rouge. Ali Alatas added some notes. After the Paris Agreement, the Khmer Rouge was excluded though not disarmed by the forces. At the behest of the negotiator, Ali Alatas had a secret meeting in Bangkok with Khmer Rouge leadership and asked them whether they were serious in their last minute refusal to join the Paris Accord. They said yes and Ali Alatas said that if they did not join, no one will support them including China. Khmer Rouge said they will take that risk. They were in pockets near borders and Phnom Penh, only UN troops can talk to them. Ali Alatas agreed that there are two problems. When they were about to join ASEAN, they were supposed to enter together with Myanmar and Laos. But one week before or so, there was a coup d’état by Hun Sen. ASEAN after a lot of debates, decided to postpone. Ali Alatas together with two other ASEAN member countries representatives were sent to solve the problem. Hun Sen was furious and refused to join ASEAN because ASEAN was seen to be interfering. Ali Alatas tried to be patient and explained that they do not want to interfere. But because Hun Sen wanted to join ASEAN, therefore they have the desire to talk to Hun Sen regarding the coup. The solution was that Ranariddh became Chairman of the Parliament and Hun Sen remain the sole Prime Minister. Ali Alatas referred to the humanitarian intervention and mentioned the rejection of the Third countries. The first reason is the sovereignty issue. Second is that it was patently clear, that it could only be applied to smaller countries. Chechnya was still a problem, but nobody talked about it because Russia is so big. This was patent discriminatory, that’s why the non-alliance countries refused to accept.
Sihanouk to testify in Khmer Rouge trial?
Verghese Mathews
06 Aug 2006 http://opinionasia.com/SihanoukKR (Comments: this article written in 2006, by former Singapore’s Ambassador to Cambodia, Mr. Verghese Mathews was another testimony about Sihanouk “willingness” , to testify about his role during his role in the Khmer Rouge regime, at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, (KRT). Note that Sihanouk had said that: “the 15 July offer of former King Norodom Sihanouk, now referred to as Father King, to testify at the KRT tribunal, makes fascinating reading and is truly intriguing. He declared on his website that he did not lack the courage to appear before the KRT.” Of course, since then he has recanted that statement, and had only offered to invite the KRT representatives to come to listen to his views on the Khmer Rouge regime and leaders, and not for him to go and testify at the KRT, as he said earlier. Of course, the KRT representatives, especially those foreigners, did not see appropriate for them to go to the palace to listen to Sihanouk instead of Sihanouk to go and testify at the KRT (please, for more details on this issue, read an article titled “Will Sihanouk appear at Khmer Rouge Trials?” posted just below this article). In addition, Hun Sen had passed a law to forbid the former king to be at the KRT either as a witness or as one of the accused accomplices (for an overwehlming evidence on the role and the complicity of Sihanouk with the Khmer Rouge, please,click on this link, Sihanouk and his Tragic Role in Contemporary Cambodia). Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. December 21, 2010)) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ta Mok, a name so familiar to a generation of Cambodians, died in Phnom Penh in the early hours of Friday 21 July. In detention since his capture in 1999, the much feared, one-legged Khmer Rouge military commander died in a military hospital of complications resulting from a long history of high blood pressure, respiratory illness, cardio-vascular problems and tuberculosis. While there were those who mourned his death, there were arguably legions who were both truly disappointed and deeply frustrated that Ta Mok had taken along with him, to the hereafter, many dark secrets of the three years eight months and twenty days of the dreaded Khmer Rouge (KR) regime. His untimely but not unexpected death is without doubt a great loss to the forthcoming Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT). He could surely have shed at least some light as to why the KR did what they did to their own people and what unfortunate alignment of the planets motivated their frenzied attempt to reinvent Cambodia and why that dreaded exercise went so dreadfully wrong. Ta Mok is not the only one to have cheated the KRT of its very limited number of primary sources. The man accused of being most responsible for the crimes, Pol Pot, Brother No 1, died unceremoniously in suspicious circumstances on 15 April 1998 - at a time when Ta Mok had wrested control of the KR from him. The loss now of such a critical witness like Ta Mok should sound the clarion call to both the UN and the Cambodian government that the KRT should not be delayed any longer and that every resource ought to be marshalled to accelerate the tribunal process. Apart from possible deaths of the remaining aging KR leaders, there is also residual fear in certain circles that some, if not most of them, who live and move freely in Cambodia, may quietly disappear from the country before the trial proper begins early next year. This is not an unlikely event. Media reports last month, for example, that former head of State Khieu Samphan "had packed up his pickup truck in the middle of the night and left town", quickly gained currency and raised anxiety among those who continue to harbour doubts about the KRT. A subsequent explanation that Khieu Samphan was merely transporting a bed to his son's house killed further international media interest of the incident but failed to assuage the doubts of the cynics. Viewed in this context of diminishing primary witnesses, the 15 July offer of former King Norodom Sihanouk, now referred to as Father King, to testify at the KRT tribunal, makes fascinating reading and is truly intriguing. He declared on his website that he did not lack the courage to appear before the KRT and again pointedly reminded everyone, "My family, my wife's family and many people who supported Norodom Sihanouk were tortured and killed by Khmer Rouge Pol Pot." Will Sihanouk testify? It would be difficult for Sihanouk not to steal the limelight should he appear at the KRT. Even his worst detractors will grudgingly admit that Sihanouk is an extremely astute politician who has been intimately involved with developments in his country for the last half a century. He is both enigmatic and extraordinary. He also knows how to capture attention. An important point to note here is the firm belief in some quarters that Sihanouk is very serious and that his was not a frivolous offer. Sihanouk is a man of history and as he looks back at his colourful and eventful life, he may perhaps pause to admit that one of the most universally misunderstood and most trying periods of his life was the period of the KR when he, Queen Mother Norodom Monineath and present King Norodom Sihamoni ended up as virtual prisoners in the palace. It is entirely possible, or so the belief goes, that Sihanouk, in his sunset years, will view the KRT, despite his previous criticism of it, as possibly one of the very few remaining vehicles to put across his side of the story of the period for future generations of Cambodians and for the international community. There is a view that as he is no more King and since constraints are fewer, he will be more forthright at the KRT. This is not being fair to Sihanouk. His track record here is clear. Even when he was King and there were numerous constraints, he never lacked in forthrightness. On the contrary, what has always been uppermost in the minds of those who knew him, both friends and detractors alike, was that no one was ever too sure what Sihanouk would say. Even some of those who genuinely admire him admit that Sihanouk is indeed unpredictable and fearless - undoubtedly a potent combination. Others have described him differently. The highly respected political commentator Milton Osborne titled his book on Sihanouk, "Prince of Darkness, Prince of Light". In a review of the book, the equally respected Martin Stuart-Fox disagreed with that reference. He gently chided, "The title is an extravagant one. Sihanouk is neither a Prince of Darkness nor a Prince of Light. Such cosmological/eschatological overtones as these titles convey should not cloud our judgment. What Milton Osborne actually presents us with in this thoughtful and revealing book is a leader whose flaws of character contributed in no small measure to his country's tragic history." There will be those who will disagree with that observation about Sihanouk but will wholeheartedly accept that the real tragedy of Cambodia was the Khmer Rouge. Given this, although Sihanouk is not required to appear before the KRT, and ultimately may not, there is no denying that should he do so, his contributions would be invaluable. There is equally no denying that should he appear, there could well be understandable anxiety among some individuals and within some capitals.
Will Sihanouk Appear at Khmer Rouge Trials?
IPS, News Agency; By Marwaan Macan-Markar http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39198 (Comments: this article made a good case to bring Sihanouk to, at least, be a witness, if not, to be tried at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KTR). Of course, Sihanouk had come out against it. But, Sihanouk had, arrogantly, suggested that the KTR should come to him instead. And as usual, Sihanouk had finessed his way out of trouble, by putting himself above the law, by saying that; “But like a character from a Shakespearian drama, Sihanouk continued to be elusive. In standing up for his cause, the former monarch ‘’complained that the ECCC wanted him to ‘take an oath to tell the truth, nothing but the truth on the subject of arch criminals’,’’ reported the ‘Phnom Penh Post’ English-language newspaper last Friday. ‘’I do not have to swear an oath after (the one I swore) with Buddha, to debase myself to take an oath in front of the ECCC.’’ Once again, Sihanouk is getting away, literally away with murder. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. November 29, 2010) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
BANGKOK, Sep 10, 2007 (IPS) - Cambodia’s colourful former king Norodom Sihanouk has emerged as the central figure in the latest controversy to plague the special tribunal established to prosecute the surviving members of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
And the 85-year-old royal, who has carved a name for himself as a man who relishes the spotlight, has waded into the dispute in his own inimitable way. He chose to reveal his thoughts on the question that has gripped Phnom Penh: whether Sihanouk should or should not be called to appear before the United Nations-backed war crimes trial. On Aug. 30 he took his first thrust by issuing an unusual invitation to the U.N. officials associated with the tribunal, including the international spokesman for the tribunal, Peter Foster, to visit the palace for a conversation on ‘’the affairs of the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk.’’ The means of communicating the invitation was typical Sihanouk: it was posted on the personal web site that he maintains. The rendezvous in the royal court was set for Sep. 8 and expected to last for three hours, from 9 a.m. till 12 noon. Sihanouk - who stepped down as the monarch in October 2004 in favour of his son, Norodom Sihamoni - took the liberty on that web posting to reveal how he views the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC), as the tribunal is officially called. ‘’After this (meeting) it will no longer be necessary for me to present myself before the U.N.’s ECCC,’’ Sihanouk stated in his invitation. And if the U.N. officials failed to show up, he noted that he ‘’will not accept to see, speak or correspond with the U.N.’s ECCC.’’ As was expected, the U.N. officials did not participate in this royal conversation on the tribunal. ‘’I was not authorised to participate in this meeting, nor were other U.N. officials,’’ Foster said during an interview from Phnom Penh. ‘’We responded by saying that only the judges involved in the trial will be able to determine who will be a witness. The judges will do so based on procedural rules.’’ But like a character from a Shakespearian drama, Sihanouk continued to protest too much. In standing up for his cause, the former monarch ‘’complained that the ECCC wanted him to ‘take an oath to tell the truth, nothing but the truth on the subject of arch criminals’,’’ reported the ‘Phnom Penh Post’ English-language newspaper last Friday. ‘’I do not have to swear an oath after (the one I swore) with Buddha, to debase myself to take an oath in front of the ECCC.’’ Those familiar with Sihanouk’s penchant for grand gestures and a life peppered with drama are hardly surprised by this latest offering. Following his being crowned the monarch of his South-east Asian nation in 1941, at the tender age of 18 years, he has abdicated twice, served as king twice, held the post of prime minister twice and served as president once. His record in the world of the arts and entertainment has been as varied, dabbling as a film-maker, song writer, painter, saxophonist and a crooner of ballads.
What is equally well-known is the link Sihanouk maintained with the Khmer Rouge, responsible for an orgy of death during 1975 to 1979 when it took control of Cambodia after a prolonged battle with a pro-American puppet regime in Phnom Penh. The extreme Maoist group killed close to 1.7 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the country’s population at the time. The victims were executed, died from forced labour or starvation as the Khmer Rouge tried to turn the country into an agrarian utopia.
Sihanouk himself lost family members to the Khmer Rouge and was kept under house arrest by the genocidal regime between 1976 till 1979. Yet against those details are the roles he played in the four years up to the Khmer Rouge triumph in 1975 - urging the Cambodian people to join the Khmer Rouge, in addition to serving as the head of state for the Khmer Rouge in the first year it held power. And when the Khmer Rouge was driven out of power by the invading Vietnamese troops, Sihanouk fled to the forests with the extreme Maoists and took on a new role as the global defender of the Khmer Rouge regime in exile.
It is this phase of Sihanouk’s life that has been brought into focus and raised the possibility of him going before the ECCC. The latter officially began work in July this year after long delays and hurdles placed in its way, including regular challenges posed by the Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen. The push to get Sihanouk appear before the ECCC was triggered by a relatively unknown non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in the United States, the Cambodian Action Committee for Justice and Equity (CACJE). In late August, it made a request to authorities in Phnom Penh to strip Sihanouk of his immunity as a former monarch in order to be called before the tribunal. The Hun Sen administration rose to Sihanouk’s defence by delivering a harsh rebuke. The premier called the request to strip Sihanouk ‘’very barbaric’’ and one that ‘’could have the result of jeopardising the peace and unity’’ of the country. But human rights groups questioned the motives of the government, arguing that war-ravaged Cambodia’s quest to create a society governed by the rules of law and justice will be undermined if the former monarch is placed above the law and insulated from the ECCC. ‘’This could set a bad precedence, since the ECCC is expected to set new and high standards of justice for Cambodia,’’ says Lao Mong Hay, senior researcher on Cambodia at the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), a regional rights lobby.
‘’The request does not mean he has to face trial as a defendant or as an accused, but it is to remove an unconstitutional clause in the constitution and make the former king available if the judges need him to appear,’’ Lao explained during an interview from Hong Kong, where AHRC is based. ‘’This is very important for the trial, since many Cambodians who lost family want to know about the past; how and why the Khmer Rouge pursued their murderous policies.’’ _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Excepts from John Pilger’s book titled “Distant Voices” Vantage Books, 1993 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pilger_John/Have_Nice_War_DV.html If the 'peace process' was proving a theatre of the macabre, Prince SIhanouk provided his own theatre of the absurd. As decided in Paris, he returned to Phnom Penh in November 1991 to head the transitional 'supreme national council', made up of representatives of his followers, the KPNLF, the Hun Sen Government and the Khmer Rouge. 'I am returning to protect my children,' he said. 'There is joie de vivre again. Nightclubs have reopened with taxi dancers. I am sure soon there will be massage parlours. It is our way of life: it is a good life. 1137 He brought with him four chefs, supplies of pâté de foie gras hurriedly acquired from Fauchon, one of Paris's most famous gourmet shops, a caravan of bodyguards and hangers-on, including two sons with dynastic ambitions. (With their father ensconced in his old palace, Prince Ranariddh and Prince Chakrapong have set their private armies on each other. 'Anyway,' said Ranariddh, 'my brother has run out of troops.' Prince Sihanouk described this as 'just a small clash.., they are good boys, but as brothers there is bickering. They never got on as children.' Many Cambodians were pleased to see the 'god-king', and the elderly struggled to kiss his hand. It seemed the world had again located Cambodia on the map. The cry, 'Sihanouk is back' seemed to signal a return to the days before the inferno of the American bombing and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk's presence even suggested to some that the Khmer Rouge had surrendered. For them the Paris 'accords' meant that the United Nations would protect them. They could be pardoned for failing to comprehend the perversity of an agreement which empowered the United Nations to protect the right of the genocidists to roam the cities and countryside free from harm and retribution, and which had appointed two of Pol Pot's henchmen to a body, the Supreme National Council, on which they could not be outvoted. This was described by Congressman Chet Atkins, one of the few American politicians to speak for the Cambodian people, as 'the consequence of a Faustian pact' with Pol Pot. At one of his many press conferences, Sihanouk was asked about the Khmer Rouge. 'In their hearts', he said, 'they remain very cruel, very Maoist, very Cultural Revolution, very Robespierre, very French Revolution, very bloody revolution. They are monsters, it is true... but since they decided to behave as normal human beings, we have to accept them... naughty dogs and naughty Khmer Rouge, they need to be caressed.' At this, he laughed, and most of the foreign press laughed with him. His most important statement, however, caused hardly a ripple. 'Cambodians', he said, 'were forced by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council... to accept the return of the Khmer Rouge'. The following day Khieu Samphan arrived to join the prince on the Supreme National Council. Suddenly, the gap between private pain and public fury closed, and the people of Phnom Penh broke their silence. 141 The near-lynching of Khieu Samphan might have been influenced by the Hun Sen Government, but there could be no doubt that it was heartfelt. Within a few hours of landing at Pochentong Airport, Pot Pot's emissary was besieged on the top floor of his villa. Crouched in a cupboard, with blood streaming from a head wound, he listened to hundreds of people shouting, 'Kill him, kill him, kill him.' They smashed down the doors and advanced up the stairs, armed with hatchets. Many of them had lost members of their families during the years that he was in power, at Pot Pot's side. One woman called out the names of her dead children, her dead sister, her dead mother - all of them murdered by the Khmer Rouge. The mob dispersed after Hun Sen arrived and spoke to them. Khieu Samphan and Son Sen (who had escaped the attack) were bundled into an armored personnel carrier and taken to the airport, and flown back to Bangkok. On April 17, 1975, the first day of Year Zero, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and marched the entire population into the countryside, many of them to their death. Generally, people did as they were told. The sick and wounded were dragged at gunpoint from their hospital beds; surgeons were forced to leave patients in mid-operation. On the road, a procession of mobile beds could be seen, with their drip-bottles swinging at the bedposts. The old and crippled soon fell away and their families were forced to go on. III and dying children were carried in plastic bags. Women barely out of childbirth staggered forward, supported by parents. Orphaned babies, forty-one by one estimate, were left in their cradles at the National Pediatric Hospital without anyone to care for them. The Khmer Rouge said that the Americans were about to bomb the city. Many believed this, but even among those who did not, defeatism, fear and exhaustion seemed to make them powerless. The hemorrhage of people lasted two days and two nights, then Cambodia fell into shadow. p465
... According to the Cambodia specialist Raoul Jennar the Khmer Rouge were given 'the perfect ally... time'. 'They are not prisoners of a calendar they would impose on themselves,' he wrote. 'They have succeeded in eight months of "peace" in reinforcing their military positions without having conceded anything, while the other parties, respecting their promise [at Paris], have begun a process which puts then, a little more each day, in a position of weakness. This is, to date, the real result of the IN operation in Cambodia. As Jennar and others pointed out, those running the UN operation in Cambodia were so committed to the 'peace plan' working, they 'hide the truth'. The truth is that the Paris agreement gave the Khmer Rouge a long-term advantage, having already caused 'Lebanonisation' of the country. Although a principal sponsor of the 'accords', the United States continued to give unilateral aid to the so-called 'non-communist' factions. The US government aid agency, USAID, spent several million dollars building a strategic road and facilities across the Thai border into the KPNLF headquarters at Thmar Pouk . The Thai Army were, as ever, zealous collaborators in such ventures. At one crossing, Thai soldiers escorted Thais to work in the gem mines controlled by the Khmer Rouge: the source of great wealth for both the Khmer Rouge and the Thai generals. In Phnom Penh under the UN unreality persisted. Echoing Neville Chamberlain, the head of UNTAC, Japanese diplomat Yasushi Akashi, 'publicly rebuked' the Khmer Rouge for their lack of co-operation. 1-17 General Sanderson said, 'It's outrageous ... them stopping our people'. 158 One of his officers, a Dutch colonel, complained about dealing with the Khmer Rouge, 'One day a nobody is a somebody,' he said, 'then a somebody is a nobody. A corporal becomes a colonel. They are friendly one day and unfriendly the next.' A Western diplomat said he 'hoped' the Khmer Rouge 'will take a pragmatic approach'. In the meantime, the Khmer Rouge stepped up their attacks. During the first half of 1992 their immediate aim was to gain control of two strategic highways leading to Phnom Penh and so cut off the northern provinces from the capital. But Khmer Rouge commanders were also securing and expanding their 'zones'. They did this by laying minefields around villages so as to deter people from leaving the areas they control. This is known as 'population control'. People who try to escape or stray into a mine-infested paddy, as children frequently do, become a 'strategic drain on the community': that is, a burden on the Government in Phnom Penh.
A Picture is worth a thousand words: the cambodian tragedy is captured in one picture http://ki-media.blogspot.com/2010/06/sihanouks-vietnam-visit-disappoints.html (Comments: Sihanouk, along with his wife Monique, and his son the current king, Sihamoni (The vassals) recently visited Hanoi (June 2010), to pay tribute to and to reassure the Vietnamese leader (Vietnamese president Nguyen Minh Triet, the suzerain), This picture clearly shows that Hun Sen is still Hanoi’s servant, and Sihanouk is still Hun Sen’s servant. The Vietnamese tributary system in now implanted on solid ground in Cambodia (On the tributary system, please, the link posted below). Vietnam Tributary System with Deadly Twist For a comprehensive archive on Cambodia-Vietnam relations, please, click on this link: http://janecadhlanews.blog4ever.com/blog/articles-cat-462157-503850-cambodia_vietnam.html Notice, how respectful Sihanouk (Kowtow) is toward the Vietnamese leader. Is he as humbling and submissive toward the Cambodian people? The answer is, NO! When will Sihanouk stop betraying Cambodia and its people? When will the Cambodian people have enough courage to start to let the ex-king and traitor know that he had done enough harm to Cambodia and its people, and should disappear from the political scene as soon as possible, in order to allow the Cambodian people to have a better chance to survive the Vietnamese onslaught. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. August 26, 2010) 
Vietnam president praises Cambodia cooperation: state TV AFP Asian Edition Jun 22, 2010 12:04 EDT http://www.royalty.nu/news/10/06/MocCamb.html Vietnam's president praised cooperation with neighbouring Cambodia Tuesday during a private visit by former king Norodom Sihanouk and members of his royal family, state television reported. Sihanouk arrived in the Vietnamese capital with his wife and his son, King Norodom Sihamoni, for a four-day stay. The ex-monarch is sometimes known as the "king-father" of Cambodia, where anti-Vietnamese sentiment is rife, fuelled by resentment at Vietnam's expansion over centuries and the perception that Cambodia is losing territory. But communist Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet said the visit showed relations between the two are close and important, state television said. Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as their fellow neighbour Laos, are determined to maintain solidarity, Triet added. According to the report, Sihanouk thanked Vietnam for its support. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, overthrew the murderous Khmer Rouge regime the following year, and occupied the country for 10 years. "Being retired and no longer doing politics nor diplomacy, my journey and trip to the glorious Socialist Republic of Vietnam will have a strictly private character," Sihanouk said in a statement dated June 14. He was to meet other current and retired leaders of Vietnam, and attend a performance at Hanoi's Opera House, a Vietnamese source said. Sihanouk abruptly quit the throne in October 2004 in favour of his son, citing old age and health problems. He remains a prominent figure in Cambodia and often uses messages on his website to comment on matters of state. Cambodia and Vietnam share a 1,270-kilometre (790-mile) border, which has remained vague since French colonial times, but in 2005 they signed a border accord that has helped calm tensions after decades of territorial disputes. Vietnamese businesses are also investing in Cambodia. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cambodian History repeats itself: A historical record on How the Cambodian Royal Family betrayed the Cambodian People Please, click the link pasted at the bottom of this introduction, to read an article written by a Vietnamese scholar David Lan Pham, on how the Cambodian royal family had betrayed the cambodian people, when Chhey Chetha II married a Vietnamese princess, and had ceded Prey Nokor (Saigon) as a gift to his new wife's father - the Vietnamese Emperor - to be used as customs station, which led to the beginning of the conquest of Kampuchea Krom). Before the conquest of kampuchea Krom, Vietnam had also used sex to conquer and totally destroyed Champa by the end of the 17th century. The most remarkable aspect of "Nam Tien," as described in this article is the fact that this strategy was conceived as a way to escape death of the Vienamese nation and people from the hands of the Chinese. (For more details, please click on the link pasted below on how "Nam Tien" was conceived, organized, managed and implemented; to obliterate Champa, to take over kampuchea Krom, and now what is remained of Cambodia). Revised Understanding Nam tien is a necessary condition.ppt In order to escape this death threat, Vietnmese leaders had fought each other - the Trinh lords of the North against the Nguyen lords of the South, who triumphed - after more than 200 years of civil war, which allowed the latter to reshape the Chinese tributary system adopted by the Trinh lords, to make it a more lethal one for those neighbouring countries, namely, Cambodia and Champa; and to rebuild a new and more capable and honest administration supported by a high quality of its civilian and military leaders, based on scholarship, heroism (A general committed suicide because he felt he did not defend the newly acquired land that was under his responsibility) and honor, while incentives including military protection, were given to those Vietnamese convicts and former soldiers who would accept to venture into the newly conquered land of the Cham and the Khmer People. Finally, the intellectual vigor of the Vietnnamese people was witnessed by the numerous new religions adopted and created by the Vietnamese, such as; Coa Daism, Hoa Hao, Catholicism, Protestantism. While the vast majority ot Cambodians remains stuck with Therevada Buddhism since the 12th century. Theravada Buddhism is the perfect way for escape for most Cambodians who have extremely been oppressed by the monarchy since the founding of Angkor in 802 by Jayavarman II. Unlike Vietnam, Cambodia had never allowed anybody other than the kings and their family members to have any opinion or ideas in order to move the country forward and not backward. The Cambodian kings had never allowed the pursuit of scholarship by the common people, nor did they look for it to move the country forward. Because, scholarship from any commoner would be considered as a competition with and a threat to the king's power. This, in turn, makes Cambodia going backward, and not forward. In Cambodia, the status-quo and standstill attitude is the norm rather than the exception. No wonder, Cambodia is moving backward and not froward. Unless this whole attitude is changed and quickly, there is little chance that cambodia can survive the Vietnamese formidable and deadly "Nam Tien." For more details on on Cambodian hsitory and on Kampuchea Krom, please go these sites; A brief history of Cochinchina.docx http://www.mongabay.com/reference/country_studies/cambodia/all.html Naranhkri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. August 30, 2010
Contact me Naranhkiri Tith, Ph.D. Consultant, Country Risks Analysis Former senior International Monetary Fund (IMF) official Former professor of International Economics and Finance, and Country Risks Analysis, at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), The Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC.
Any comments - negative or positive -, or any questions you may have on the content or the presentation of this site, as long as the language used remains at a civilized level, are most welcome. Washington, DC; (USA)
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| "Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied " (A Quote from the The New York Times, March 5, 2007) A rapid conclusion of the Khmer Rouge Trial, according to international standard of justice, that is Real Justice and Not "Practical Justice," as Craig Etcheson had suggested, is the only way to guaranty the survival and the dignity of the Cambodian people The main purpose of this web site is to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders who are responsible for the slaughter in cold blood, of more than two million innocent people, Cambodians and non-Cambodians and regardless of their age or gender, to trial according to international standard of justice and not accoring to Hun Sen and the Vietnamese totally politicized and corrupt judicial system. Secondly, it provides a set of background information on how and why the Khmer Rouge trial has been hijacked by Hun Sen, with the help of Sihanouk, and with the implicit acquiescence of some major countries in the world, and especially, by China, France, Japan, The United States of America, and by Vietnam. Finally, it proposes a roadmap of how this objective can be achieved. Several important benefits can be derived from an early completion of the Khmer Rouge trial, for the majority of the Cambodian people. First, the Khmer Rouge trial can give the Cambodian people and other victims of mass killing in the world, a sense of hope, and more importantly, a sense of justice that they deserve, and the expectation of a more normal life. Second, this trial would be a cheap and wholesale treatment for the majority of Cambodians who still suffer from the Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder (PTSD), resulting from being exposed to or having eye-witnessed the mass killing perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Third, the trial can take away from Hun Sen and his CPP, the main reason for his regime to be accepted, internationally, by comparing itself to one of the worst political regimes in recent human memories. The Khmer Rouge, from 1975 to 1978, murdered two to three million innocent Cambodian children, women, and men, and other racial groups, in cold blood and gruesome manner. Now, in 2007, there still is no Khmer Rouge leader put on trial for crime against humanity, let alone condemned for one of the most heinous crimes of the long history of human beings’ cruelty toward other human beings. According to recent and reliable sources, the long and protracted efforts by the United Nations to bring those Khmer Rouge leaders responsible for the crime against humanity to be tried, appear to be at a dead end, resulting from internal and external factors (See the article entitled 'Talks to Save Khmer Rouge Trials' by the BBC, in 'Khmer Rouge Trial Chronology' page). Externally, there are those countries, which do not want to see the Khmer Rouge brought to an end for fear of being exposed to uncomfortable revelations of their past behavior and collusion with the Khmer Rouge. Those countries most directly involved in the Khmer Rouge in the past, include China, Thailand, the United States, and especially Vietnam (See the article entitled, 'Khmer Rouge in Court' by RM Jenna, in 'Khmer Rouge Trial Chronology' page). Internally, Hun Sen appears to be the main actor behind the stalling of the trial, because, he cannot afford to allow the Khmer Rouge trial to be brought to a conclusion, for fear of losing the basis of comparison for his criminal and corrupt regime. Because, only by comparing his regime to that of the Khmer Rouge, can Hun Sen's regime be more acceptable to the international community. Sihanouk also does not want to go ahead with the trial, as he may be confronted by some embarrassing and revealing information regarding his past association with the Khmer Rouge (See the article entitled 'The Political Khmer Rouge Trial by the Vietnamese, in 1979,' by Luke. Hunt, in 'Khmer Rouge Trial Chronology' page). Therefore, the only alternative way to render justice to the Cambodian people, is to bring the Khmer Rouge trial out of the responsibility of the corrupt Cambodian justice system, which is subservient to Hun Sen’s political control and manipulations, by mandating and allowing the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) to be in full charge of the whole process and administration of the trial. The (ICC) located in the Hague, the Netherlands, would be the logical organization to accomplish this necessary and demanding task. The great powers that claim to have adopted and respected the general principles normally adopted by all civilized nations, that include the respect for justice and open society, such as the United States, Japan, and the European Union, should show the courage and determination to take the lead in this important and long-delayed rendition of justice to the majority of the Cambodian people. To succeed, this project must have the open support of as many Cambodians as possible, who feel strongly that the long awaited justice that Hun Sen, and his supporters, including Sihanouk had denied them. Justice delayed is justice denied! As the New York Times has reminded us in the cases of Srebrenica and Darfur, in a recent editorial that; "Court (ICC) ruling can never compensate the survivors of these horrors. But, by strengthening the reach and authority of international law, these cases should give pause to those tempted to unleash future genocides - and to those who stand by."
UN chief tours Khmer Rouge prison, appeals for more justice during visit to Cambodia
By: SOPHENG CHEANG
Associated Press Thursday, October 28, 2010 | Last Update 6:23 EDT http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/breaking/un-chief-tours-khmer-rouge-prison-appeals-for-more-justice-during-visit-to-cambodia-105970313.html
(Comments: Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General is a very brave and dignified person by daring to challenge Hun Sen and his CPP’s regime to bring more of those former Khmer Rouge leaders who are now members of his government to justice. We shall see who is going to have the last word on that important subject. I hope that UN S.G. Ban Ki Moon, will pursue to the end the content of his remark on the Khmer Rouge trial, as follows: "We know it is difficult to relive this terrible chapter in your history," Ban said. "But I want you to know, your courage sends a powerful message to the world — that there can be no impunity. That crimes of humanity shall not go unpunished." Should UN SG Ban Ki Moon’s remark become a reality sooner or later, real justice, and not “practical justice,” as suggested by Craig Etcheson, will be rendered to those Cambodians and non-Cambodians who were cowardly murdered by Pol Pot and his gang of savages. As important, is the efforts by Hun Sen and the Vietnamese to serve their common objective, which is to demonize the demon, will not be fulfilled. Naranhkiri Tith. Ph.D. Washington DC. October 28, 2010) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made an emotional appeal Thursday for Cambodia to send a message to the world that the Khmer Rouge's crimes against humanity will not go unpunished. Ban's comments came after a tour of the Khmer Rouge's main prison and torture center during a visit to Cambodia that has been marked by heated words from the country's leader. Prime Minister Hun Sen on Wednesday ordered Ban to shut down the U.N. human rights office in Cambodia and to remove the current envoy. Hun Sen also told Ban that Cambodia will not allow the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal to expand the scope of its trials to include former low-ranking officers of the regime. The 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime was blamed for the deaths of some 1.7 million people from starvation, disease, overwork and execution. "Thirty years have passed. Yet here, in this tragic place, we still hear the echoes. The cries of human misery. The agony," Ban said at the infamous S-21 prison where as many as 16,000 people were tortured before being executed. "I will never forget my visit here today. In this place of horror, ladies and gentlemen, let the human spirit triumph. Words cannot do justice. But we can." Ban later told The Associated Press in an interview that he had emphasized to Hun Sen the need for the government to "provide full cooperation and fully respect the independence of the court." He said the leader gave assurances for both. The tribunal closed its first case in July when it convicted the regime's chief jailer and head of S-21, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. A second trial is expected to start next year against the four top surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. Hun Sen has said the trials will stop there, despite U.N. wishes to bring lower-ranking officers to justice for murder, torture and other crimes. The U.N. says progress has been blocked by political interference from Cambodian officials who oppose more prosecutions. "We know it is difficult to relive this terrible chapter in your history," Ban said. "But I want you to know, your courage sends a powerful message to the world — that there can be no impunity. That crimes of humanity shall not go unpunished." Critics accuse the Cambodian leader of trying to limit the tribunal's scope to prevent his political allies from being indicted. Hun Sen once served as a Khmer Rouge officer and many of his main allies are also former members of the group. He also objects to the presence of U.N. human rights envoys, who tend to criticize the government's human rights abuses. "The office for U.N. human rights in Cambodia has to be shut down," government spokesman Khieu Kanharith quoted Hun Sen as telling Ban during a two-hour meeting Wednesday. Hun Sen accused the U.N. rights envoy, Christophe Peschoux, of "not working on human rights issues with the government but working as a spokesman for the opposition," Foreign Minister Hor Namhong told reporters. Ban has not commented publicly on Hun Sen's demands, but told the AP Thursday: "I am convinced that we will continue to work here in Cambodia. That's my understanding after further meetings with the prime minister and the foreign minister." Human Rights Watch's Asia deputy director Phil Robertson said the warning "appears to be part of Hun Sen's master plan to ensure total impunity for himself and consolidate authoritarian power." Associated Press writer Vijay Joshi contributed to this report.
Cambodian PM says no third Khmer Rouge trial
AFP – October 27, 2010 (Comments: as I have always said that the real objective of the Khmer Rouge trial is not to render justice to those Cambodian and non Cambodian people who were massacred by the Khmer Rouge monsters, but, “to demonize the demons,” so as to make Hun Sen and the Vietnamese look less demons, and therefore more acceptable to the international community. Now that objective has been achieved by the trial of “Duch’s” detailed confession to the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouges, he was let go with a sentence of 30 years, and not death, but with the possibility of being free earlier, Hun Sen and his boss the Vietnamese will never allowed to go through, not even those of the four senior Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, and Noun Chea. All the mimicry of justice would not have happened, had Senator John Kerry not helped Hun Sen to take control of the UN-sponsored trial by allowing the Hun Sen and his CPP to be an integral part of the trial, even though he knew that the justice system under Hun Sen is totally politicized and corrupt. Finally, Sihanouk who had allowed the Khmer Rouge to rise by using his name as the god-king, has also escaped the trial thanks to his now total alliance and support for Hun Sen and the Vietnamese. That is why Cambodia has nowhere to go from now on but down and down, at a faster pace. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. October 28, 2010) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHNOM PENH (AFP) - – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told visiting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that a second Khmer Rouge war crimes trial due to start early next year would be the last.
Hun Sen "clearly affirmed that case three is not allowed", Foreign Minister Hor Namhong told reporters after Ban met with the premier. "We have to think about peace in Cambodia," he said. In its first trial the UN-backed court in July sentenced former Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, to 30 years in jail for overseeing the deaths of 15,000 people in the late 1970s. Last month the court indicted four top regime leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in connection with the deaths of up to two million people from starvation, overwork and execution between 1975 and 1979. The accused in the second trial are "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea, former foreign minister Ieng Sary, his wife and ex-social affairs minister Ieng Thirith, and former head of state Khieu Samphan. The court is also investigating whether to open a third case against other former Khmer Rouge cadres, but has faced political interference. Cambodian and international prosecutors have openly disagreed on whether the court should pursue more suspects. Hor Namhong said Hun Sen told Ban during the meeting that the court would achieve a "successful prosecution" by the end of its second trial, but would suffer a "failure" if it prosecuted more cadres from the brutal regime. Hun Sen was once a mid-level Khmer Rouge member himself before turning against the movement. He has repeatedly warned that further prosecutions at the court could destabilise Cambodia, saying that he would prefer to see the court fail than indict more suspects.
Khmer Rouge Trial Threatened
Written by Susan Postlewaite
Asia Sentinel; Friday, 24 April 2009 http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1841&Itemid=189
Long-delayed justice in Cambodia may be denied yet
(Comments: as expected, Hun Sen is threatening again that if the ECCC wants to bring more former Khmer Rouge leaders to trial, he said it will be civil war. In other words, Hun Sen does not want to have some of his most prominent associates in the CPP, such as Chea Sim, Heng Samrin, Sar Kheng, Keat Chhon, and Tea Banh to be tried at the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Hun Sen, a former Khmer rouge regiment commander, has repeatedly said that if the ECCC brings more former Khmer Rouge leaders to trial, there will be civil war. But, the question is who can start a civil war in Cambodia under Hun Sen? The answer is Hun Sen himself is the only one who can start any war in Cambodia, civil or otherwise. Again, we must thank Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch for having the courage to call ‘A spade is a spade” when he said: "I've said for years that Hun Sen will try at key moments to sabotage the tribunal, and sadly, yet again he has done so," Adams said. "It is ridiculous to suggest the possibility of a spontaneous security threat from former Khmer Rouge, as they have no ability to take up arms against the government. If anything happens, it will only happen with Hun Sen's
blessing."
What else can I add to that truthful statement by brad Adams. The saddest thing about the Khmer Rouge Trial is the apparent blindness or duplicity by the international community in allowing Hun Sen to use the Khmer Rouge Trial for his own benefit and not for justice sake. The international community knows full well that Cambodia under Hun Sen, does not even have until today an anti corruption law. How could then the international community expect the ECCC not to be corrupt, when a recently published in the German government report said that there is a widespread of corruption within the Cambodian side of the staff of the ECCC including the main Cambodian administrator in the ECCC, Sean Visoth. Hun Sen and his boss the Vietnamese only want a “show trial,” and they have got it. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. April 24, 2009) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Although the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge have been unfolding in a Phnom Penh courtroom for three weeks, a toxic mix of corruption allegations, political interference and a money shortage threaten to shut the tribunal down, even as the world reads that justice is finally being done after 30 years of inaction.
The situation hit a low point with a blunt threat by Prime Minister Hun Sen recently that if the court runs out of money it's fine with him. He said the international prosecutor's desire to arrest more Khmer Rouge leaders living freely in Cambodia is "propaganda."
"Do not believe the propaganda there will be a widespread trial," Hun Sen told reporters, adding that any more arrests beyond the five suspects in custody could create civil war. "I agree to accept the defeat of this court or the collapse of the court, but I will not let this country have civil war again," Hun Sen said. He was in the Khmer Rouge himself but defected to help
Vietnam liberate Cambodia in 1979.
Meanwhile the trial of the regime's lead torturer Kaing Guek Eav, 66, also known as Duch, was off to what prosecutor Robert Petit said was a "good beginning," with four other aging Khmer Rouge leaders in custody and supposed to be tried in 2010. The Khmer Rouge were responsible for 1.7 million deaths by starvation, torture, execution, and overwork in Cambodia
from 1975 to 1979. Petit wants more than five leaders tried, but his
Cambodian co-prosecutor does not agree.
The dispute was turned over to the judges in December along with Petit's potential arrest list of five or six names. There is no indication when they will decide.
"The trial of Kaing Guek Eav is extremely exciting and there is a sense that justice is finally unfolding for the millions of victims," said John Hall, a professor at Chapman University‘s School of Law in California. But, he said, the inability of the court to credibly investigate allegations that Cambodian court personnel had to pay kickbacks to get and keep their
jobs is fraying the patience of the donors who support the court.
"At some point the UN and the international judges must seriously consider what Judge (Marcel) LeMonde called the nuclear option - to walk away," he said.
The problems have taken on renewed urgency as the court does not have money to pay Cambodian staff salaries for April. Australia offered to release funds that had been put on hold for six months pending an investigation into the corruption allegations. But the UN blocked the release. The UN has refused to release funds since last July when allegations resurfaced by Cambodian staff that a kickback ring operates at the court and they have to pay a percentage of their monthly salaries to a middleman.
Court spokeswoman Helen Jarvis said Friday that "we're confident" that the staff salaries will be paid next week. She said she could not say what country will shoulder the expense. (Japan came in with a $200,000 "urgent" donation to pay March salaries.)
Jarvis also said the judges are still considering whether more arrests will be allowed. "They're working on it. They have given questions back to the co-prosecutors. It‘s very complex," she said.
The UN investigated last fall but refuses to release its findings. UN Assistant-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs Peter Taksoe-Jensen has met three times since January, most recently for three days ending April 9, with Cambodian officials about the alleged kickbacks. But no resolution has been reached.
The court's senior Cambodian administrator, Sean Visoth, was named in November as a participant in a report by a German parliamentary delegation after their meeting with the court's UN administrator. Visoth has been sick leave since then.
Human rights groups and defense attorneys believe the corruption is widespread and could well extend to the judicial side, although they have not submitted evidence of that.
"The Cambodian judges and prosecutors receive their orders directly or indirectly from Hun Sen. They cannot act independently for fear of being removed or worse," said Brad Adams, executive director of Human Rights Watch Asia division.
"I've said for years that Hun Sen will try at key moments to sabotage the tribunal, and sadly, yet again he has done so," Adams said. "It is ridiculous to suggest the possibility of a spontaneous security threat from former Khmer Rouge, as they have no ability to take up arms against the government. If anything happens, it will only happen with Hun Sen's
blessing."
Prosecutor Petit, veteran of war crimes courts in Rwanda and East Timor, said he still hopes that the judges will agree with his request to arrest more leaders. He also said the graft allegations have to be dealt with.
"This has to go away so it no longer shares the headlines with the more important work of the court. Half the headlines are about the problem they refuse to deal with," said Petit. "It threatens the continuation of the court. It's a very real problem."
Three of the defense attorneys representing the other suspects in custody asked the court to investigate the corruption, but the court's co-investigating judges said they don't have jurisdiction.
"The corruption is like a plague where everybody gets tainted," said defense attorney Michael Karnavas who represents 82- year- old Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge's foreign minister. He said if the UN is "worried that Hun Sen is going to kick them out they should be out the door first."
Others pointed out that Hun Sen has the UN over a barrel because the UN doesn't want to walk away from the tribunal, but it also doesn't want to be seen supporting a court that doesn't meet international standards of justice.
Hall said as unpalatable as it would be to halt the trial, it may " be preferable than to continue to condone a court whose legitimacy has been so seriously undermined."
"Is a flawed court better than no court? Not necessarily," he said. ______________________________________________________________________ Coping with the Psychological Trauma of the Khmer Rouge Terith Chy (Comments: The crime of the Khmer Rouge is not only the fact they slaughtered more than two millions Cambodians and other races, but, they murdered the whole Cambodian nation, by setting such a low standard of behavior that makes any other evils (Hun Sen and the Veitnamese) look better. That is why there has been sustaining efforts by the Hun Sen and his Vietnamese patrons to "demonize the demon." On the other hand, the Khmer Rouge, not only murdered more than one third of the Cambodian population in 1975, which was around 7 million, also traumatized those who have survived, as the article posted below had pointed out. How, can anybody expect the Cambodian people to stand up to the Vietnamese aggressions when they cannot even take care of themselves psychologically and physically, leave alone stand up and fight for their freedom. This is the real tragedy that the Cambodian people is facing. But, most Cambodians are not aware how hard it is to fight against an aggressive, well-organized, well-led, and determined Vietnam pushing very hard for the final phase of the Vietnamization of Cambodia which started in the 17th century, when king Chey Chettha II married a Vietnamese princess, and as gift to his new bride has granted the town of Prey Nokor (Today Saigon) to Vietnamese imperial authorities, to be used as a custom house to collect taxes on boats using the Mekong River. Most Cambodians still do not realize how precarious their country situation is. In addition, with Sihanouk and Hun Sen have submitted themselves with the Vietnamese, the Vietnamization of Cambodia has entered its final phase. Vietnam is rushing, because it knows that time is not on its side, as the majority of the Vietnamese people are asking for more freedom and openness in their society. When that moment arrives, the Vietnamese people would want to take care of themselves first, before venturing into Cambodia or Laos, as Vietnam is now doing. But, this good opening that will be offered to the Cambodians can only be brought into fruition, if and only if, they can produce really honest, brave, knowledgeable, dedicated, democratic, and experienced leaders, totally different from Sihanouk, Hun Sen, or Sam Rainsy. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. May 28, 2007) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The legacy of the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime was one of disaster. It caused the deaths of about 1.7 million people (nearly a quarter Cambodia’s population) and left the country’s economy, infrastructure and institutions in ruins. But the hardships, suffering and fear that people experienced during the regime have not stopped today. The vast majority of Democratic Kampuchea’s survivors still suffer from some degree of mental or emotional problem. According to a 2004 study by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization of Cambodia (TPO), 81% of Cambodians have experienced violence, while 28.4% suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PDSD), 11.5% from mood disorders, and 40% from anxiety disorders. In the nearly three decades that have passed since the fall of Democratic Kampuchea, these victims have received little or no assistance from the state, which has little capacity for treatment. The US Department of Health and Human Services has also studied the mental health problems of the regime’s survivors who are living in the United States. It found that 62% suffer from PTSD and 51% from major depression (the comparable rates for the US population are 3.6% PTSD and 9.5% depression). This is no wonder, considering that the study concluded that 99% of these Cambodian refugees nearly starved to death, 96% endured forced labor, 90% had a family member or friend murdered, and 54% were tortured.[1] These alarming statistics beg for action to be taken to help those who have been struggling to live normal lives for nearly 30 years, but are unable to do so. Ronnie Yimsut, whose entire family was clubbed to death, recalls his dreams about Democratic Kampuchea: ‘I still have nightmares about the massacre on that dark December night. It has never completely gone away from my mind, and I am still horrified just thinking about it. Time does not heal such emotional trauma, at least not for me.’[2] The establishment of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the recent attention the media has given to mental health have helped Cambodians begin to discuss these problems. However, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal will likely cause many people to re-experience their trauma, creating further pressures on society. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal and Re-traumatization The leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime have enjoyed impunity for nearly 30 years, while their victims have been waiting anxiously to see some degree of justice done. With the establishment the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the Tribunal), the day for justice may arrive soon. The Tribunal is likely to have huge impacts on Cambodia, both positive and negative. On the positive side, it will likely change the image of Cambodia from that of a war-torn country to one where the rule of law prevails. Articles in the media could attract attention to Cambodia, bringing tourists and much-needed foreign exchange. It will also offer a great opportunity to the country’s legal community, who will gain experience from international lawyers and jurists, which could be seen as a start for legal reform. Most important, however, is that the Tribunal, which enjoys wide popular support, is anticipated to bring about a degree of reconciliation among Cambodians, should justice be realized. However, these positive impacts may only occur if the Tribunal proves to be successful, and the prospects for success are still in question. Three of the regime’s leaders (Pol Pot, Ke Pauk, and Ta Mok) have already died, and only two (Ta Mok and Duch) have ever been brought into custody. The remaining leaders are in their 70s and 80s, and some of them are in poor health. Whether those who are indicted will survive for the three-year trial period is uncertain. And although the disputes over procedural issues have largely been resolved, the Tribunal’s internal rules have still not been approved. Despite the numerous potential positive impacts, it is anticipated that the trials will re-open old wounds and fuel resentment when survivors recall their harsh experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime. The media and NGOs have served as a catalyst in getting people to talk about their experiences during Democratic Kampuchea, which has been helping some to begin healing. Cambodia’s Director of Mental Health, Dr. Ka Sunbaunat, said that “some patients see the Khmer Rouge trial as therapy in itself. The exposure of wrongdoing helps them put their lives back together again.”[3] But this probably will not be the case for those who will be giving testimony in the courtroom, whether for the prosecution or defense. Many of those who experienced excessive levels of violence during the regime still do not want to share their past, particularly rape survivors. Taing Kim, who is the subject of a documentary film by DC-Cam, has never disclosed her rape during the regime to her children or let them see the film about her. Witnesses and Retraumatization before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. When people tell their personal stories, it can help them heal their psychological wounds, but this can be harmful to potential witnesses. Various international courts and tribunals have developed some preventive measures to reduce this harm. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, for example, has established a Victims Unit similar to those of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and International Criminal Court to assist and protect witnesses. Rule 33 of the Tribunal’s draft Internal Rules provides for the prohibition of self-incrimination of a witness. Rule 34 provides that the co-investigating judges themselves or through the request of one of the parties or their lawyers can order appropriate measures to protect the lives and health of victims, witnesses and their families. It further provides for such measures as concealing the identity of a witness, which includes using a pseudonym, hiding his or her address, distorting the voice and physical features of a witness, in camera proceedings, and punishment for the disclosure of a witness’ identity or address. To secure against the possible physical harm of a witness, the Tribunal could place a victim or witness in a safe residence in Cambodia or abroad. The safety of witnesses must be taken seriously, as they can be exposed to danger as soon as they are named as witnesses. Physical danger is evident with the recent killings of two potential witnesses before the ICTY and their families during an investigation of one of the accused. Similarly, the killings of witnesses in the traditional Gacaca court in Rwanda have been increasing. In addition to physical danger, witnesses face fear: they must swear to tell the truth, and if they do not, they could be charged with perjury or contempt of court. Although the Tribunal’s Rule 34 provides for the protection of the life and health of witnesses and their family members, it cannot shield them from psychological harm. Witnesses will face harsh cross-examination at the Tribunal, which will likely be shocking to them. Studies of the Holocaust, ICTY and ICTR have shown that witnesses’ memories are more accurate for emotional events than for “neutral” events. But witnesses in these cases testified within a few years of the events they experienced. This will not be the case for Cambodia, where people’s memories are nearly 30 years old. In addition, the original memories of witnesses who have experienced the same event can be distorted after they talk to each other or receive new information from the media or other sources. This might call the accuracy of their memories into question during the trials. And how will they react when the defense or prosecution does so? Testifying is often a very negative experience, as a witness before the ICTY stated: I was completely humiliated. When the defense asked me that question, I immediately looked over at the prosecutor. But he just kept staring at the papers on the table in front of him. I panicked. My heart started pounding and I felt like I was going to faint… No, I’ll never testify again in that tribunal.[4] It is likely that at least some of the witnesses before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal would have similar – or even worse – experiences given the questionable accuracy of their memories. Thus, witnesses need to be informed of what they can expect in the courtroom and be given special psychological care before, during and after the trials. Credibility of PTSD Witnesses. Because of the high percentage of Cambodians traumatized by the Khmer Rouge, it is highly likely that most of the witnesses at the Tribunal will suffer from some degree of mental disorder. The first danger here is that they will be asked difficult or hostile questions during cross-examination. The defense counsel, in particular, in an effort to impeach the credibility of the witnesses, will likely claim that testimonies given by PTSD victims are not reliable. However, some academics have found that high levels of stress do not deteriorate the credibility of memory: although an extremely stressed person may not be able to remember the details, he or she will still be able to remember the important features of the events. This finding has been supported by the ICTY, which held that, “even when a person is suffering from PTSD, this does not mean that he or she is necessarily inaccurate in the evidence given. There is no reason why a person with PTSD cannot be a perfectly reliable witness.”[5] Coping with Mental Illness In the early 1970s, Cambodia had an estimated 450 qualified doctors; only 43 of them survived the Khmer Rouge regime. Most of the educated people in the country had either died during the regime or fled the country in its aftermath. In addition, Cambodia’s infrastructure was nearly completely destroyed: “Cambodia had been reduced to a primitive state with no markets, no power supply, no safe drinking water, no sanitation, and no money.”[6] Rebuilding, with only a small amount of aid from Vietnam and the Soviet Union, was a massive undertaking, as a Vietnamese journalist described: At the birth of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea [the successor regime to the Khmer Rouge] even the most optimistic observers had no idea how the new regime was going to restore life back to normal on the immense ruins of a whole society, which included the ruins of all communities and all families… The homeland of Angkor was like an anthill crushed under cruel boots, people were dazed and confused and wondered what the future held in store for them.[7] The destruction of the health sector was no exception, and it had to begin again from nothing (professional health care was absent and scientifically formulated medicines were not available during the regime). Like other government ministries, the Ministry of Health lacked even basic office furniture and equipment. The National Health Infrastructure Today. Even 28 years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended, Cambodia’s health sector is still among the worst in the Western Pacific Region.[8] Many people lack access to state-provided health services, and according to a 1998 Cambodian government report, “Many public health facilities in the Kingdom of Cambodia lack managerial, financial and human resources. Although nominally free, public health services carry informal fees but the quality of services remains low in general. Many people have lost confidence in public services and turn to indigenous healers and private providers for care.”[9] Although this and other reports identify the main health problems in Cambodia, they do not include mental health as one of them. It was only in 1992 that the Ministry of Health established a Mental Health Sub-committee and began to develop strategies to deal with psychological problems. Today, however, Cambodia still has only one psychiatric hospital; it was built in 1935. In January 2006, the Cambodian government approved a National Strategic Development Plan that will allocate US $3.5 billion to all sectors over the next five years. The sectors with the largest allocations are health ($600 million), education ($550 million) and transportation ($550 million). While the health sector’s annual budget is $120 million, it remains to be seen how much will go for psychological health and to what extent this will benefit survivors of the Khmer Rouge who suffer from psychological trauma and other disorders. Today, according to TPO, Cambodia has 26 psychiatrists, only 100 general practitioners, who have received 12 weeks of training in mental health, and 9 national and international organizations addressing mental health problems in a country with 14 million people. NGO Efforts. Daily survival is the first priority for many of Democratic Kampuchea’s survivors, and with 35% of Cambodians living on less than US 50 cents a day, few can afford to travel for psychological help.[10] In addition, given their limited education and a lack of information, most do not realize that the nightmares that have disturbed their sleep for so many years are the symptoms of an illness. So, people have sought help from traditional healers, herbalists, and fortune tellers to cope with their psychological sufferings. NGOs are providing assistance in a few places, but their help is limited due to financial constraints and the paucity of experts in this field. The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) and Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Cambodia (TPO) are two prominent institutions that have offered some psychological support to the regime’s survivors. Their two-year Victims of Torture (VOT) Project attempted to help those coping with their psychological trauma as a result of living through the horror of the Khmer Rouge. Through interviews, DC-Cam staff identified people suffering from PTSD and TPO provided them with counseling. The staff from both organizations also provided simple forms to treatment to people with emotional difficulties, including muscle relaxation techniques, breathing exercises, anger management, emotional processing of trauma memories, and Buddhist ways of coping with trauma. During the project, 302 people from three provinces were interviewed; 95 of them were found to be victims of PTSD. The treatment included individual counseling for those with the most severe trauma, group therapy and psychiatric care. Of the 95 people identified as suffering from PTSD, only 60 could be offered treatment because of the constraints TPO’s small staff was facing (traveling to the provinces for counseling was a major burden on their time). This is a reflection of Cambodia’s lack of human resources in the field of psychological health. Even if more financial resources were available and more attention was paid to trauma victims, the small number of experts in this field would make similar efforts difficult to implement. Recommendations Apart from the study conducted by TPO, no survey has been conducted on mental health problems in Cambodia. This neglected subject requires a thorough study to inform the development of a national strategy for mental health. Thanks to the establishment of the Tribunal, more attention is being paid to the mental struggles of the regime’s survivors. A Cambodian medical sociologist says that mental health problems have become an epidemic and that “The country needs a national therapy session.” A national project, if possible, would be very useful in helping people suffering from PTSD. However, it will likely not materialize soon, given the current financial and human resource constraints Cambodia faces. Assistance is needed from other countries (finance, experts and/or training) to make this national project a reality. Increasing the number and quality of local mental health clinics throughout the country is essential. It now seems possible with the recently discovered oil and natural gas deposits off the coast of Cambodia. The exploitation of these natural resources will generate up to $6 billion by 2010; if managed properly, it could help lift the country out of extreme poverty. In addition, a government official told Radio Free Asia that a portion of the revenues earned will be set aside for improving the education and health sectors. It is expected that mental health sector would also benefit from this oil resource. In addition, Cambodia’s economy grew by 10.5% in 2006, and is projected to increase by around 9% for the next two years, and the mental health sector should benefit to some extent. In the meantime, DC-Cam and other NGOs are looking for additional ways to provide psychological support to those suffering from PTSD. One alternative would be to offer training to local people who would then identify and refer those sufferings from PTSD to the project for assistance and to engage existing government clinics in offering services. It would also be possible to build the capacity of Buddhist monks, nuns, traditional healers and Buddhist lay practitioners in offering “indigenous therapy” to those in need of psychological support. More information is also essential. A client of the VOT Project identified as having PTSD said, “When I was working in the rice paddies, sometimes my soul was not with me. It floated somewhere and was preoccupied with the past. I could not hear the other people talking near me. When they called me loudly, I felt jumpy and shaky.” Another said, “I know that I became angry easily and it is not always reasonable. I frequently displaced my anger toward my child or my grandchild, even if they just opened the door while I was resting or sleeping in the house.” These people did not realize that what was bothering them is a type of disease that can be cured. For this reason, information should be disseminated on symptoms, where and how to get care, and self-treatment and other ways to cope with or lessen the symptoms of anxiety and trauma. TV and radio spots, which have been effective in the fight against HIV/AIDs, SARS and other diseases, would be very helpful in this regard. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Terith Chy recently earned an LLM degree from Hong Kong University. This article is based on a paper he wrote for Professor Suzannah Linton’s class on Dealing with the Legacy of Human Rights Violations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/aug2005/nimh-02b.htm [2] Ronnie Yimsut, “The Tonle Sap Massacre,” in K. De Paul (Ed.), Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). [3] Quoted in Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, “Getting away with Genocide, Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal,” (University of New South Wales Press: 2005), pp. 142-43. [4] Eric Stover, “The Witnesses, War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague,” University of Pennsylvania Press: 2005, p. 71. [5] Prosecutor v. Anto Furundzija, ICTY, Trial Chamber, 10 December 1998. [6] Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, op. cit., p. 13. [7] Ibid., p. 14. [8] http://www.nis.gov.kh/SURVEYS/CDHS2000/AboutCDHS2001.htm. [9] Ministry of Health, Department of Planning and Health Information, Cambodia, “1998 National Health Statistics Report,” http://www.camnet.com.kh/nphri/pub-conts.htm. [10] Seth Mydans, “Will Oil Wealth Keep Cambodia Afloat or Drown it?” The International Herald Tribune, May 03, 2007. Ten Years of Independently Searching for the Truth: 1997-2007
HOW MANY DID COMMUNIST REGIMES MURDER?* By R.J. Rummel -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note that I completed this study in November 1993 while still engaged in collecting democide data. Not all the democide totals I mention here may be complete, therefore. For final figures on communist megamurderers, see my summary Table 1.2 in my Death by Government. For all final estimates, see the summary table in Statistics of Democide. RJ. Rummel -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With the passing of communism into history as an ideological alternative to democracy it is time to do some accounting of its human costs. Few would deny any longer that communism--Marxism-Leninism and its variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total might be. For about eight years I have been sifting through thousands of sources trying to determine the extent of democide (genocide and mass murder) in this century. As a result of that effort** I am able to give some conservative figures on what is an unrivaled communist hecatomb, and to compare this to overall world totals. First, however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would government forced labor that kills a person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government created famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets. With this understanding of democide, Table 1 lists all communist governments that have committed any form of democide and gives their estimated total domestic and foreign democide and its annual rate (the percent of a government's domestic population murdered per year). It also shows the total for communist guerrillas (including quasi-governments, as of the Mao soviets in China prior to the communist victory in 1949) and the world total for all governments and guerillas (including such quasi-governments as of the White Armies during the Russian civil war in 1917-1922). Figure 1 graphs the communist megamurderers and compares this to the communist and world totals. Of course, eventhough systematically determined and calculated, all these figures and their graph are only rough approximations. Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the victims of communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. And that is what the figures in Table 1 are meant to be. Their apparent precision is only due to the total for most communist governments being the summation of dozens of subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in extrapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres). With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito's Yugoslavia. Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule of slightly over just over 2 to 1. In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone--one communist country-- well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it. Figure 2 shows the major sources of death for those murdered under communism and compares this to world totals for each source for this century. A few of these sources require some clarification. Deaths through government terrorism means the killing of specific individuals by assassination, extrajudicial executions, torture, beatings, and such. Massacre, on the other hand, means the indiscriminate mass killing of people, as in soldiers machine gunning demonstrators, or entering a village and killing all of its inhabitants. As used here, genocide is the killing of people because of their ethnicity, race, religion, or language. And democide through deportation is the killing of people during their forced mass transportation to distant regions and their death as a direct result, such as through starvation or exposure. Democidal famine is that which is purposely caused or aggravated by government or which is knowingly ignored and aid to its victims is withheld. As can be seen in the figure, communist forced labor was particularly deadly. It not only accounts for most deaths under communism, but is close to the world total, which also includes colonial forced labor deaths (as in German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies). Communists also committed genocide, to be sure, but only near half of the world total. Communists are much less disposed to massacre then were many other noncommunist governments (such as the Japanese military during World War II, or the Nationalist Chinese government from 1928 to 1949). As can be seen from the comparative total for terrorism, communists were much more discriminating in their killing overall, even to the extent in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Vietnam, at least, of using a quota system. Top officials would order local officials to kill a certain number of "enemies of the people," "rightists", or "tyrants". How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world. Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers. What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instrument of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in Table 1. But communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslaves, Frenchmen, and other nationalities. Then there is the Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered near 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during world War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in Mexico from 1900 to 1920, many of these poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. And one could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide. But what connects them all is this. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted. Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme of democide. Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin's reign or the height of Mao's power) has taken place when they have been in their own history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply. Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy.
| | Genocide against the Cambodian people by the Vietnamese (Comments: two striking and convincing testimonies; one by an American military Historian and the other by an Asian scholar, on how Dai-Viet (Vietnam) had committed genocide against the Cambodian people. (Please, read the definition of genocide as defined by the 1948 Geneva convention, posted just below) Please, take a look of my PowerPoint presentation on how Vietnam using "Nam Tien" to obliterate Champa, and now to complete the conquest of Cambodia with the help of Cambodians leaders, such as; Sihanouk, Hun Sen, Son Ngoc Thanh, and Pol Pot. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. December, 2007) Revised Understanding Nam tien is a necessary condition.ppt -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vietnamese colonialism and genocide against the Chams and the Cambodian people by Bernard Fall; An American Military Historian "Vietnamese intervention in Cambodian affairs had begun in 1623 when Chey Chettha II, a king of Cambodia who had married a Vietnamese princess, attempted to shake Siam's overlordship with the help of the Nguyen. In exchange for that help, the Hue government requested Cambodia's authorization to send settlers to Prey Kor, and a Vietnamese general was sent with a security detachment to protect the new settlers. In 1658, a Vietnamese expeditionary force again had to intervene in the endless internecine struggles of the various pretenders to the Cambodian throne, and in 1660, Cambodia began to pay a regular tribute to the Vietnamese court." "But the Vietnamese yoke on Cambodia was to take a shape far more direct than the highly theoretical suzerainty China still exercised over Viet-Nam. The declining Khmer state was split into three Vietnamese "residences" under the control of a Vietnamese Chief Resident at the Cambodian court at Oudong. The Vietnamese began an acculturation process that, as in the neighboring provinces and in the case of the Chams, amounted to veritable genocide: destruction of the Buddhist temples and shrines, compulsory wearing of Vietnamese clothing and hairdress, Vietnamization of city and provincial names, and, finally, abolition of the royal title of the Cambodian sovereigns. By the early nineteenth century, the queen, Ang Mey (1834-41), held a virtual prisoner in her palace, was officially referred to as merely 'chief of the territory of My-Lam.'3" Source: Bernard Fall; The Two Viet-Nams; A military History;
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly (9 December 1948) Article I. The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish. Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Article III. The following acts shall be punishable: a) Genocide; b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; d) Attempt to commit genocide; e) Complicity in genocide. Article IV. Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. Article V. The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or of any of the other acts enumerated in Article III. Article VI. Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction. Article VII. Genocide and the other acts enumerated in Article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and treaties in force. Article VIII. Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III. Article IX. Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in Article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
Recommendaion: Four extremely important links for a better understanding on the role of Communism in the mass killings of people all over the world including in Cambodia and Vietnam, and on how Hun Sen under the Vietnamese control, has been devasting the life of the majority of the Cambodian people ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Comments: Please, click the link posted below to read a review of a book written by a group of former European Communist intellectuals, edited by Stephane Courtois, a former French Communist intellectual, entitled "The Black Book of Communism." (See details of this article and reviews posted below, in this page.) In this review, the main characteristics of Communism were hilighted to show the reason why Communism had killed so many innocent peoples in the world, and how they had justified these mass killings. Most importantly, this review had shown that Communism killed on a massive scale and regardless of age, race, or religion. This is an important point, as some authors (A. Hinton) had advanced the thesis that the Khmer Rouge 'killing fields' were due to the specificity of the Cambodian character, and Communism has no role in them. Ben Kiernan went so far as to make the Khmer Rouge racists and victimizers. By doing so, he wants to demonize the demons to make his Communist friends, the Vietnamese and Hun Sen look more acceptable to the international community. I do hope that this review will allow people to look in a more objective way, at the reasons behind the mass killing of Cambodians and other races by the Khmer Rouge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_of_Communism Also, posted below, a web site link to a study done by Professor Rudolph Rummel on mass killings perpetrated by dictatorship of the left and the right ideologies, at the order of the government, entitled 'Freedom, Democracy, Peace, Power, Democide, and War.' (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/) Both books are highly recommended for a must read for those who to know the truth about the Vietnamese committing genocide against the Khmer Krom People. Please, also see the article posted on the other column in this page, on the condemnation of the crimes of Communism by the majority of the European Council, entitled "MPs Vote to condemn 'Evils of Communism'." These three articles are all linked to each other, although coming from very different political background, which make them even more credible. Finally, in order to have a better understand of the relations bewteen Cambodian and Vietnam, we should not forget that Vietnam is still very much a communist country (of its won admission) which continues to oppresses its own people and the minorities, especially the Cambodian minority now living in South Vietnam or Khmer Kroms. And , we should not forget that Hun Sen's CPP is still very much organized and functions as a communist party, whose members of the Central Committee were prominent members of the Khmer Rouge organization. Please, keep these facts in mind, when reading this web site. Please, time time to carefully watch an incredible set of some twenty video clips titlted "Run for Your Life," made by a group of Australian civil rights advocates on the dreadful and tragic daily life of the majority of the Cambodian people under Hun Sen Kleptocratic dictatorship controlled by the Vietnamese. As you can see, Communist Vietnam is still committting crime against the Cambodian people (Especially the Khmer Krom) with the help of Hun Sen and his CPP. http://www.youtube.com/watchv=TlmF6TDrDGQ&NR=1 Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. April 12, 2007)
(Comments: this review of the now well-known book titled “Black Book of Communism,” written by a group of former European communist intellectuals and edited by French former communist intellectual, Stephane Courtois, has proven beyond any doubt that the khmer Rouge Trial as being now established is no more no less an exercise of futility and an insult to all those who are victims of the Khmer Rouge mass murder. What the real objective of the Khmer Rouge Trial is not to render justice to the victims of the Khmer Rouge mass murder, but, to “demonize the demons” that is to make the Vietnamese and Hun Sen and his CPP a lesser evil by making the Khmer Rouge more demons than they already are. As this review has clearly shown, it is the whole Communist movement and ideology that had mad mass murder a means to reach the end, that to impose a utopia on those people who were under colonialism. It was Vietnam which had adopted Communism as its main ideology, and which had imposed it on Cambodia by nurturing the Khmer Rouge movement in Cambodia, so as it can use it to fulfill its long-conceived dream of making Cambodia, as it did with Champa as part of its empire. This strategy is known as “Nam Tien.” “Nam Tien” was conceived by Vietnam as a strategy to escape its proximity to and constant threat from China. The main features of “Nam Tien” is to expand the vital physical space of the Dai Viet, which was in the Red River Delta in North Vietnam Southward, at the expense of Champa, and indianized kingdom, which was in the now central Vietnam, and Southern part of Cambodia, known as Kampuchea Krom. “Nam Tien’ is a well-conceived, well- Organized, well-managed, and well-implemented strategy. It is also very adaptable to the changing ideological conditions in the world. Finally, it takes into consideration the main weaknesses of those neighboring countries, namely Cambodia and Champa, in order to use the leaders of these countries to serve Vietnam’s colonialism. The unfortunately aspect of Cambodia struggle to remain free precisely resides on the fact that Vietnam knows how to use those corrupt and selfish Cambodian leaders, be them Sihanouk, Son Ngoc Thanh, Pol Pot, or Hun Sen, to serve their ultimate objective which to colonize their countries. Since, those weaker neighbors never used any map nor have any use of physical border markers allowed Vietnam to adopt the concept of moveable borders. These are the main problems for Cambodia to escape Vietnam Colonialism known as “Nam Tien.” Unfortunately, most Cambodians only complain about Vietnam colonialism, but had never really try to understand why vietnam “Nam Tien” is so deadly and unstoppable. It is difficult to see any hope for Cambodia to have any chance to escape Vietnam “Nam Tien” unless, they are able to come up, as soon as possible, with a kind of leader that would understand the fundamentals of “Nam Tien,” in order to be able to come up with a counter strategy to combat the most deadly of all types of colonialism. Naranhkiri Tith Ph.D. Washington DC. October 17, 2010) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In late 1997 a leading French publishing house, Robert Laffont, published Le Livre Noir du Communisme (The Black Book of Communism), an 850-page book of scholarly essays that collectively provide a history of Communism in the 20th century. The contributors to the book include some of the finest scholars from both East and West, who have drawn extensively on new archival findings. Every country that lived (or is still living) under Communism -- the Soviet Union, the East European countries, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Mongolia, and so forth -- is covered. The book also features many crucial, previously unpublished documents from the former Communist archives. Le livre noir du communisme begins with a 38-page introduction, "Les Crimes du Communisme," by the editor, Stephane Courtois. This introduction and the conclusion (also by Courtois) are what caused most of the controversy in France. Some prominent French intellectuals and politicians, especially those affiliated with or sympathetic to the Communist Party, argued that Courtois had gone too far in drawing a parallel between Stalinism and Nazism as systems that relied on violent terror. Some claimed that Courtois had overstated the intrinsic role of mass violence and repression in Communist systems. Courtois and numerous other scholars responded in a series of heated exchanges in the French press and academic journals. (At times, these exchanges bore only a scant connection to the book itself.) The next 800 pages of the book are separated into five large parts. The first part is a 250-page study by the distinguished French historian Nicolas Werth, "Un Etat contre son peuple: Violences, repressions, terreurs en Union sovietique" ("A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union"), which draws extensively on new archival findings. The essay is divided into 15 sections, beginning with "Paradoxes et malentendus d'Octobre" ("Paradoxes and Misunderstandings About the October Revolution") and then covering the whole period of Bolshevik and Stalinist terror as well as some of the events that followed the death of Josif Stalin. The second part is a 100-page study of the Comintern and the Soviet Union's role in the international Communist movement, "Rªvolution mondiale, guerre civile et terreur" ("World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror"), by Stephane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panne, and Remi Kauffer. This part is divided into three essays, "Le Komintern de l'action," by Courtois and Panne; "L'ombre portee du NKVD en Espagne" (" The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain") by Courtois and Panne; and "Communisme et terrorisme," by Kauffer. The third part, "L'Autre Europe: Victime du Communisme," is a 100-page overview of Communism in East-Central Europe. The author of the first section, focusing on Poland, is the most eminent historian in Poland, Andrzej Paczkowski, who has been of great help to Western scholars in gaining access to archival materials in Poland. (He also is a member of the HPCWS Editorial Board.) The other section, of roughly 70 pages, by the distinguished Czech historian, Karel BartoÔek, covers the rest of Central Europe and the Balkans. These two sections together provide a rich and nuanced reassessment of the Communization and Sovietization of Eastern Europe, drawing on a wealth of new archival material. The fourth part, "Communismes d'Asie: Entre 'reeducation' et Massacre," focuses on East Asia (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). It is divided into three sections. The first is a 100-page study by a distinguished French historian, Jean-Louis Margolin, of China under Mao Zedong. It covers the civil war in China as well as all major episodes in post-1949 Chinese history (the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc.) and China's occupation of Tibet. The 30-page second section, also by Margolin, focuses on North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos. The third section, by one of the world's leading specialists on Cambodia, Pierre Rigoulot, looks at Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. This 80-page section is both riveting and profoundly disquieting. The fifth part of the book, "Le Tiers-Monde" ("The Third World"), deals with Communist regimes in other parts of the Third World. This part is divided into three sections. The first section, by Pascal Fontaine, is a 35-page overview of Cuba, Nicaragua (under Sandinista rule), and the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. The second section is a 30-page overview of Marxist (or formerly Marxist) states in Africa -- Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique -- by the leading French expert on Africa, Yves Santamariabe. The third section, by Sylvain Boulouque, is a 25-page analysis of Afghanistan from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The book ends with a 30-page conclusion by Stephane Courtois, "Pourquois?," which tries to come to grips with the destruction and terror that have been extensively cataloged in the previous 800 pages. Courtois maintains that "[despite] the availability of rich new sources of information, which until recently had been completely off-limits [and which have led to] a better and more sophisticated understanding of events, . . . the fundamental question remains: Why? Why did modern Communism, when it appeared in 1917, turn almost immediately into a system of bloody dictatorship, and a criminal regime? Was it really the case that its aims could be attained only through extreme violence?" In a dense analysis of how violent terror became a way of life under Lenin and Stalin, Courtois concludes that "the real motivation for the terror ultimately was Leninist ideology, and the perfectly utopian will to impose a doctrine that was completely at odds with reality." This totalizing ideology, Courtois argues, generated murderous intolerance toward all those who were perceived as obstacles to the new regime: "Terror involves a double sort of mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, then a criminal, and is excluded from society. Exclusion very quickly turns into the idea of extermination." That basic outlook, he writes, has been present, "with differing degrees of intensity, in all regimes that claim to be Marxist in origin." In addition to the introduction, the five main parts, and the conclusion, the book features several dozen full texts or excerpts of recently declassified (and, with a few exceptions, previously unpublished) documents as sidebars. These documents appear in the book in French translation, but the French publisher has supplied copies of all the original documents to permit direct translations into English. Among the items featured are orders for the ruthless suppression of the Tambov rebellion in 1921, correspondence between Stalin and the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, transcripts of interrogations from the Great Terror, reports from the show trials in both the USSR and Eastern Europe, the 1940 memorandum ordering the execution of Polish officers in Katyn Forest, decrees on the deportations of ethnic minorities, reports from the commandants of Siberian gulags, several items pertaining to activities of the French Communist Party, documents on the treatment of prisoners of war in the USSR, reports on the actions of Communist guerrillas during the Greek civil war, a memorandum outlining the East German state security ministry's ties to the terrorist Carlos, reports on forceful measures against religious believers, directives issued by the secret police in several East European countries, reports on political repression in Romania and China, documents on prison camps and forced labor in China, reports and directives from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and many others. |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Black Book of Communism
Reviewed by Claire Wolfe
Phone (262) 673-9745
Fax (262) 673-9746 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
By Stephane Courtois, Mark Kramer (Translator), Jonathan Murphy (Translator), Karel Bartosek, Andrzej Paczkowski, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin (Contributors); Introduction to the U.S. edition by Martin Malia Published by Harvard University Press, 1999
Originally published in France, 1997 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Examining the photos and reading their captions in The Black Book of Communism, you might expect the surrounding 700+ pages to contain a wail of outrage. The photos, though few, are as graphic and heart-rending as the worst from Nazi Germany. But the text is no impassioned partisan cry. It's something more powerful than that; it's the facts. The Black Book has been called a catalog, an indictment, a prosecutorial manual against Communist crimes. It is a simply a dispassionate account - article after article - of the history of Communist power. Beginning with Leninist terror policies and concluding with the starvation produced by Afrocommunism, the historians of The Black Book list the events, tally the numbers, describe the conditions, name the names. Their conclusion: . USSR: 20 million deaths · China: 65 million deaths · Vietnam: 1 million deaths · North Korea: 2 million deaths · Cambodia: 2 million deaths · Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths · Latin America: 150,000 deaths · Africa: 1.7 million deaths · Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths · Communist movements or parties not in power: bout 10,000 deaths Nearly 100 million deaths. Not casualties of war, but civilian slaughter. Deaths in gulags and concentration camps. Deaths from a bullet to the head. Most of all, deaths by starvation - the result either of planned famines, meted out as punishment to internal foes (as in Stalin's USSR), or unintended consequences of central policy. American historian R.J. Rummell has tallied similar figures in his book Death by Government. But The Black Book is different in that 1) it focuses on death and terror in Communist regimes only 2) many of its contributors were (or are still) members of the left and 3) this book touched off an international storm when it was first published in France. The "crime" of revealing Communist crimes Why would this scholarly book - with its "just the facts, Ma'm" approach and its extensively documented claims - ignite a firestorm? Partly it is because many crimes of Communism have gone unexamined, due both to bias among the intelligentsia and lack of access to archives of Communist countries. As such, this book is a shock to those who haven't been paying attention. Partly it is that in Europe, and France especially, it is still chic to identify oneself as a Communist or Socialist. This book is an embarrassment and a shame to those who have practiced "ideological self-deception." But appallingly, the controversy arose largely because the Black Book's authors - in particular chief editor and contributor Stephane Courtois - dare to compare the horrors of Communism to the horrors of Nazism. (The title itself is reflects the famous Black Book of Nazi crimes compiled after the Nuremberg Trials.) An unbiased scholar might consider this a natural thing to do; some political partisans considered it an offense. In the introduction, "The Crimes of Communism," (one of just three essays that analyze, rather than merely report, the century's events), Courtois writes: 'Time and again the focus of the terror was less on targeted individuals than on groups of people. The purpose of the terror was to exterminate a group that had been designated as the enemy. Even though it might be only a small fraction of society, it had to be stamped out to satisfy this genocidal impulse. Thus, the techniques of segregation and exclusion employed in a "class-based totalitarianism" [Communism] closely resemble the techniques of "race-based totalitarianism." The future Nazi society was to be built upon a "pure race," and the future Communist society was to be built upon a proletarian people purified of the dregs of the bourgeoisie. The restructuring of these two societies was envisioned in the same way, even if the crackdowns were different. Therefore, it would be foolish to pretend that Communism is a form of universalism. Communism may have a worldwide purpose, but like Nazism it deems a part of humanity unworthy of existence. That Courtois finds no moral distinction between the barbarities of right and left, between mass slaughter of races and mass slaughter of classes (the Russian bourgeoise and the kulaks, for example), led the left-leaning newspaper Le Monde to trot out the familiar charge of anti-Semitism and to damn the entire book by association.' Courtois further irritated France's intellectuals (and indeed some of the book's co-authors) by concluding that Communists actually benefitted by promoting the illusion that the Holocaust was a unique crime - thus diverting suspicion from themselves and ensuring that the " t right" always appeared more heinous than its twin on the left. Spanning time and the globe You need not agree with Courtois, or even spend time with the book's three analytical essays, to be deeply moved - and informed. The catalog of horrific deeds encompasses: Nicholas Werth's 15-article section, "A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union," which details Lenin's deliberate use of terror, forced collectivization, "dekulakization," Stalinist purges, the workings of the secret police and the rise and fall of the gulag system. Werth spares no Russian leader or Marxist intellectual from 1917 to the fall of the USSR. "World Revolution, Civil War and Terror," which traces the USSR's determined efforts to export its philosophy - and its methods - throughout the world. "The Other Europe: Victims of Communism," which details crimes in Poland, Central and Southeastern Europe. "Communism in Asia: Between Reeducation and Massacre," in which Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot examine China (with emphasis on the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution), North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The authors admit that, with most Asian Communist regimes still in place, access to archives is forbidden and facts remain sketchy. Yet what they report should be enough to dispel any lingering visions of fatherly Mao and grandfatherly Ho. "The Third World," which reveals the horrors perpetrated by Communist guerrillas or regimes from Afghanistan to Cuba and Peru to Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique.. In addition, the book is fascinating for its many insights into Communism's roots. You might be surprised to learn who these French authors consider to be the real father of Communism (hint: not Marx). And most readers would certainly be surprised to learn that Soviet leaders so greatly respected one Western saint that they erected a monument to him at the Kremlin. The Black Book's revelations are so broad and detailed that no mere review could describe them adequately. Anyone who cares about history or truth should read this book. (Fortunately its lucid prose makes it easy to follow even the most arcane or gut-wrenching events). Why should we care? But with Communism in collapse nearly everywhere, and even China (so the media tells us) on the road to capitalism, why should anyone other than a historian or a crusader for justice care about any of this? Yes, it was awful, but isn't it just about over? Shouldn't we simply nod in acknowledgment, feel sincere sorrow, an appropriate degree of horror perhaps - and move on? But of course we should care for many reasons - above all because trust in the Omnipotent State is still with us, still waiting to darken humanity again. For that is the essence of both Nazism and Communism - the belief that the state (whether claiming authority from The Culture, The Ideology, The Class, The Race, The People or some yet-to-be-concocted Authority) is supreme. This leads first to the assumption that individuals and groups who don't fit the collective ideal are irritants, then enemies - then that they should be disposed of "for the good of the whole." If we are not careful and aware, this pervasive evil may spring in a new form. If we point fingers only at "right" or "left," depending on our own inclinations, we may fail to oppose the same phenomenon when it arises wearing a new face - a face that looks friendly, perhaps even familiar. We must study both the Nazis and the Communists, leaving aside the fundamentally meaningless distinctions of left or right, nationalist or universalist, race-hating or class-hating, and know the shared soul of the beast within. For anyone who wants to protect the future by knowing the past, this book is a Very Important Read. But could such horrors ever really come to our own doorsteps? At first blush, it seems not. Reading this book I was often struck by how foreign the recounted events are. It's impossible to imagine a Pol Pot-style agrarian "utopia" imposed upon a modern U.S. or Britain. Clearly, the savageries of Peru's Shining Path guerrilla's are uniquely Peruvian. Clearly Afrocommunism arises in part from tribal roots, so unlike ours. Clearly, the ACLU would prevent the development here of conditions described by Black Book contributor Pascal Fontaine - Nicaraguan prisons so crowded that inmates had to sleep standing up, with so little water that prisoners drank their own urine to survive, with such non-existent sanitation that cells and even hallways ran thick with excrement. No, we can assure ourselves, such third-world horrors couldn't happen here. And there's a certain amount of truth in that. Even at its height, Communism gained power almost exclusively in nations with entrenched, institutionalized class divisions or nations in extreme stress (like Cambodia caught between U.S. bombardment and threats from Vietnam). But similar tyrannies, we already know, have risen even from the "civilized" West. At times, you read the dispassionate words of The Black Book and you feel a chill of familiarity. Controlling the language Above all, there are the passages about the Communist's skillful manipulation of language for political purposes. This manipulation took two forms, both of which are in use in American and Europe today: The first is a demonization and dehumanization of everyone unpopular with the regime. It was not people the Communists killed. It was "capitalists," "running dogs," "enemies of the people," "saboteurs," "the bourgeoise," or "wreckers." Just as Nazis didn't exterminate Jewish human beings but "maggots," "menaces to society," "parasites" "corrosive influences on Aryan culture" and "masters of the lie." Just as today government and the media do not merely disagree with, but demonize and marginalize "militia nuts," "right-wing extremists," "haters" and "religious fanatics." (And just as it might be "fags," "knee-jerk liberals" or "godless humanists" shoved to the fringes if politicians of a different viewpoint got into power.) Of course no sane person would declare that the political manipulation of words in first world countries has reached Stalinist danger levels. Nevertheless, as Richard W. Stevens has pointed out, official or quasi-official margnialization of groups is an early stage in a deadly process. As the Black Book says: 'Terror involves a double mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, and then declared a criminal, which leads to his exclusion from society. Exclusion very quickly turns into extermination. [The] idea [of a purified humanity] is used to prop up a forcible unification - of the Party, of society, of the entire empire - and to weed out anyone who fails to fit into the new world. After a relatively short period, society passes from the logic of political struggle to the process of exclusion, then to the ideology of elimination, and finally to the extermination of impure elements. At the end of the line there are crimes against humanity.' The other form of language manipulation noted in the Black Book is a simple denial - putting a prettier face on ugly realities. Concentration camps become "reeducation" centers. Millions were forced from their farms and livelihoods in a process of "voluntary collectivization" (language reminiscent of the compulsory "volunteerism" forced upon many American students as a graduation requirement). Political opponents receive "therapy" for their "mental illness." (Do you suppose they take Prozac or Ritalin?) Even today, in China political inmates are called "students" in token of the fact that their punishment is designed to force them to accept the ideology of those they oppose. Related to these forms of manipulation is the institutionalized use of terms that simply by being spoken or written perpetuate political assumptions. For instance, the word "kulak" in the USSR began as an insult; it quickly became the only acceptable word to describe the independent farmers who were fighting for their land and livelihood; thus every time they were spoken of they were implicitly damned. In our own culture we have near-universal (media-inspired) use of the term "gun violence." Simply by speaking the phrase, one perpetuates a set of suppositions: that guns, not people are responsible for crime, that guns are inherently more violent than objects such as hammers or knives; that they are in a special class that must be rigidly controlled. We talk of "hate speech," and thereby convey that the speaker has no legitimacy; he is simply motivated by incomprehensible loathsomeness; everything he believes, says or does should be disregarded or condemned. If you are a "redneck" you are no doubt the epitome of both "gun violence" and "hate speech" and nothing more needs to be said of you. Those whose "self-esteem" is so damaged by your "insensitivity" that they can't function may have to collect their "entitlements" (which is quite unlike the shame of going on welfare, accepting a handout or collecting a dole). With such loaded terms, no debate is possible. The assumptions have been imposed in the very words. Another aspect of language control is simply imposing certain terminology upon everyone through social or political pressure - even if the terminology itself is value neutral. One day, you may say "crippled." The next, you're insensitive: the proper term is "handicapped." The next, you're out of the intellectual loop: Everyone knows the politically correct word is "disabled" (then "differently abled," then "physically challenged"). One day your neighbors are "Negro." But the next you're a bigoted rube if you fail to say "Black." Then you can't be sure: Is it "Black" or "Afro-American" or "African-American" and what if your neighbor is from Jamaica, not Rhodesia, is she still "Afro-hyphen"? One day, even Dan Rather says "Red China." The next, suddenly everyone makes an abrupt switch to praise our friend "The People's Republic," as if the term "Red China" had never existed. I'm not speaking of the natural flow and change of language - which in English is rich, abundant and one of our great cultural treasures. I'm not speaking of the clubby, ever-changing jargon of various social groups. I am speaking of imposed language which ensures that only those "in the know" (as defined by an elite group) can ever feel confident discussing, or even thinking about, politically sensitive topics. Common people lose power over political issues because they fear they can't speak safely or astutely about them. They fear they will be ridiculed, that their views won't be taken seriously. Since they aren't sure of the acceptable terminology, they often assume they must also be lacking salient facts. They shut up. They become submissive to the intellectual dictates of interest groups - which is often exactly the intent. Note that such language is nearly always imposed when government is in the process of taking more control in a given area. It does not just happen. In this latter case, the terms themselves are less important than the fundamental question: Who shapes the language? As Orwell observed so powerfully in more than one of his works, when you control people's language, you control how they think - and ultimately how they behave. Denial of responsibility Another curious echo between Communism and our world arises in the concept of absolute power without even minimal responsibility. One example from The Black Book: "On March 2, 1930 all Soviet newspapers carried Stalin's famous article 'Dizzy with Success,' which condemned 'the numerous abuses of the principle of voluntary collectivization' and blamed the excesses of collectivization and dekulakization on local bosses who were 'drunk on success.'" Of course we now know - as The Black Book explains so well - that the "abuses" of agricultural collectivization - including the millions of deaths by famine that followed - were deliberate, and were planned by Stalin himself. Yet as Vasily Grossman details in his poignant novel, Forever Flowing, the public continued to believe Stalin's claims of innocence. If only someone could tell the great, caring leader what was really happening, they believed, he would put a stop to the horror. Thus, they put their utmost trust in the very agent of the catastrophe. Stalin's denial of responsibility was no isolated case. Later, in his 1956 "Secret Speech" openly discussing Stalin's evils for the first time, Nikita Kruschev very carefully failed to mention that he himself, as head of the Communist Party in the Ukraine (the focus of the famine), played a role in implementing Stalin's policies of collectivization and deliberate starvation. Today, in U.S. politics, we have "leaders" who demand ever greater power, while at the same time taking less and less responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is true on both a policy level and a personal one. They are not accountable for bombings of Sudanese pharmaceutical factories or Balkan hospitals. Likewise, they cannot even consider that their intervention could be a cause, not the cure, of "crises" in health care, education or poverty. Every act of official violence or overkill is dismissed as the doing of some low-level functionary on the scene - and even that person usually escapes punishment (ala Lon Horiuchi) due to his status as a government employee. Even when an authority figure "takes full responsibility" - as Janet Reno did for the Waco debacle - she can do so safely, knowing there are no consequences. On the personal level, when caught in wrongdoing, politicians at most admit they "made mistakes," "gave the appearance of wrongdoing," or were helpless to know right from wrong in the absence of "controlling legal authority." But actually accept moral or legal responsibility and act accordingly? Not they. You may go to prison for committing similar acts. They are exempt. Again, nothing that has occurred in modern America even begins to approach the devastation or the sheer cruelty described in The Black Book. But we must question the intentions of politicians who demand ever more power with less accountability. Down that road - the road of complacency or downright State Worship - lies ruthlessness for leaders and helplessness for ordinary people. Perpetual war To justify their harshest measures, Lenin and Trotsky early on developed the concept of perpetual war. That is, anyone who opposed them was not merely an opponent, but an enemy - of the state, of the proletariat, of Communism, therefore of all that was good and progressive and desirable. Thus it was necessary not only to argue against opponents, but to crush them utterly. Trotsky wrote: 'The question about who will rule the country - that is, about the life or death of the bourgeoisie - will be decided on either side not by reference to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence.' As writer and critic Tzvetan Todorov elaborated: 'The enemy is the great justification for terror, and the totalitarian state needs enemies to survive. If it lacks them, it invents them. Once they have been identified, they are treated without mercy. Belonging to the [enemy] class is enough; there is no need actually to have done anything at all.' It is important to read The Black Book to get the full impact of what it means to wage perpetual war against one's own fellow citizens. But we're already seeing the beginnings of it in America today. Is it any coincidence that we now not only have such things as Wars on Poverty, Wars on Illegal Immigration, Wars on Crime and a perpetual War on Drugs but - irony of ironies - that we set up "czars" to conduct them? And no one should imagine that "war" is merely a catchy metaphor. In this case, when politicians use a word, they mean it. Because our nation is at "war" with drugs, we see increasing use of military equipment and militaristic tactics in law enforcement. Instead of two uniformed officers knocking at a door to present a non-violent suspect with a warrant, we now send a 20-strong, ninja-clad SWAT team armed with German MP5s to kick down his door in the middle of the night, screaming, hurling flash-bang grenades, and shooting his children, his parents or himself if, in the confusion, they either move when ordered to halt or fail to move fast enough when ordered to move. We have roadblocks with random, warrantless searches of automobiles. We have courts that send people accused of drug trafficking to prison on the word of criminal informants - without even requiring hard evidence of drugs or drug transactions. We have Supreme Court decisions that discard the Constitution in favor of "overriding government considerations." Increasingly, we are approaching conditions like the one The Black Book describes prevailing in Cuba: In 1978 a law was adopted to prevent criminality before it actually happened. What this meant in practice was that any Cuban could be arrested on any pretext if the authorities believed that he presented a danger to state security even if he had not committed any illegal act. In effect the law criminalized any thought that did not accord with the ideas of the regime, turning every Cuban into a potential suspect. Even in America, we have nearly reached a point where certain suspects - usually in drug, weapon or political crimes - are simply enemies to be expunged, not citizens with rights. Other rings of familiarity In other areas we can also see echoes of Communist-style mega-state power. U.S. officials today: Encourage children to inform on their parents; encourage teachers, neighbors and friends to inform on others based on barest suspicions of wrongdoing Promulgate laws criminalizing everyday activities, and even discussion of certain outlawed activities Decree ever-harsher punishments for non-violent crimes (and harsher punishments yet when those laws fail to end the problem) Allow secret trials in some cases (involving non-citizens suspected of political crimes) Encourage widespread dependence on the state, with concomitant disconnection from family and community Belong to a professional political class rather than a citizen government Extend control over the basics of life (such as education, the food supply and health care), Increase their control over industry (in our case, via regulation and subsidy, rather than outright ownership) Promote constant "crises" as an excuse for seizing more power Foster a belief (now almost universally held) that no problem can be solved without federal intervention Imposition of Utopia The Black Book of Communism begins to show us that totalitarianism is totalitarianism, whether we call it, Communist or some other name. Totalitarianism's central feature is a state that desires total control and assumes the right to impose that control at any cost. If you already know the nature of tyranny, read this book to vindicate your wisdom and provide yourself with intellectual ammo against those who believe that a little statism is a harmless thing. If you don't already know, read and be glad that these authors speak so dispassionately; otherwise your heart would break. We should never forget that we, too, are vulnerable to this danger - and are perhaps most vulnerable when we believe "it can't happen here." in the end, Courtois reminds us, terror can (and does) grow out of even the most heartfelt idealism: 'Why should maintaining power have been so important that it justified all means and led to the abandonment of the most elementary moral principles? The answer must be that it was the only way for Lenin to put his ideas into practice and "build socialism." The real motivation for the terror thus becomes apparent: it stemmed from Leninist ideology and the utopian will to apply to society a doctrine totally out of step with reality. ... In a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the Bolsheviks made terror an everyday part of their policies, seeking to remodel society in the image of their theory, and to silence those who, either through their actions or by their very social, economic, or intellectual existence, pointed to the gaping holes in the theory. Once in power, the Bolsheviks made Utopia an extremely bloody business.' Read The Black Book of Communism and join the Holocaust cry: Never again
MPs vote to condemn 'evils of communism' Swedish member calls for victims' memorial day Left says Council of Europe motion 'neo McCarthyism' Jon Hinley, Paris The Guardian, London; Thursday, January 26, 2006 (Comments: This condemnation of Communism misdeeds in Europe is a clear example that the process of demonizing the Khmer Rouge is to make the Vietnamese Communists and their Cambodian servants under Hun Sen and Sihanouk even more obvious as a means to to deviate the real objective of Vietnam colonialism in Cambodia. Only, by making the Khmer Rouge worst than they are can Vietnam and Hun Sen look more acceptable to the international community. However, this rewriting of history by Vietnam can happen only with the help and the betrayal of Sihanouk by collaborating with Hun Sen and his CPP. Naranhkiri Tith, Ph. D. Washington DC. May 18, 2007) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- For some it was a vile capitalist plot aimed at rewriting the recent history of half of Europe, transforming wartime resistance heroes into villains, and denying the laudable ideals and legitimacy of a great political movement. For others it was a long-overdue denunciation of a couple of dozen thoroughly evil regimes who wrecked their nations' economies, tortured their citizens, and between them were responsible for up to 100 million deaths. But, by a clear majority, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe yesterday backed a controversial motion demanding that the continent's 46-member human rights watchdog formally condemns "the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes". More than 60 members of the body's 315-seat assembly, made up of MPs from Europe's parliaments, were due to speak in a debate on a report by the conservative Swedish MP Goran Lindblad, which argued that 15 years after the collapse of the eastern bloc international condemnation of its governments' activities was "urgently necessary". Mr Lindblad's motion also called for an international conference on the issue and urged former communist states to "revise school books to reflect what happened, establish museums documenting these crimes, and introduce a memorial day for the victims of communism". The MP adopted the 100 million victim figure arrived at by Stéphane Courtois in his 1997 Black Book of Communism. The count includes 65m in China, 20m in the Soviet Union, 2m in North Korea, 2m in Cambodia, 1.7m in Africa, 1.5m in Afghanistan, 1m in Vietnam, 1m in east Europe and 150,000 in Latin America. (Mr Courtois puts the number of deaths due to Nazism at about 25m.) Mr Lindblad listed communist regimes' crimes as "assassinations and executions, concentration camp deaths, starvation, deportation, torture, slave labour and other mass physical terror", saying they should be condemned like Nazis' crimes. Council officials said 99 of the MPs present voted in favour of the motion, 42 opposed it and 12 abstained. Communist parties, mainly in western Europe, had reacted fiercely, saying the report deliberately failed to distinguish between the ideals of communism and its application by totalitarian regimes. The Belgian Communist party, the PCB, called the motion "a violent attack on history, present and future of communism". The Greek KKE called it "a declaration of war and persecution against all communist parties", and Germany's PDS said it was "neo McCarthyism". Mikis Theodorakis, the Greek composer, said: "In the name of our dead comrades, of those who passed through the hands of the Gestapo and the death camps ... shame on those who want to turn victims into executioners, heroes into criminals and communists into Nazis." French communists said the motion "banalises the Holocaust" and "ignores the communist role in fighting fascism". André Guerin, a Lyon MP, told Le Figaro that the council's idea was to "definitively bury the values of communism" and "make believe they are outmoded and that the only alternative is Capitalism". Protests were vigorous in Russia, where a survey found 50% of Russians felt Stalin had played a "positive role" in their history and 42% thought "somebody like him" would be helpful in Russia today.[End] __________________________________________________________________ | |
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