The Khmer Rouge Trials Are About to Begin

By Benny Widyono

On June 13, 2007, it was announced in Phnom Penh that the long-awaited Khmer Rouge trials are ready to start. Thus ended 27 years of international amnesia over bringing to justice the leaders of the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which during its reign from April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979, caused the deaths—through mass murder, starvation and forced labor—of 1.7 million to 3 million Cambodians, or a fourth to a third of the country’s population.

During its rule, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot abolished private property, personal possessions, money, leisure, socializing, marriage (except in cadre-approved cases), religion, and all personal liberties. Cambodia became one giant concentration camp consisting of totalitarian rural communes. The day the Khmer Rouge took power, they evacuated the entire population of Phnom Penh and other cities in 24 hours, including infirm hospital patients whom family members had to push out of town in their beds, some trailing intravenous tubing and bags. In the countryside, people slaved and starved to grow rice that went to China and hauled buckets of earth to build dams without engineers or technicians.

This hideous regime finally was ousted by Vietnamese forces next door with the help of a Cambodian rebel force on January 7, 1979. Why then did it take so long before the Khmer Rouge leaders, many of them already dead or dying to be brought to justice? The answer lies in political maneuverings by the major powers, in which Cambodia became the victim of the Cold War struggle for hegemony in Southeast Asia.

In January 1979, a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), was proclaimed, which soon gained control over 90 percent of the country and more of its population. However, the United States, still smarting from its defeat by Vietnam in 1975, together with China, incredibly spearheaded a resolution in the United Nations year after year to continue to accord the Khmer Rouge leaders who had carried out such horrendous crimes the right to represent Cambodia in the UN throughout the 1980s. In the field, the PRK was treated like a pariah state and denied economic aid while the Khmer Rouge camped in the jungles were given political, economic, and even military assistance. As a result, a civil war ensued between the PRK and the Khmer Rouge and its allies, newly founded resistance groups representing the royalists and an anti-communist faction, in which hundreds of thousands more Cambodians lost their lives.

In August 1979, the PRK did try the Khmer Rouge leaders in a People’s Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned its top leaders, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary to death in absentia. The West ignored this trial. Obviously the possibility of putting the Khmer Rouge on trial was not high on their agenda. U.S. and Chinese backing for the Khmer Rouge kept Cambodian politics in turmoil and prevented the pursuit of justice for the mass tragedy.

The stalemate was only broken when the Paris Peace Agreements on Cambodia were signed on October 23, 1991, and the United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia (UNTAC) was created and entrusted with holding elections in Cambodia. However, the solution was flawed as the agreements continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as one of the four legitimate legal entities in Cambodia. It was left to the new government of Cambodia established after the UN-sponsored elections to formally approach the United Nations on June 21, 1997, for assistance in holding a Khmer Rouge trial. The next year saw the end of the civil war with the dismantling of the remaining political and military structures of the Khmer Rouge.

In 2001 the Cambodian National Assembly passed a law to create a court to try serious crimes committed during the 1975–1979 Khmer Rouge regime. This court is called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea (Extraordinary Chambers or ECCC). An agreement with the UN was reached in June 2003 detailing how the international community will assist and participate in the Extraordinary Chambers. The ECCC is an unusual experiment in transitional justice. At one level, it marks a milestone in Cambodia’s tortured experience of violence and suffering as it will finally bring the culprits to justice. At the international level, the ECCC is the latest in a series of tribunals starting with Nuremberg and culminating with the International Criminal Court. It is a Cambodian court with international participation, a novel experiment. One thing is clear. The ECCC will have a major impact on both Cambodia and the future of international justice.

 There will be five judges, three Cambodian and two UN-appointed international judges. Four of the judges must agree, thus ensuring that at least one international judge participates in any decision, according to the so-called super-majority principle. During the past six months, local and international legal officials struggled to find ways to incorporate international law into proceedings that fall under Cambodian jurisdiction. Finally, in June 2007, they have settled their differences. The tribunal is expected to last for three years with trials starting in late 2007 or early 2008. In 2007, the only Khmer Rouge leader in jail is Kang Khech Ieu (alias Duch), the notorious director of the S21 prison and torture chamber. Senior leaders Pol Pot and Ta Mok have died while others, including Ieng Sary, who was pardoned by the king in 1996 for his death sentence at the PRK tribunal in 1979, are living in Cambodia as free citizens. Even though many Khmer Rouge leaders will not face trial, the process is important to finally bring justice, reconciliation, and peace of mind to all Cambodians who survived Khmer Rouge rule and to educate the new generations regarding Cambodia’s traumatic past.

Benny Widyono, a member of the UN transitional authority and a personal envoy to the UN secretary general, is the author of Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations (October 2007), which tells the inside story of the complex battle for Cambodia.