Cambodia’s Constitutional Court has finally cleared a law which will allow murderous thugs of the Khmer Rouge to be brought to trial for their part in the butchery of at least 1.7 million of their fellow Cambodians during the savage four years of the rule of dictator Pol Pot. It is fully 20 years since the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by Vietnamese-backed Cambodian rebels and now three years since Pol Pot, the architect of this genocidal campaign, was himself killed in a jungle redoubt from which he was seeking to win back power.
Cambodian premier Hun Sen has been widely criticized, not least by the United Nations, first for the limited amnesty that he granted to some of the leading Khmer Rouge henchmen, one of whom became his foreign minister, and then for the delay in introducing legislation which would enable Khmer Rouge killers to be prosecuted. Indeed, the final three-year delay came about when the UN, which will assist in the trials, objected to the general weakness of its provisions.
Many diplomats in Phnom Penh doubt that the law will ever be properly implemented. There may be a few show trials, and indeed one former senior Khmer Rouge commander has reportedly offered to give evidence for the prosecution against his former comrades. However, the general analysis is that at best, a few relatively small fish may be brought to justice. There is an extremely strong moral case that any member of the Khmer Rouge, be he a commander or a foot soldier who was just following orders, should be brought to book.
It can with justice be asked how the Cambodian government can have waited so long, before moving, albeit perhaps half-heartedly, against Khmer Rouge. But this is to overlook the unpleasant political realities of Hun Sen’s early years of power. The Vietnamese military had not exterminated the Khmer Rouge, but driven them from the capital into a near-inaccessible rural heartland. Such was the condemnation of Hanoi’s interference in Cambodia, by both the Chinese and the United States, that when the bulk of the Vietnamese forces were obliged to withdraw from Cambodia, there was no realistic likelihood that they could return if Hun Sen’s regime found itself in danger from a successful Khmer Rouge counterattack.
The new Cambodian government had to contain the Khmer Rouge while luring away its people by offering amnesties. It worked. The deadly killers began to turn on each other. Pol Pot ordered the execution of longtime aide and military chief, Son Sen and his wife and nine children, by having a truck driven over their heads. It was a final brutal act that probably led to the homicidal leader’s own assassination soon after.
In haunting museums piled full of skulls, there are memorials enough in Cambodia to the frenzied blood lust of the Khmer Rouge. But the majority of young Cambodians, who never knew the terrible days of Pol Pot, want to get on with their lives in this beautiful but downtrodden country. A few show trials may help them understand the horrors that their parents and grandparents had to endure, to explain why many members of their families are dead, but such is the great time gap, there is little sense in which the revealing of the truth will lead to any real reconciliation.
