IN 1975, the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Lon Nol government in Cambodia and began a four-year orgy of butchery in which as many as two million people, including the greater part of all educated middle class professionals, were massacred. The killing fields of Cambodia, a country destabilized by the US military presence in neighboring South Vietnam, constituted a crime on a par with Nazi and Stalinist exterminations.
Pol Pot, the ogre who orchestrated this merciless bloodletting and his Khmer Rouge were driven from power by the Vietnamese in 1979 and Pol Pot himself died in exile across the border in Thailand in 1998. It is only now, 18 years on, that desultory attempts to bring Pol Pot’s surviving henchmen to book for their crimes are finally taking shape, with the arrest of the Khmer Rouge regime’s No. 2, Nuon Chea. The 82-year-old, who had defected from the Khmer Rouge and been given a pardon by the new Cambodian government, was clearly shocked to be detained as part of a UN-backed genocide investigation.
There are those who think it is too late to bring Nuon Chea and other former regime leaders to trial. Others are concerned that his arrest overturns his previous pardon.
Both these views are wrong. What the Khmer Rouge did to their fellow-Cambodians outrages every decent standard of humanity and their crimes can be neither pardoned nor forgotten. Just as the surviving Nazi leaders were brought to the bar of international justice and paid for their savagery, so too must those leaders of the Khmer Rouge who are still alive. Justice has no time limit.
The Hutu leaders who initiated the mass slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda and Serbs, Croats and some Bosnians who perpetrated crimes against humanity in Bosnia were made to answer for their crimes. Currently Liberia’s former President Charles Taylor is being tried for encouraging the bloodthirsty rebels in Sierra Leone and there are rightly moves to indict the leaders of Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army for unspeakable brutality.
There should be no hiding place for any individual or group who throws aside all decent behavior and perpetrates appalling crimes against humanity.
Yet with the exception of Nazi Germany, the genocidal criminals who have been punished have all come from small, generally Third World countries. There seems to be an inherent belief that the wealthy First World is too civilized, too well organized to ever be guilty itself of similar crimes. That however is questionable. What the Americans did in Fallujah, the way they treated their prisoners at Abu Ghraib and throughout Iraq also look like crimes against humanity, even if they could not be classed as genocidal. Yet the UN’s International Criminal Court is not supported by Washington because it is not prepared to let its citizens appear before it. For the ICC to gain proper status, it needs to prove that it is not a vehicle for “White Man’s Justice” whose jurisdiction does not apply to the First World.
