Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Twenty-five years after Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge launched its genocide campaign, could a war-crimes trial finally be a reality?
Dec 18, 2000 | Over beers and green curry in a tiny village near Thailand's border, I ask my dinner companion whether he thinks the leaders of the Khmer Rouge should finally be tried for war crimes, 25 years after they oversaw the slaughter of more than a million people. He leans forward and pauses. "I want a trial," he says at last. "Every leader does good things and bad things. Bad things were done."
He ought to know. Like countless Cambodians, Meas Tung joined the Khmer Rouge as a teenager during the early 1960s. At age 13, he was swept up in the organization's romanticism about ethnic Khmer pride, and its calls for people to get back to the land. He became a combat soldier at 17, and tells me he helped plant some of the hundreds of thousands of land mines, booby traps and explosive devices still buried in fields across Cambodia.
By the time the Khmer Rouge launched its brutal assault in 1975, soft-spoken, dimpled Meas was a seasoned fighter. And by the time he quit the organization in the early 1990s, he had climbed through the ranks to become the head of a regiment, and a colonel in the army of Pol Pot, one of the most eccentric and brutal dictators in modern history. Meas was even summoned to Pol Pot's jungle hideout in 1993, only a few miles from where we are now sitting eating dinner, to hear an address by the revered Brother Number One, about the internationally brokered Paris agreement that ended Cambodia's decades of war.
Culturally, Cambodians have focused their efforts on reconciliation with former enemies, and there is a widespread fear that a war-crimes trial would disrupt that process. But the horrific past lives on in this country, in piles of skeletons dug up from mass graves and made into shrines and in the stories of the regime's survivors. And pressure from the United States is mounting, meaning the process of justice might soon be underway.
In just 44 months between April 1975 and January 1979, the Khmer Rouge executed, tortured to death or effectively starved between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians -- nearly 1 in every 4 people -- in killing fields across the country. Clocks, radios, televisions, all Western medicines, books, hospitals, stores and schools were banned during the Khmer Rouge genocide years. Teachers, doctors, even classical dancers, were forbidden to practice and thousands of them were executed. Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed thousands of wooden buildings in Cambodia's gracious old colonial capital of Phnom Penh, to sell the wood to the Vietnamese.
But ask Meas Tung what he did during the genocide of Cambodians and you are not likely to learn much. "I was taught to repair trucks, and guarded a yard where trucks were kept," he says, watching every word. "Later, I patrolled a big road."
Like hundreds of former Khmer Rouge soldiers, Meas has not only blended into Cambodia's new society but has been scrubbed clean of the past. He now heads the agricultural program for the district of Samlot, which runs along Thailand's border. On this day, his task is to escort two foreign journalists around the area, to show them the land on which thousands of refugees and demobilized soldiers are now living and farming.
More than 25 years after the Khmer Rouge routed Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, and began its mass murder campaign, United Nations and American officials are nearing a deal to try some of those culpable. After more than two years of negotiations, delays and objections, Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen has promised to pass a law within the next month clearing the way for a war-crimes trial. There are hitches, however: Contrary to the original international plan, the trial will take place on Cambodian soil, in Phnom Penh, and involve both Cambodian and foreign prosecutors and judges. Even then, the foreign jurists will have to be approved by Hun Sen's government. The deal is a slippery slope, one which many human rights groups believe will water down the impact of the trials.
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