REGIONAL

RECOMMEND (174)

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

PLUSONE

MORE

E-MAIL

PRINT

TEXT SIZE

If Cambodia’s genocide victims are ever going to see their tormentors stand trial, the UN must act quickly. Cambodians have been waiting 23 long years for a tribunal to deal with mass murders committed under Pol Pot’s four-year reign, but negotiations are still mired in bitter controversy and legal debate. Over the years, China, the US and many other countries have all lent a hand in blocking attempts to put the Khmer Rouge on trial. But a fresh mandate from the UN General Assembly in December last year obliged a reluctant UN Secretariat to revive negotiations and set up a special tribunal in Phnom Penh. It has rekindled hopes of a final chance to drag Khmer Rouge leaders to their day of judgment and be held accountable for acts of genocide. Pol Pot is already dead. More recently another major suspect in the genocide trial, Ke Pauk, died in the hospital. All surviving Khmer Rouge leaders are old men, looking weary in their seventies. With increasing urgency, many argue the UN and the Cambodian government need to move forward quickly and conduct a tribunal. But while many are calling for the process to be hastened, some human rights purists say justice will never be possible in a quasi-Cambodian court, not even with the existing proposal of a mixed tribunal with an international co-prosecutor and judges and alongside Cambodian jurists. Amnesty International claims the final text of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal law—the product of three years of negotiations with the UN—is still "hopelessly flawed". Their recommendation is that the law passed by Cambodia’s National Assembly should be entirely scrapped, and negotiations should go back to square one. New York-based Human Rights Watch has taken a similar hardline stance. But many Cambodians are tired of the legal wrangling and the monumental delays. "If we wait for the perfect law, then all the Khmer Rouge leaders will be dead, and it won’t help Cambodian people at all," said Chea Vannnath, director of the Phnom-Penh based Center for Social Development. The only Khmer Rouge leaders who have been put on trial so far are the three commanders responsible for a 1994 train ambush in the southern province of Kampot, where three western backpackers were taken hostage and then executed. Thirteen Cambodians were also shot dead. In December, former Khmer Rouge General Sam Bith, in charge of Kampot and Takeo provinces, was found guilty of masterminding the ambush and the killings and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Other genocide victims in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, for example, have had the satisfaction of seeing their tormentors being brought to trial. A tribunal in Sierra Leone is also in the wings. But for the survivors of Cambodia’s holocaust, that annihilated anywhere up to two million people, there has been no justice. After Pol Pot was ousted in 1979, many survivors called for an immediate international tribunal. Back then the genocide issue was held hostage to cold war machinations while Washington went so far as to support granting a seat to the Khmer Rouge at the UN, as part of its aggression towards Vietnam which was supporting Phnom Penh’s government at the time. In fact, from 1979-1997 there was nothing but deafening silence from the UN on the issue of bringing the Khmer Rouge to trial. The new mandate calls on the UN Secretary-General "to resume negotiations without delay, to conclude an agreement with the government of Cambodia based on previous negotiations, [and] to establish Extraordinary Chambers" in order to prosecute senior Khmer Rouge leaders. The new mandate from member states delivered a slap in the legal face to UN lawyers and since then, exploratory talks have resumed in New York with a view to leading to more detailed negotiations in Phnom Penh this February. So far only two Khmer Rouge leaders have been arrested for the tribunal—Ta Mok and Pol Pot’s secret police chief, Khaing Khev Iev, alias Duch. Another five of the six major suspects are living quietly in Cambodia and will not be indicted until the tribunal is convened. Nine months ago, prospects for an internationally credible UN-backed genocide tribunal appeared to have been killed stone dead by a UN walk-out. By aborting the complex negotiations in 2002, the UN effectively added another year to the most procrastinated tribunal of all time. The UN’s Legal Counsel, Hans Corell, argued the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Law did not provide sufficient guarantees for an "independent tribunal and international legal standards". Corell was unclear whether the UN or Cambodia would have ultimate control over the judicial process.