RIGHTS-CAMBODIA: Delays Dog Khmer Rouge Genocide Trials

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 17 2005 (IPS) - A United Nations evaluation team’s scheduled arrival in Cambodia, next month, has perked up hopes that the long wait to prosecute the surviving leaders of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime may soon be over.

The initial groundwork that the U.N. team is due to lay for the special Khmer Rouge tribunal will be just as significant as the milestone reached in May, when the world body announced that the legal and financial conditions had finally been met for the trials.

”There will be many milestones to be crossed from here on till the trial commences,” said Helen Jarvis, advisor to the office of Cambodia’s Council of Ministers. ”The selection and appointment judges and the prosecutor and their swearing-in will be important.”

Yet, she confirmed during an interview to IPS that it could take months before the first genocide suspect would face the tribunal. ”It could even take up to 12 months after the judges are sworn in for the first suspect to be in the dock.”

However, hints of such slow progress was another reminder of the difficult journey the plans to create this U.N.-backed special tribunal have had.

On Monday, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said that the trial may not proceed as planned because of a funding shortfall that he wants the international community to meet.

”If they (the donor community) don’t give the money, then the tribunal cannot be established. I don’t have the money for setting up this tribunal,” the Cambodian leader was quoted in the media as having said.

The funding dispute brought to the surface concerns over Hun Sen’s commitment to have the Khmer Rouge leaders tried. Any back-pedalling by Phnom Penh will be viewed as a breach of an agreement reached between the Cambodian government and the U.N. on funding, human rights activists said.

”The government has an obligation to raise the funds,” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a Phnom Penh-based body that has been collecting evidence and testimonies of Khmer Rouge atrocities for the special tribunal. ”Refusal to fund the tribunal will be a violation of that agreement.”

The Cambodian government, he told IPS, has been offered money from two sources, the Japanese government, through development aid, and the Cambodian business community. ”The money is there – all the government has to do is make use of it.”

Following the agreement this year, the U.N. announced that international donors had pledged 43 million US dollars for the three-year tribunal and that Cambodia was expected to raise the remaining 13.3 million dollars.

So far, Cambodia has only been able to provide 1.3 million US dollars towards the 56.3 million dollar target.

Such figures do not include other amounts that Cambodia, one of South-east Asia’s poorest countries, has agreed to pay for the trial, said Jarvis, the government’s advisor. ”Cambodia has agreed to pay 5.6 million dollars for indirect costs during the tribunal, such as provision of detention for suspects and medical assistance.”

Hun Sen’s attitude is not without precedent. He has upset human rights activists with other obstacles that he has placed since negotiations for the tribunal began almost a decade ago between the U.N. and the Cambodian government.

Among them was Phnom Penh’s push to have a majority of judges on the tribunal from Cambodia, as opposed to initial plans for the bench to be dominated by international jurists.

And in July, human rights activists monitoring the progress of the trial raised the alarm at moves by Phnom Penh to select the Cambodian judges for the trial in secrecy.

”The government appears to have begun the process of selecting judges and prosecutors to staff the future tribunal, but it has shrouded the process in secrecy,” wrote Nathaniel Myers, an expert on tribunal- related issues, in the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper.

Apr. 17 this year marked the 30th anniversary of the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge’s march into Phnom Penh. Close to 1.7 million Cambodians were killed due to executions, forced labour and famines during the Khmer Rouge’s four year reign of terror, from 1975 to 1979.

Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, escaped justice, when he died in 1998. And some Cambodians wonder if the country’s former foreign minister during the Khmer Rouge rule, Leng Sary, will escape likewise from the tribunal. He was granted amnesty by the Hun Sen government.

Currently, only two Khmer Rouge leaders – Ta Mok, the military chief, and Kaing Khek Lev, or Duch, who headed the grisly Toul Sleng interrogation centre in Phnom Penh – await trial.

Duch was responsible for the deaths of nearly 16,000 men, women and children who were tortured and executed in the interrogation centre that he ran.

Hun Sen will be watched closely by human rights activists when the trial begins and not just for his record as an autocratic leader placing obstacles in the way of justice.

He was also a former member of the Khmer Rouge till he defected to join forces with a Vietnamese-backed government that ruled Cambodia after the murderous Pol Pol was driven out of power.