Cambodia's Khmer Rouge on trial (The Economist)

[struggle4progress]

Evil and the law
Feb 23rd 2009 | PHNOM PENH
From The Economist print edition
Thirty years after he was put out of business, a Cambodian torturer gets his day in court

JUSTICE moves slowly in Cambodia, even — or perhaps especially — where genocide is concerned. Thirty years after a Vietnamese invasion toppled the Khmers Rouges, and nearly ten years after he was detained, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, last week became the first leader to face trial at a UN–backed “hybrid” tribunal on the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh, set up to achieve justice for survivors of a regime that killed perhaps 2m people.

Duch ran Tuol Sleng or S-21, a notorious Phnom Penh prison (now museum), where more than 14,000 men, women and children were tortured and killed. For two days of procedural hearings the 66-year-old Christian convert sat attentively. At each adjournment he stood, touched his clasped hands to his forehead, and bowed to the crowded court. “Now he is just an old man. Before, he was the absolute man,” says Vann Nath, who survived S-21 because Duch let him paint a portrait of the Khmers Rouges’ leader, Pol Pot. “Whether someone lived or died hinged on him.”

Duch is being tried separately from four other detainees, all, unlike him, central-committee members. His systematic interrogations in S-21 left a damning trail of evidence, and he is vital to the effort to understand the regime. “He alone has admitted his deeds and will almost certainly point the finger to implicate others,” says Alex Hinton, of Rutgers University’s Centre for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights ...

The success of the court remains in doubt. Elderly victims and the defendants themselves (the others are over 75) may thwart it by dying. It took ten years of talks between Cambodia and the UN before the court opened in July 2007. In March the court’s Cambodian side will run out of money. In December the international prosecutor publicly disagreed with his Cambodian co-counsel’s refusal to seek other defendants. This raised questions about political interference. Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, among others, is a former Khmer Rouge cadre ...

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13171439

[damntexdem]

1. Interesting history to the Cambodian killing fields.

One of the more-horrid occurrences in recent history.

Given a start by Richard Nixon, when he spread the Vietnam War into Cambodia to "fight the Communists." Ended by the Communist government of Vietnam, after the U.S. fled from the region.

[struggle4progress]

2. Interesting sequel to interesting history: the Reaganites, on the bizarre

theory that anybody was better than the Vietnamese communists, supported the Khmer Rouge in the late Reagan era and into the early Bush I era

It's absolutely clear that this actually happened: the Congressional Record from the period contains a number of attempts by Congress to outlaw funding the Khmer Rouge, with the Administration objecting successfully for several years; finally, Congressional outrage won, and the funding cutoff passed