Searching for answers in Cambodia

[seemslikeadream]

You just keep looking over you shoulder georgie, ya never know, we'll get ya soon or later.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7897590.stm


Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge committed genocide in Cambodia, Jonathan Head witnesses the first UN war crimes trial of a prison camp commander.



Kaing Guek Eav is the youngest surviving member of the Khmer Rouge
"The banality of evil."

That phrase, made famous by the political scientist Hannah Arendt in her study of Nazi war criminals, kept coming back to me as I watched the small, grey-haired man, blinking behind glasses, taking his seat in the newly built Phnom Penh courtroom.

His name is Kaing Guek Eav, a former maths teacher, but in Cambodia he is known everywhere simply by his revolutionary nom-de-guerre, Duch.

And he may in the end be the only person ever held to account for one of the greatest atrocities of modern times, the killing fields of Cambodia.

Frail defendants

It has been an epic struggle even getting this far in the quest for justice for the millions of victims of the Khmer Rouge.

The Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia, as this hybrid tribunal is known, has suffered repeated false starts, shortages of funds, and bitter verbal spats between its two sponsors.

The idea of a tribunal was first mooted back in the mid-1990s, but the Cambodian government wanted to run it, while the international community - represented by the UN - argued that Cambodia's judicial system was not up to the job.

It took a decade for them to agree to set up trials presided over by both Cambodian and international judges.

The surviving Khmer Rouge leaders were not indicted until just over a year ago. They are now elderly and frail, and may not live long enough to face trial.

"So is this it?" I thought, watching Duch shuffling in the dock. "The reckoning for the great terror of the Khmer Rouge, falling on the skinny shoulders of this little old man. Is it really worth all the diplomatic wrangling, the millions of pounds wrung from donors?"

It is a question journalists, academics and human rights researchers have been asking Cambodians for years.

The answers they get are ambiguous.