Getting Away With Genocide: Cambodia's Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge

343 Pages·2004·3.21 MB·English

by  Tom Fawthrop

Getting Away
With Genocide?
Elusive Justice and the
Khmer Rouge Tribunal
Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2004 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis 2004
The right of Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis to be identified as the authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2028 7 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2027 9 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in Canada by Transcontinental Printing
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Contents
List of Photographs vi
Foreword by Roland Joffe vii
Acknowledgements xiii
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xvi
Introduction 1
1 Rebirth of a Nation – and the Beginning of
the Long Struggle for Justice 8
2 Keeping Pol Pot in the UN Cambodia seat 24
3 The World’s First Genocide Trial 40
4 Sympathy for the Devil 52
5 Challenging the History of Forgetting 70
6 Peace without Justice 101
7 Waking up to Genocide 108
8 The Trauma of a Nation: Searching for Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation 134
9 Uneasy Partners 155
10 The Gangs of New York 189
11 Clinching Convictions – the Challenge for
the Prosecution 210
12 One More River to Cross 232
Annexe A Key Khmer Rouge personnel 254
Annexe B Recent Publications of particular importance 270
Notes 274
Bibliography 300
Index 311
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List of Photographs
1. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Phnom Penh, October 1991. 54
2. Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s foreign minister, Phnom Malai, 1988. 55
3. Pol Pot with Chinese ambassador Sun Hao at Phnom
Penh airport. 57
4. Nuon Chea, following close behind his leader Pol Pot. 57
5. Chinese military offi cers and Khmer Rouge leaders after
signing deal to supply Pol Pot forces with military aid
through Thailand. 58
6. Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the company of leading
candidates for the Khmer Rouge tribunal. 65
7. Khmer Rouge soldiers at Khao Larn Khmer Rouge base
near Saaphan Hin Trat province. 92
8. Pol Pot haggles over the price of a watch in Beijing in
the early 1990s. 93
9. Pol Pot with Thai special forces Unit 838. 95
10. Son Sen, one of the Khmer Rouge leaders generally
regarded as one of the key leaders responsible for
mass murder. 96
11. UN police chief, Brigadier General Van Roos, 1993. 99
12. Thai military intelligence agent Colonel Chaiwat
Maungnol, partying in Pailin with a Cambodian
gem dealer in 1995. 103
13. Mary Robinson, UN Human Rights Chief in January 1998. 118
14. Hans Corell, UN legal chief, and Sok An, chairman of
the Cambodian Task Force for setting up the tribunal. 198
15. Vann Nath, painter and one of the few S-21 prison
survivors, seen here re-enacting the painting of Pol Pot
inside Tuol Sleng. 251
16. Chhum Mey, another S-21 inmate who miraculously
survived. 252
17. Ta Mok, Pol Pot’s military chief, linked to many bloody
purges. 255
18. Ke Pauk, Ta Mok’s deputy, and also accused of
implementing mass purges. 256
19. Duch, trusted by Pol Pot to run the secret police HQ at
Tuol Sleng. 257
20. Nuon Chea, aka ‘Brother Number Two’, ranked as the
most powerful man after Pol Pot. 258
vi
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Foreword
Roland Joffe
Soon after the Vietnamese left Cambodia in 1989 I found myself
standing on the sweating tarmac of Cambodia’s Pochentong
airport, expectantly clutching my passport, trying not to stare at
the bedraggled line of Vietnam War-era helicopters, rusting away
under the sugar palms. This felt familiar: I’d been here before. I hadn’t
though – not physically at least.
Forty minutes later, visa stamped, luggage loaded into a Toyota
van, I was heading out of the airport and onto the main road that
led to Phnom Penh. As we pulled onto it, heading into a stream of
cycles, ox carts, motor scooters and overloaded old buses I felt it
again, this overwhelming sense of coming home, home to a place
I’d never been to.
Five years before, I’d have struggled, if asked, to place Cambodia
accurately on a map. I’d heard of it, certainly, I knew it boasted fabulous
temples lying overgrown in its jungles, I knew it was in Southeast
Asia, I knew the French had colonised it, but that was the sum total
of my knowledge. Oh, and that it had in some way been embroiled
in the ghastly mess that we knew as the war in Vietnam!
Then one day, in 1982, the fi lm producer David Putnam gave me a
script to read. It was based on an article that had appeared a year or
so before in the New York Times Magazine. The article was by Sidney
Schanberg. It was about Cambodia. It was about his time there as a
journalist. Most importantly of all it was about Sidney’s extraordinary
assistant, the courageous, resourceful and loyal Dith Pran.1 Even
more, it was a searing portrait of a country’s hidden agony, a heartfelt
indictment of the brutal international realpolitik that then held the
world in its crudely Darwinist grip – that, in modifi ed form, as recent
events in Iraq show, still does. I couldn’t put the screenplay down. I
read it with growing horror and fascination. Horror at the cruelty that
infected the very sinews of the little nation of Cambodia. Fascination
at the strength of ordinary Cambodians, who with heroic guts refused
to yield up their humanity to the atrocious fantasy that the deluded
and paranoid neo-Stalinist Khmer Rouge called ‘Kampuchea’. That
script eventually became the fi lm called The Killing Fields.
vii
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viii Getting Away With Genocide?
On the evening of my fi rst day in Phnom Penh, I walked with
Heng, my Cambodian interpreter, to the Central Market. The old
yellow stucco colonial buildings were half deserted, cooking fi res
smouldered on the pavements, rubbish and wrecked cars were still
scattered about, but the air was fi lled with the sounds of life, babies
crying, mothers calling out, children giggling, the unmistakable
rumble and slap of a skateboard. Life had returned to this sleepy,
stylish capital – a capital that a few years before had been drained of
its population, left as an empty shell, inhabited by mindless torturers
and their deranged masters, the Khmer Rouge leadership.
As I stood in the moist air, the lowering sun gradually washing the
scene with a luminous pink, I caught Mr Heng’s eye. He dropped his
gaze. I asked him what he was thinking. It took him a long time to
answer. We stood in silence while he struggled with himself. When
he looked up, I could see the tears coursing slowly down his face.
‘Why?’ he asked simply. A battalion of answers fl ooded into my
mind. After a slight pause Mr Heng continued, ‘Why? Why didn’t
we count? Why did no one do anything?’
Again, answers fl itted through my mind – Cambodia was a sideshow
to the bigger war, to the ideological struggle that underpinned the
cold war. But that wasn’t the question Mr Heng had in mind. ‘Why?’
he asked quietly, ‘when your British government knew what the
Khmer Rouge was doing, about the mass killings and suffering, did
it send men from your special forces to train Khmer Rouge soldiers?’2
The skateboard clattered to a stop, a stifl ing sense of shame welled
up inside me.
Later, after an evening at the Foreign Correspondents Club (a rather
sweet little restaurant much frequented by young NGO workers),
where the discussion about how a country could apparently commit
genocide on itself ebbed and fl owed, I went for a walk along the banks
of the Mekong river. It wasn’t that the discussion at the press club
didn’t interest me: it did. Whatever had happened in the inner depths
of those damaged psyches that became the Khmer Rouge needed to
be urgently understood. But I was occupied by the question that Mr
Heng had put to me, and by another thought – or rather a memory.
The river fl owed by peacefully. On the opposite side, from where
the Khmer Rouge had shelled the city, lights twinkled, signalling
the presence of the innumerable little brothels that had sprung up
to service UN soldiers, amongst others. The moist air clung to my
skin and lovers whispered in the shifting patterns of moonlight. In
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Foreword ix
my mind, though, I was somewhere else, somewhere that Mr Heng’s
question had dredged up in my mind.
I’d been working on the setting up of The Killing Fields for a month
or so when I got a visit from an overly-dogmatic left-wing friend.
After some time he got around to what was the real purpose of his
visit. He suggested that I should think twice before continuing work
on the fi lm. His reason, deftly and confi dently explained, was that
Cambodia was an ‘aberration’. By that he meant that it was a bad
example of a Marxist state, because it had gone off the rails, and to
publicise it would damage the cause. I was stunned at the mental
gymnastics that got him to that point, so stunned that I not only
ignored his request, but put it out of my mind. Now walking along
the Mekong, my mind racing with the effect of Mr Heng’s question,
I saw a grisly link between it and that request of a few years before
that I abandon the fi lm.
The link is this. Both sides in the cold war were linked by a view
of reality that existed outside their commitment to their respective
‘isms’. That link was the geo-political philosophy of realpolitik, or,
as the American State Department puts it, ‘reality politics’. This
philosophy has underpinned the foreign policy of nations since
the 1870s. It was the brainchild of Bismarck, the war-hungry and
expansionist German chancellor.
In essence it goes like this. It is every government’s job to protect
the interests of its own nation state at all costs. It follows from this
that no nation state can treat the rest of the world as composed of
anything other than a set of shifting self-interested alliances. This view
enshrouds its profound cynicism in the banner of intellectual rigour
and historical precedent. The fact that it is an excuse for the most
profound immorality is defended with the argument that since there
is no court of appeal in international affairs to guarantee fairness,
each nation must fend for itself, in ceaseless attempts to undermine
the infl uence and effectiveness of competing nation states.
This self serving, pseudo-Darwinist view of international relations
has corrupted not only the foreign policies of the nations that
subscribe to it, but arguably the very ethical foundations of those
states themselves. It forms the central tenet of the foreign policies
of the world’s major – and not so major – powers.
So, both my friend and the conservative Margaret Thatcher – one
wanting the truth ignored, if not concealed, the other sending
soldiers to train the murderous troops of a demented Stalinist Khmer
Rouge – were united in feeling that the noble sword of national or
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x Getting Away With Genocide?
ideological self interest should be used to cut a justifi able swathe
through the prickly thickets of ethical behaviour.
One evening, while I was researching The Killing Fields, I found
myself in heated conversation, in a Bangkok bar, with an ex-CIA
operative. Let’s call him Billy Boy. Billy Boy had a grisly but acerbic
intelligence. I was supposedly probing him about his devious and
covert experiences in Cambodia, but he was more professional at
ducking and weaving than I was at probing. Billy Boy, however
was a man in a rage. The focus of his rage was the way the world
had ignored the suffering of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
He had particular scorn for Noam Chomsky, who at one time had
been accused of discrediting refugee accounts and denying that any
genocide had taken place.
The rest of his vituperation was aimed at the State Department,
or ‘state’, as he called it. The word came shooting out of his mouth,
like a rocket-propelled grenade. He had spent months huddled
over his radio listening as his operatives were picked off one by
one by the Khmer Rouge. ‘No one back home cared,’ Billy Boy said
bitterly. ‘Because the buzzword was détente with China. Democratic
Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge state, was a client of China’s. The
Chinese have a beef with the Vietnamese, so do the Thai. Get the
picture? And that’s without factoring in local circumstances such
as logging, gems and corruption!’ That’s the ugly reality behind
the intellectual justifi cations of realpolitik. As Billy Boy put it: ‘You
wanna know why things happen in Cambodia, Limey? Go look in
the White House. Wanna know why they get ignored? Go look under
the carpet in Drowning Street [sic], or whatever you call your prime
minister’s residence!’
William Shawcross’s compelling study of Cambodia’s fate during
the Vietnam War, Sideshow, draws a bitter picture of precisely
how this small nation was sacrifi ced to the wider interests of the
global games of the Cold War, and in particular the ferocious US
bombing campaign.
Once the war in southeast Asia was over in 1975, interest in the
fate of Cambodia and its people faded utterly. Not that governments
around the world didn’t know about what was going on in Cambodia.
They did. But they barely seemed to care. A few brave and honest
voices across the political spectrum spoke up, struggling to be heard
through a fog of disinterest. Disinterest, as I’ve noted, compounded
by denial from some quarters including some doctrinaire sections of
the left.3 Denial that helped stifl e any concerted effort to focus the
x
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Foreword xi
world’s attention on the agony that was the daily life of ordinary
Cambodian men and women under the Khmer Rouge. ‘Grow up,
man. Truth is always a f****ing inconvenience,’ sneered Billy Boy,
chillingly. ‘You know I’m right!’
It’s nearly 30 years since the Khmer Rouge atrocities began. It’s
been 25 or so since they were swept out of power. As yet there have
been no war-crimes trials, no trials for crimes against humanity. It’s
not in many people’s self interest, at least those that count, to dig
up the truth.4
In whose interest would these trials be? Funnily enough the answer
is incised in stone in the bas-reliefs that line the lower walls of the
vast and ancient Khmer Temple of Angkor Wat. A line of carvings
depict various wars, real and mythological, fought during the time
of the Khmer Empire that dominated the landscape of southeast Asia
from the ninth to thirteenth centuries. Huge warriors are locked in
timeless stone battle. Amidst their giant feet, crushed, one might
believe, there are plants and houses. And, yes, look closer – tiny
fi gures: farmers, merchants, peasants and their wives and children,
ordinary Cambodians, the ‘little people’ of the day.
Just before I left the bar in Bangkok, Billy Boy had raised a weary
hand in the air. ‘But go ahead Limey – speak up for the little people!’
he’d said, before sinking another beer. But something in his tone let
me know that he meant it, that it was important that cynicism and
self- interest be confronted. That it may even be a duty.
What can the Khmer Rouge Tribunal achieve? Well, in Billy Boy’s
tipsy phrase, it could honour the ‘little people’. It would demonstrate
accountability. It would show that it isn’t – and will never be – possible
for the powerful to escape responsibility for the suffering they cause.
The trial would show that self-interest, even for nations, can never,
ever, excuse inhumane acts or crimes against humanity.
Further it might encourage public discussion and learning about
what forces, social and psychological, led a group of Cambodians,
intellectuals and peasants, to murder and torture their fellow citizens.
There’s much to be learned there, learning that might absolve
Cambodians in general from suffering the anguish of feeling that
there is something specifi c to their culture or make up that produced
this violence. A vital absolution if the country is to move on.
Then there is the closure of punishment, perhaps the least
regenerative aspect of the trials. I wonder whether the Cambodians
might want to take a leaf out of that great humanitarian Nelson
Mandela’s book, and use the tribunal as a forum of understanding
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