Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
By Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis
UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005
320 pages, $39.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY TONY ILTIS
Commentators of the Gerard Henderson variety accuse the "left" of having supported Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (or Democratic Kampuchea) movement, which was responsible for the murder of between 1 and 2 million people when it ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Fawthrop and Jarvis's painstakingly detailed examination of attempts since 1979 to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice demonstrates that the political establishments of the Western powers supported the Khmer Rouge for almost two decades after it was ousted from power.
In 1979 the Cold War was raging. It was the year of the Nicaraguan, Grenadan and Iranian revolutions, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the election that brought Ronald Reagan to power in the US.
Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam, which was not only a Soviet ally, but less than four years earlier had inflicted upon US imperialism the biggest military defeat in its history. For this reason, the Western powers and China ensured that the Khmer Rouge continued to represent Cambodia in the United Nations, so that UN and Western aid went not to Cambodia, but to Khmer Rouge-controlled refugee camps on the Thai border.
The principal backer of the Khmer Rouge while it was in power was China. Following the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, Beijing initially tried to outflank Moscow from the left. It opposed the Soviet policies of detente and "peaceful coexistence" and held up the Cultural Revolution (in reality the brutal consolidation of the personal dictatorship of Mao Zedong) as a radical attempt at creating a communist society.
However, following US President Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1971, China and the US began forging a strategic alliance against the Soviet Union. After the liberation of Cambodia, the US and China cooperated closely in their support of the Khmer Rouge. China's support was open and unapologetic, however the US had to take public revulsion of Pol Pot into consideration, so its support was covert. For this reason Pol Pot himself was kept in the background and Khieu Samphan was promoted as the moderate face of the Khmer Rouge, even though he was a principal architect of the genocide.
The US administration instructed its diplomats and politicians not to be seen shaking hands with any Khmer Rouge leaders in public. Fawthrop and Jarvis recount Secretary of State Alexander Haig's successful evasion of senior Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary's attentions at a 1981 UN conference in New York designed to legitimise the Khmer Rouge!
In 1982, to provide camouflage for the Khmer Rouge, the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) was created. This allied the Khmer Rouge with the rightist Khmer Peoples National Liberation Front (KPNLF) and the faction of former Cambodian ruler Norodom Sihanouk, who became head of the CGDK. Sihanouk was originally installed as king of Cambodia by the French colonial administration in 1941. While his regime was repressive, for 15 years he managed to keep Cambodia out of the US war in Vietnam. In 1969, the US began bombing Cambodia and in 1970 it organised a military coup to overthrow Sihanouk's neutral government. From his exile in Beijing, Sihanouk then formed an alliance with his erstwhile enemy, the Khmer Rouge, and in 1975 returned to Cambodia, officially as head of state.
Despite this title, Sihanouk was a prisoner of his allies, who murdered 19 members of his immediate family. In 1976 he was replaced by Khieu Samphan. In 1982, this time as a US ally, he once again became a diplomatic fig leaf for the Khmer Rouge. Under the guise of support for the Sihanoukists and the KPNLF, Western military aid continued to reach the Khmer Rouge.
After tentative contacts between Sihanouk and Cambodian leader Hun Sen in the late 1980s, Sihanouk hinted at support for a peace agreement that excluded the Khmer Rouge. However, under Western and Chinese pressure, he reverted to his earlier position. Initially the Hun Sen government opposed any arrangement that would include the Khmer Rouge. Yet the end of the Cold War meant that the Soviet Union was no longer willing, and Vietnam no longer able, to economically and militarily support Cambodia (Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1989).
In 1990, Cambodia accepted a UN Transitional Authority (UNTAC) taking over the administration of Cambodia (with sovereignty residing in a Supreme National Council of six delegates from the Cambodian government and six from the CGDK, including two from the Khmer Rouge). A UN peacekeeping force was to remain until UN-supervised elections in 1993. China began scaling down its support for the Khmer Rouge at this time. However, the Thai military had developed a close relationship with the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge enclaves in Cambodia were rich in timber and gemstones and the plunder of these resources became a profitable business for the Polpotists, the Thai military and Thai logging and mining companies.
While UNTAC was scrupulous in policing the cessation of Vietnamese and Laotian support to the Cambodian government forces, it took a rather indulgent attitude towards Thai support for the Khmer Rouge. Despite this, the profitability of the gemstone and timber trade and the Khmer Rouge's poor electoral prospects meant that it withdrew from the peace process. Thus the new regime that resulted after the 1993 elections — which saw Sihanouk once again become king, and his son, Ranariddh, sharing the prime ministership with Hun Sen — still had a Khmer Rouge insurgency to deal with.
In 1997 this coalition fell apart when Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh. At the same time, the Khmer Rouge was disintegrating. Pol Pot liquidated one of his senior henchmen, Son Sen, and was put under house arrest by another, Ta Mok. Ironically, it was also in 1997 that the UN, for the first time, recognised that the Khmer Rouge was responsible for genocide.
The US also appeared to be changing its attitude. On April 9, 1998, the New York Times leaked a proposal by President Bill Clinton to unilaterally capture Pol Pot and bring him to trial. Pol Pot died in suspicious circumstances six days later and allegations were later made by Thai army chief General Surayud Chulanond suggesting he was murdered. Fawthrop and Jarvis point out that the Thai military, Pol Pot's jailor Ta Mok, and the CIA all had reason to fear what he might reveal at a public trial.
In 1999, negotiations began between Cambodia and the UN to establish a joint Cambodian-UN tribunal to try the remaining senior Khmer Rouge leaders. On May 13, 2003, an agreement between the two parties was signed. Jarvis (who since 1999 has been an advisor to Cambodia's task force on the Khmer Rouge trials) and Fawthrop describe the numerous and ongoing hurdles. They criticise the position of international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that Cambodians are somehow not competent to try the Khmer Rouge leaders and that the tribunal should be exclusively international.
Deprived of any assistance in combating the Khmer Rouge insurgency, the Cambodian government encouraged its disintegration by allowing senior Khmer Rouge leaders to avoid arrest if they defected. In 1996, Ieng Sary defected with a third of the Khmer Rouge forces. Despite having been sentenced to death in absentia in 1979 (along with Pol Pot and Son Sen) he is still free, living in considerable luxury on gemstone and timber trading profits. Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot's former deputy, Nuon Chea, followed in 1998. Ta Mok and the commandant of infamous S21 extermination centre, Duch, on the other hand, are both in custody, as they were captured rather than having defected.
Jarvis and Fawthrop also criticise the tribunal's mandate to only investigate crimes committed while the Khmer Rouge was actually in power. Not only does this mean that the period following its overthrow — when the Western powers were providing it with economic, military and diplomatic support — cannot be investigated, it also excludes the investigation of war crimes against Cambodia between 1969 and 1975.
The US bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country, which began in 1969, and the subsequent overthrow of its government, was not only a clear violation of international law but caused a massive loss of life. In fact, the body count for this crime, masterminded by Henry Kissinger, was of a similar magnitude to that of Pol Pot's. Furthermore, the ferocity of the Khmer Rouge "revolution" was a direct result of the devastation wrought by this war crime.
This book not only adds to the literature showing Western complicity in the Cambodian holocaust, it also shows the hypocritical and convoluted workings of international human rights law. Like in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, East Timor and the countries of the former Yugoslavia, international mechanisms of justice are distorted or thwarted by Western great power interests. The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, established in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, expressed the hope that such crimes would never happen again. A radical change in the global order is necessary before this hope can become reality.
From Green Left Weekly, February 16, 2005.
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