BY ALLEN MYERS
PHNOM PENH — With 92 votes in favour and none opposing, the National Assembly on January 2 approved a bill to establish a special court to try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was responsible for the deaths of up to two million people during its 1975-79 rule.
This was the first time since Cambodia's current constitutional arrangements were adopted in 1993 that the National Assembly has voted unanimously for a bill.
Before it becomes law, the bill must still be passed by the Senate, approved by the Constitutional Council and signed by the king. None of these constitutional requirements is expected to disrupt the progress towards a trial of KR leaders.
More uncertain is the attitude of the United Nations. The Cambodian law envisions international assistance in the conduct of the trial, including the appointment of some non-Cambodian judges and a foreign co-prosecutor sharing responsibility with a Cambodian counterpart.
These provisions were developed during protracted negotiations after the Cambodian government in mid-1997, frankly recognising the many problems in the country's legal system, including a dearth of trained legal personnel, appealed for UN assistance to conduct the trials.
The response of the UN secretariat reeked of "the white man's burden". A "committee of experts" it appointed (chaired by Australia's former governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen) proposed that the trials be conducted entirely outside Cambodia, with participation by Cambodians limited to the defendants and witnesses.
This paternalism was especially galling in view of the fact that the UN, for more than a decade after the KR's overthrow, had allowed the KR genocidists to occupy Cambodia's seat in the UN General Assembly.
Three years of patient efforts by the Cambodian government to reach a mutually acceptable arrangement concluded last July, during a visit here of a UN team led by Hans Corell, the UN undersecretary-general for legal affairs.
The negotiators announced that substantial agreement had been reached, but no agreed text was released. In October, the English-language Phnom Penh Post published on the internet a text which it described as having been agreed between the UN and the Cambodian government, but a spokesperson for the Council of Ministers (the cabinet) published a correction in the Post pointing out that the text was the UN's proposals, not something agreed to by the Cambodians.
It is therefore not at all certain that the UN will agree to coordinate the participation of foreign personnel in the trials. Its doing so is treated by the UN secretariat as constituting endorsement of the trials' legitimacy by "the international community".
The arrogance of the secretariat aside, the United States and Japanese governments immediately welcomed the passage of the bill, Britain, France and other countries had already indicated their willingness to send judges to participate, and China reaffirmed its previously stated position that the conduct of the trials should be a matter for Cambodians to decide.
For the government, the National Assembly's unanimous vote represents a considerable achievement.
While there is in Cambodian society a widespread desire to see those responsible for the crimes of the KR regime brought to trial, there have always been varying degrees of opposition to any specific proposal. There have been critics on both sides of every issue: those who want no international involvement at all and those who feel that the trials should be purely international; those who suspect that the big fish will be allowed to get away and those who demand that all the little fish also be prosecuted; those who fear that the trials will be tokenistic and those who fear that any trial will disrupt a fragile "national reconciliation" that the government has sought to implement since KR forces began negotiating their surrender in 1996.
The Prime Minister Hun Sen's government has devoted considerable time and effort into calming these fears and cajoling the critics into giving the process a chance. This search for consensus, along with the negotiations with the UN, appears to be the reason for the slow process of the trial bill through the parliament; it was formally submitted to the National Assembly a year ago.
The government's critics, of whom there are many among NGOs and imperialist would-be instructors of the Third World like the International Republican Institute, spent much of the year attacking the government for "dragging its feet" on the trial law. When the bill was passed after two days of plenary discussion, the same critics complained that it had been done too quickly.