Searching for the truth Issues 28 - Documentation Center of Cambodia

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Searching for the Truth ⎯ LETTER Letter : The Right to Life I would like to share with you some reflections about our work for truth, justice and national reconciliation in Cambodia, work we have been doing at the Documentation Center of Cambodia since 1995. On Saturday, March 9, 2002 at the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, I organized a film screening for the United Nations Special Representative for Human Rights in Cambodia, Prof. Peter Leuprecht. The film we showed, entitled Bophanna, is about a couple who were tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge because they married without permission from Angkar. After the screening I asked Professor Leuprecht’s staff⎯some twenty or twenty-five international human rights workers: “what is the most important human right”? As usual, many ideas were expressed, ranging from the right to free speech and the right of association, to the right to gather freely for peaceful purposes and the right to a free press as the most important human right for a democratizing country. I bluntly told the group that all of the above rights and others are meaningless if you are dead. The most important right is the right to life. All other rights can be enjoyed if and only if this most basic right is guaranteed. And it is this fundamental right that was so massively violated by Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime⎯also known as the Khmer Rouge regime. Some thirty to forty percent of the Cambodian people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in less than four years. No other government in history has taken away the right to life from such a high proportion of its people. For this reason, I believe we can say that the Khmer Rouge regime was the worst violator of human rights in the history of mankind. Even so, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge such as Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith remain free men and women today, unpunished more than a quarter of a century after they committed these Number 28, April 2002 unprecedented atrocities. Their on-going impunity sends a message to the Cambodian people that our most fundamental rights do not matter. That most fundamental right was violated again and again and again, at least 2 million times, and yet the violators remain untouched. And there is more than that. Former Khmer Rouge leaders today ride around in expensive cars, and live in fancy villas with bodyguards and servants. In a word, they remain rich and powerful, while the masses of the Cambodian people continue to live lives of poverty and desperation. This is the condition of my country, Cambodia, today. We at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) have spent the last seven years working to change this unacceptable situation. We have extensively documented the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime. So far we have carefully mapped 19,440 mass graves, 167 extermination centers (prisons) and 77 genocide memorials. We have collected more than 600,000 pages of Khmer Rouge documents, which we are translating, cataloguing, and entering into a computer database. We have assembled dossiers on 18,000 Khmer Rouge cadres, and we are tracing the chain of command of Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) all the way from the Chairman himself down to the chiefs of districts, communes and villages. When we began, it was not clear how the Khmer Rouge carried out their evil design. Now we can prove much more regarding the who, what, when and where. We have found that there were many more victims than scholars previously believed, with more than two million killed. Even so, all of this work in assembling the evidence is but one part of the puzzle. We have also been working for the last seven years to catalyze a process that would cause responsible authorities to marshal this evidence and bring it to bear in a court of law against the perpetrators. We have been Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) 1 100 100 100 100 100 100 50 50 50 50 Black Yellow Magenta Cyan
100 100 100 100 100 100 50 50 50 50 Black Yellow Magenta Cyan Number 28, April 2002 working with legal experts in the Cambodian government, the United Nations and other interested nations around the world such as the United States and various European countries to design an institutional framework for genocide justice in Cambodia. At the same time, we have been working with⎯and sometimes against⎯political authorities from around the world to get them to do the right thing and take the hard decisions that are required to end the culture of impunity in Cambodia. Though we have come a very long way and accomplished a great deal, we have not yet achieved this goal. We have as yet been unable to persuade the Cambodian government and the international community that the crimes against humanity should be prosecuted in an acceptable manner that would help Cambodia to heal itself and to move forward. The goal of genocide justice in Cambodia may or may not ever be achieved. So the Documentation Center of Cambodia has a second goal, no less important than promoting justice, and that is ensuring memory. Memory, like justice, is a critical foundation for establishing the rule of law and genuine national reconciliation in Cambodia. Beyond our efforts to document the facts of the Cambodian genocide, one of the ways we seek to promote memory is through our monthly magazine, Searching for the Truth. Now in its third year of publication, The Truth brings the findings of our research and documentation to people all over the country and abroad. We distribute it free of charge at the commune level each month. Although this and our other projects aimed at sustaining memory are crucial, they are not enough. For the Cambodian people to be released from the chains that bind us to our past, we need justice. The United Nations has tried to bring Cambodians justice, spending more than four and a half years in negotiations with the Cambodian government on the establishment of a criminal tribunal for the Khmer Rouge leadership. In early 1999, the United Nations experts proposed establishing an ad hoc international tribunal for the Khmer Rouge, modeled on the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia; the Cambodian government flatly rejected this proposal on 2 Searching for the Truth ⎯ LETTER the grounds that it violated Cambodian sovereignty. Undaunted, the United Nations and Cambodia then tried to agree on an unprecedented new model of international justice, a “mixed” tribunal designed to take into account the Cambodian government’s stated concerns about sovereignty. But, as I am sure all of you know, on February 8 of this year, the United Nations announced that it would not continue the negotiating process. The United Nations says that the law adopted by the Cambodian government last year (August 10, 2001) cannot guarantee international standards of justice for the tribunal. In the face of widespread pressure from the international community, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has held firm to his decision. As recently as March 13, the Secretary-General declared that those in the international community who wish to see a change in the United Nations decision on the tribunal need to lobby Prime Minister Samdech Hun Sen and, in the Secretary General’s words, persuade him to “change his position and attitude.” The Cambodian government said it was surprised by the United Nations’ decision, insisting that everything in the Khmer Rouge tribunal law was agreed beforehand with the United Nations, a position that the United Nations does not share. On March 15, the chairman of the government’s tribunal task force, H.E. Mr. Sok An, reiterated the government’s “earnest hope” to find a way out of the present impasse, stating that the government believes “there is every basis for the negotiations to resume.” But H.E. Mr. Sok An gave no indication that the government itself is prepared to change its position and modify the Khmer Rouge tribunal law to take into account the United Nations’ objections. The United Nations always talks about justice, about achieving international standards of justice in Cambodia. They are right about the importance of this matter. The Cambodian government always talks about reconciliation, the need to preserve the peace and heal the wounds of war in Cambodia. They, too, are right about that being crucially important. But it seems to me that nobody really talks about Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)
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Searching for the truth Issues 28 - Documentation Center of Cambodia

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