Spreading the Word of the Cambodian Genocide
Bloody tourists in a land of skulls
Two of Pol Pot's top henchmen are on a luxury tour of Cambodia after
apologising for their crimes. Three experts on the Khmer Rouge - including
Dith Pran, whose story was told in The Killing Fields - say they can never
be forgiven
By Youk Chhang, Dith Pran and Ben Kiernan
Saturday January 2, 1999
The Guardian
Under government protection, two former Khmer Rouge leaders last week
began a luxury tour of the country they helped to destroy in the 1970s,
and complained media attention was ruining their new year holiday.
Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea - architects with Pol Pot of the 'killing
fields' regime - had earlier appeared at a press conference in Phnom Penh
and said they were 'sorry' for what happened from 1975 to 1979.
After basking in VIP treatment in Phnom Penh for two days, they travelled
in luxury cars to the seaside resort of Sihanoukville, first leg of a tour
that will take them to the ancient Angkor temples and their home
provinces.
Along the roads are memorials stacked with bones and skulls of thousands
of their victims, irrigation ditches dug by hand under the murderous eye
of Khmer Rouge overseers and fields strewn with mines from years of civil
war.
'Please have some sympathy with me. I want to have some rest,' complained
Khieu Samphan to journalists staking out a seaside hotel in southern
Cambodia last week where he and fellow defector Nuon Chea were staying.
But for all their apologies, the defection to the government of two of the
last Khmer Rouge leaders does not end the issue of accountability for the
Cambodian holocaust, in which 1.7 million people perished.
The Khmer Rouge regime was guilty of genocide five times over. Victims
included Cambodia's Buddhist monks and various ethnic minority groups: the
Vietnamese, Chinese, Thais and Cham Muslims. Some groups such as the Kola
were totally eliminated.The Khmer Rouge also committed crimes against
humanity by deporting, massacring and forcibly starving the urban
population, as well as war crimes against neighbouring Vietnam.
The government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who warmly welcomed Khieu
Samphan and Nuon Chea after their defection, may wish to forgive and
forget. But it faces increasing criticism for abandoning its pledge to see
them put before an international tribunal.
Pol Pot or 'Brother Number One', who led the genocidal regime, died in his
sleep on 15 April. At least five other top-level Khmer Rouge officials
remain alive and unpunished.
Nuon Chea, 71, was 'Brother Number Two'. He served under Pol Pot as Deputy
Secretary-General of the ruling Communist Party of Kampuchea. Khieu
Samphan, now 67, headed the State Presidium of Democratic Kampuchea - the
Khmer Rouge state. Both men played roles in a genocidal regime.
According to witnesses, at a secret meeting in May 1975 Nuon Chea endorsed
Pol Pot's orders to 'wipe out' religion, 'scatter' officials of the
defeated Lon Nol regime, drive out Vietnamese civilians and close schools
and hospitals.
In April 1977, as the killings escalated, Khieu Samphan declared: 'We must
wipe out the enemy . . . Everything must be done neatly and thoroughly. We
must not become absent-minded [but] continue to fight and suppress all
stripes of enemy at all times.' Samphan headed the powerful office of the
CPK Central Committee at the height of the mass murders in 1978.
Then there is the case of Ieng Sary, the regime's Number Three and Deputy
Prime Minister to his brother-in-law, Pol Pot. The official view in his
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1976 was: 'In our country, one to five per
cent are traitors, [who are] boring in.' An aide's secret diary revealed:
'Our enemies are now weakening and are going to die. The revolution has
pulled out their roots, and the espionage networks have been smashed; in
terms of classes, our enemies are all gone. However, they still have the
American imperialists, the revisionists, the KGB and Vietnam.'
'Though they have been defeated, they still go on . . . the enemies are on
our body, among the military, the workers, in the co-operatives and even
in our ranks . . . these enemies must be progressively wiped out.'
Twenty years later, in 1996, Ieng Sary defected from Pol Pot. He was
granted a limited pardon by the Cambodian government and retained a
fiefdom in north-west Cambodia. His amnesty began the split within the
Khmer Rouge, as other leaders sought similar deals. In 1997 Khmer Rouge
security chief Son Sen was killed after Pol Pot suspected him of planning
to defect.
Two weeks later Cambodia's then rival Prime Ministers, Prince Norodom
Ranariddh and Hun Sen, jointly called on the United Nations to try the
Khmer Rouge leaders before an international tribunal. But by then Pol Pot
had already been arrested by his former associates. Khieu Samphan, Nuon
Chea and the Khmer Rouge military commander Chhit Choeun (alias Mok) now
branded Pol Pot a 'traitor'. After a show trial, they convicted him not of
genocide or crimes against humanity but of 'criminal acts' - the murder of
Son Sen and his family. Pol Pot could still give press interviews, and
complain of boredom and mosquitoes in his state of 'house arrest' under
Khmer Rouge control.
Last March, Mok's former deputy commander, Ke Pauk, mutinied. He took most
remaining Khmer Rouge forces to the government side. They attacked Mok's
last units, who fled to the Thai border. Pol Pot died, abandoned in his
jungle hut.
The surviving top officials of the Khmer Rouge regime can now be
apprehended and put on trial. Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Ke
Pauk all have a case to answer. Son Sen's former prison chief, Deuch, and
interrogator, Mam Nay, are living within reach of the law. And the lone,
one-legged Mok, known in Cambodia as 'The Butcher', may not hold out much
longer.
A United Nations group of legal experts, assembled in response to the 1997
bipartisan Cambodian government appeal, visited Phnom Penh in November to
examine the voluminous evidence. They are expected to report to the UN
next month.The Cambodian government may deserve credit for the defeat of
the Khmer Rouge army and for the surrender of most of its leaders. But the
question of justice remains.
In an angry statement on Friday, Hun Sen denied he was opposed to a trial
and said he supported an investigation into the mass killings. His first
priority had been to secure peace, and the question of trials was the next
order of business.
'My position is that the trial of the Khmer Rouge is a fait accompli and
should proceed,' he said. He noted that he had said explicitly that he
could make no guarantees of immunity to the two men.
He added cryptically: 'The best chess player is the one who knows how to
move a large number of pawns in support of each other from point to point
to secure victory.'
Youk Chhang is director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia in Phnom
Penh. Dith Pran founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project. Ben
Kiernan is professor of history and director of the Cambodian Genocide
Program at Yale university, and author of 'The Pol Pot Regime'.
Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
Mailing address:
Ben Kiernan,
Professor of History,
Director, Cambodian Genocide Program,
P.O. Box 208206,
New Haven, CT 06520-8206,
USA.
Phone: (203) 432 9347; 432 2870 (voice-mail)
Fax: (203) 432 9381 (CGP);
432 7587 (History Department)
E-mail: magpie@pantheon.yale.edu
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