:: OP-ED

A Rouge warning

Shankari Sundararaman

Oct.13 : As the world watches Cambodia's unfolding drama, there is an uneasy feeling that justice for historical pasts may never be available for a generation of Khmers who have faced genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime. Last week the first case was closed, that of Duch (pronounced Doik), in which the former warden of the Tuol Sleng prison was tried for crimes against humanity in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), also known as the Khmer Rouge Trials.

Duch was the first of five remaining Khmer Rouge leaders to face trial. The other four are Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith and Nuon Chea. They represent the immediate core that was under Pol Pot, who drove the agenda and vision of the state of Democratic Kampuchea (the name given to Cambodia between1975-1979 under the Khmer Rouge). Cambodia had initially asked the United Nations to set up the trials in 1997. However, this became operational only in 2006. Till date Duch remains the only person to have been tried from the top leadership. Apart from these, six others have been identified. However, they remain anonymous and there is already speculation of political interference since it may expose the complicity of others.

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia between April 1975 and December 1978. Between these years, the country was pushed back to year zero, while the leadership unleashed an agrarian-style reversal of the entire political and social setting. In one of the worst recorded cases of genocide, the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot was responsible for the estimated deaths of nearly two million in a population of seven million. Within three-and-a-half years nearly one-third of the population was wiped out due to torture killings, starvation and disease.

In the midst of this internal turmoil, external relations with neighbouring Vietnam deteriorated. Interestingly, the revolutionary forces that had fought against the US presence in the region were plagued by their own differences, which became evident after the US withdrawal from the region in 1975. This factor caused a rift between the interpretations of the Vietnamese Communist Party and the Khmer Rouge. While the Vietnamese followed the Soviet model, the Khmer Rouge version was more closely linked to Mao's idea of an agrarian Communist state. In fact, these interpretations were further fuelled by the Sino-Soviet split which occurred in the 60s and this was seen along the fault lines of the Cambodia-Vietnamese relations too.

In December 1978, a split faction of the Khmer Rouge, headed by Heng Samrin and current Prime Minister Hun Sen, acted as a front for the Vietnamese military intervention in Cambodia. This intervention divided the regional and extra-regional players along ideological lines. This came to be known as the Third Indochina War and was finally resolved when the international players backing the various political factions agreed to a UN framework which allowed the country to have a transitional authority under the UN, leading to supervised elections in April 1993.

The Vietnamese intervention kept Cambodia in the grip of the Cold War for several years. One of the ambiguities of the situation was that in spite of its track record of genocide and excessive human rights violations, the Khmer Rouge's political legitimacy continued for several years to come.

One factor that kept the Khmer Rouge alive was that the internal political factions ousted by the Vietnamese intervention formed a coalition. Three groups were relevant in this context. The Royalist Party (FUNCINPEC), initially led by Norodom Sihanouk and later by his son Norodom Ranariddh, and the Republicans (KPNLF), led by Son Sann at the national level, gave legitimacy to the Khmer Rouge. The three groups together formed a Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) in 1982. These were pushed out of the country to the Thai-Cambodian border when the Cambodian People's Party (CPP, erstwhile KNUFNS), led by Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, acted as the front for the Vietnamese intervention. The CGDK kept the Khmer Rouge alive and kept its political legitimacy going.

The UN, which is backing the genocidal trials today, initially maintained the seat of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. This was later kept vacant for a few years and than handed over to the CGDK, a coalition government which included the Khmer Rouge. This was done on grounds that the UN charter had a clause on the inviolability of domestic jurisdication. This clause actually stated that in cases of internal turmoil, no third nation had the right to intervene since the matter fell under the purview of domestic jurisdiction. As such, even cases of humanitarian intervention are subjected to this understanding. Given the validity of this clause in the UN interpretation, the Vietnamese intervention was not considered a humanitarian one. Moreover, the Vietnamese acted in isolation and its intervention continued for over 11 years. These factors further pushed the Cambodian case as one in which a national level conflict was supported by regional and international actors. In a nutshell, the Cambodian conflict was the outcome of the cold war within the Southeast Asian region, which was simply the extension of the US war against Vietnam.

One of the issues that will remain critical in terms of finding justice is that there is a certain degree of both national and international level complicity in which players at both levels have been involved in sustaining the political life of the Khmer Rouge. Even within the ruling party today Prime Minister Hun Sen, finance minister Keat Chhon and the President of the National Assembly Heng Samrin, have all been former members of the Khmer Rouge.

Hun Sen has already alluded to the fact that the continuation of the trials could actually lead to a situation where the country is once again plunged into a civil war. It is hard to imagine that bringing people responsible for genocidal acts would cause a country to move towards a civil war. However, given the fact that complicity with the Khmer Rouge has been a complex issue, which has several unseen layers within it, there is no doubt that several actors may emerge as the trials progress. Will the ECCC also try groups that sustained the Khmer Rouge's political legitimacy?

Moreover, at the national level there is a generation of youth born after 1978 which does not have any recollection of what that three-year period represented. The courts have resorted to several methods, such as public broadcasting and also making arrangements for villagers to be taken to the auditorium to witness the actual trials. This is to ensure that the recounting of history does not go missed by the generations that came after the genocide. It remains pertinent that a national history must account for the fact that excesses have occurred and this needs to be remembered by subsequent generations as an insurance against the repetition of crimes against humanity.

Dr Shankari Sundararaman is an associate professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the School of International Studies, JNU