P U L S E

Khmer children posing in front of a mass grave in Cambodia's notorious "Killing Fields." Many children hang around this and other memorial sites while faking sad faces so that affected tourists will give them money. We asked them to act like themselves.

I was in Cambodia in 2006 working with a small, grass-roots, non-profit organization dedicated to street children.  One day while heading to a village located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (Cambodia’s capital), I passed by the massive reconstruction site of what was to become the UN backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).  My companion who had been living in Cambodia for the past several years scoffed at the site:

They are wasting all that money to prosecute a few old men who will be dead soon.  But you’ve seen how the majority of Khmer people live today.

According to the official website, this court was created to try “serious crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime 1975-1979.”  It became fully operational in 2007.

Orchestrated by the Pol Pot led Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian genocide resulted in the deaths of nearly 2 million Cambodians, beginning with the country’s elite and educated.  Many were tortured and executed—hundreds of thousands died of starvation.  Pol Pot’s vision of turning Cambodia into a peasant farming society involved herding the country’s educated and upper class citizens (although the poor were certainly not exempt if they were suspected of being enemies of the state) into the countryside to work in what later become known as the notorious “Killing Fields.”  Thirty years later the United Nations has spent tens of millions of dollars on the ECCC project, which is a complex mix of international and domestic law and only composed of both international and Cambodian staff because Cambodians lobbied with the support of the French to be involved.  In total the ECCC is supposed to try 5 participants, but to date only Kang Kek Iew (“Duch”) has been indicted as the other suspects are still under investigations.  Some news reports paint an image of justice being served, with tear-inspiring descriptions of survivors standing beside their tormentors as they read apologies aloud, but how close is this to the reality on the ground?

In Cambodia, the national memory of the genocide is either skewed or non-existent for much of the youth.  Of course, the few remaining survivors struggle with the hardship they were forced to endure every day, but only recently has the genocide been introduced into some school curriculums (if they can be called that) which are hardly developed in any respect.  The schooling system (like Cambodia’s hospitals) are mostly geographically inaccessible to many school-aged children and rely heavily on funds brought in from their poor students to operate. There are also a number of problems with the court proceedings themselves (as shown in this recent Al Jazeera documentary) and efforts to involve the Cambodian public (it was decided that the proceedings be private because they might cause unrest among the public) are also confused and few and far between.

If you ask an average Cambodian what they know about the genocide, they might refer you to the well-known tourist destination spots of Toul Sleng Museum (the infamous S-21 Prison—a high school turned torture chamber and execution hall under the Khmer Rouge) and the Killing Fields, which are depicted in Roland Joffé’s beautiful 1984 film by the same name.  However, if you ask that same Cambodian what they know about America’s involvement in relation to the event, chances are he or she won’t have much to tell you.  Award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger has been reporting on Cambodia for more than 30 years.  It was he who tried to warn the rest of the world about the horrors that he was witnessing prior to Pol Pot’s closing off of the country to the entire outside world, and he remains the only well-known journalist to continue to point out America’s direct responsibility to this day.  In a February 2009 article about the tribunal Pilger wrote:

It is highly unlikely Pot Pot would have come to power had President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, not attacked neutral Cambodia. In 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodia’s heartland than were dropped on Japan during the second world war: equivalent to five Hiroshimas. Files reveal that the CIA was in little doubt of the effect. “[The Khmer Rouge] are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” reported the director of operations on May 2, 1973. “This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men [and] has been effective with refugees.”

Pilger ends by stating:

Unless international justice is a farce, those who sided with Pol Pot’s mass murderers ought to be summoned to the court in Phnom Penh: at the very least their names read into infamy’s register.

Of course, there has been no stated intention to do any such thing.

Cambodians suffer from the threat of a high and spreading presence of HIV.  Its economy relies heavily on tourism and is a hot spot for sex tourism, much of it geared towards the exploitation of children.  Most of the population lives in the poorly developed countryside and those who live in the city centers often do so in slums.  In the Al Jazeera clip noted above the commentator states that the economy has recently experienced a boom due to a surge in construction, but there is another side to this story.  When I was there I went to a housing complex being built around the periphery of a slum, virtually locking the inhabitants in, with no official point of entry or exit, and neatly banishing them from sight.  Schools and hospitals are also severely underdeveloped and underfunded, like the government itself which is by no means corruption free.  The UN has spent tens of millions of dollars on a project to try 5 elderly men (again, only 1 has so far been indicted) involved in the genocide of their own people and it is still unclear how much of the population is actually aware of these proceedings or what impact these events will have on future generations.  War criminals should be held accountable, certainly, but how does one balance this need with that of using available funds to sustainably build desperately needed infrastructure in one of the poorest countries in the world?

Cornel West famously said that “justice is what love looks like in public.”  Is the ECCC and everything that it represents really serving justice to the people of Cambodia?

For more on the Cambodian genocide and the context that is often omitted in related reports, take some time to watch Pilger’s immensely informative 1979 documentary below.