Seeking Justice in Cambodia's Killing Fields

San Francisco Chronicle

Cambodia's killing fields hold the key to a horrible truth
Frida Ghitis
Sunday, April 4, 2004

Choeng Ek, Cambodia -- About half an hour south of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, lies a disturbingly peaceful grassy field. The killing field of Choeng Ek is one of the many places where thousands of Cambodians died at the hands of other Cambodians.

Excavated mass graves have yielded a gruesome harvest of human bones, some still covered in ragged clothes.

In the middle of the field, a glass memorial encloses about 8,000 skulls, some visibly shattered in the act of murder. Each skull, one shudders to realize, belonged to a human being, a life extinguished in an orgy of violence during the days of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

It is a perilous practice to compare tragedies. But few countries have suffered as much as Cambodia. And yet, 25 years after Vietnamese forces overthrew the Khmer Rouge and its bloodthirsty leader, Pol Pot, there is little understanding of what exactly happened during Cambodia's nightmare.

Until now, there has been no attempt to reach clarity and justice, and no one has come to trial.

So Pheap, who was a boy during the Khmer Rouge regime, shakes his head in disbelief at the political process that has yet to bring justice.
"I don't understand," he says. "Why does it take so long?" Now 35 years old, So Pheap remembers working in the fields with the other children, separated from his parents. Many family members died in circumstances no one can explain.

"Why did they kill so many people?" he wonders, as do millions of Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge experience remains a confusing and painful national scar.

International efforts have focused on bringing genocide trials against top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the fanatical, paranoid regime that led as many as 2 million Cambodians to their deaths.

The trials, however, will not be enough to cleanse the soul of this nation. Cambodia needs a South Africa-style Truth Commission, one that will bring out the truth and clear the air poisoning relations between victims and victimizers, who live side by side in this impoverished nation.

The Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, once a member of the Khmer Rouge, spent years negotiating with the United Nations on rules for a genocide tribunal.

Agreement was reached to try the top leaders still living in freedom, but the tribunal remains in limbo, due to a national political stalemate. Even when the genocide trials get started, only a handful of elderly men will face justice. The trials are important, but they are not enough.

The victims at Choeng Ek came from Phnom Pehn's infamous prison, Toul Sleng, a place where the Khmer Rouge regime brought its enemies, real and imagined, to be tortured, interrogated and then carted off to their deaths.

The Khmer Rouge, led by the Paris-educated Pol Pot, came to power in 1975, in the chaos left in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. The United States had carpet-bombed Cambodia in an effort to cut off enemy supply routes to Vietnam.

After the Americans left, Pol Pot and his followers easily overthrew Lon Nol, the anti-communist dictator Washington had supported. So Pheap still remembers the rejoicing in the streets.

The joy was short-lived. Pol Pot wanted to create a Maoist agrarian utopia. He ordered everyone out of the cities and into the fields.

Phnom Penh, a city crowded with some 2 million people, including many refugees fleeing the civil war, became a ghost town.

Even hospitals were emptied, as the entire population joined a drive to boost rice production. Hundreds of thousands died of overwork, disease and starvation.

Pol Pot's deranged plan was to create a blank slate of a society. To do this, he exterminated all educated people, meaning anyone with at least a seventh-grade education. Ethnic minorities, intellectuals and Buddhist monks were murdered in the name of the revolutionary ideal.
Pol Pot, who died a free man in 1998, was known as Brother No. 1. He was surrounded by a small clique.

But the Khmer Rouge counted thousands of followers. The Toul Sleng prison alone employed more than 1,000 guards, interrogators, torturers and other accessories to murder. Like the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, almost all remain at large. They have not faced their victims, and they have not told their stories.

Cambodians understand the reality of that time. They know many of those who killed knew that they too would die if they failed to follow orders.
What the country desperately needs -- something that other nations, such as Iraq, will also need -- is a systematic way to get at the truth.

Cambodians should at long last have a chance to tell their heartbreaking story. They should have the opportunity to gain a profound understanding of what happened and why it happened.

Only then can they obtain a believable vow from their leaders not to allow history to be repeated. Only then will they be able to live without the constant fear of revenge and of a return to terror.

Only then will the rest of us hear the truth about how a band of fanatics drove millions to their deaths, while the rest of the world chose to look away.

Frida Ghitis is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television