Will There Be a Trial for the Khmer Rouge?

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 14, Issue , 2000, Pages 67-82

  Chandler, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84937330964     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2000.tb00054.x     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. On deaths in DK, see Patrick Heuveline, “Between One and Three Million: Towards the Demographic Reconstruction of a Decade of Cambodian History (1970–1979),” Population Studies 53 (1998), pp. 46–65.
2. The best overall accounts of the period are still François Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (New York: Henry Holt, 1977)
3. Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
4. Carlos Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 135.
5. The passage is from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 241.
6. On S-21, see David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). Duch, a born-again Christian, was arrested in 1999, after vanishing from sight for over a decade. Ta Mok, apparently unrepentant, was turned over to Cambodian authorities by the Thai in 1999.
7. For a bitter critique of the December 1998 amnesties, see Brad Adams, “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory,” Phnom Penh Post, January 22-February 4, 1999.
8. For Ieng Sary's remarks, see Phnom Penh Post, August 20-September 2, 1999.
9. See Annette Marcher, “Hammarberg: Impunity Cambodia's Problem,” Phnom Penh Post, October 29-November 11, 1999
10. Annette Marcher, “Go It Alone Tribunal Seeks Foreign Gloss,” Phnom Penh Post, October 1–14, 1999
11. Annette Marcher, “National KR Tribunal Takes Shape,” Phnom Penh Post, November 26-December 9, 1999.
12. See also Jason Burke, “Butcher of Cambodia Set to Expose Thatcher's Role,” The Observer (London), January 9, 2000.
13. See Annette Marcher and Yin Soeum, “Govt [sic] to Wrap Up Tight Trial Law,” Phnom Penh Post, December 24, 1999-January 6, 2000
14. Associated Press (Phnom Penh), “Hun Sen Endorses US Proposal,” October 19, 1999.
15. On Hun Sen's subsequent outburst, see Reuters (Phnom Penh), “Cambodia PM Lashes Foreign Demands on Rouge Trial,” November 18, 1999.
16. On the show trial, see Vietnam Courier, ed., Kampuchea Dossier III: The Dark Years (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, 1979).
17. Gareth Porter's Vietnam: The Politics of a Bureaucratic System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
18. points out that defense counsels were abolished in Vietnam in 1975, and were replaced by a court-appointed “socialist pleader … who was not expected to present a legal defense on behalf of [his] client” (p. 172). On S-21's metamorphosis into a museum, see Chandler, Voices from S-21, chap. 1
19. Judy Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” Museum Anthropology 21 (Spring/Summer 1997), pp. 83–98.
20. Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1997), p. 297, deplores what he calls a “slam dunk” verdict of the kind reached at the show trial. The S-21 guard Him Huy, who admitted taking part in the execution of prisoners there, was imprisoned in 1980, and mentioned that “several” other former employees at S-21 had been jailed for a time (author's interview, January 1998).
21. Michael Vickery and Naomi Roht-Arriazi, “Human Rights in Cambodia,” in Naomi Roht-Arriazi, ed., Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 243–51.
22. On PRK historiography, see Ledgerwood, “The Tuol Sleng Museum”
23. Viviane Frings, “Rewriting Cambodian History To ‘Adapt’ It to a New Political Context: The KPRP's Historiography,” Modern Asian Studies (1997), pp. 807–46.
24. Catherine MacKinnon, “Law's Stories as Reality and Politics,” in Peter Brooks and Paul Gewertz, eds., Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 245.
25. An interesting historical parallel would be the heroic status afforded to late-blooming resis-tants in France in 1944, to say nothing of the kindly treatment meted out to many former Vichy officials. See Paul Thibault, “La culpabilité française,” Esprit 24 (January 1991), pp. 22–31
26. Robert O. Paxton, “The Trial of Maurice Papon,” New York Review of Books (December 16, 1999).
27. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, Beacon Press, 1998), p. 151 n. 14.
28. On problems caused by the continuities between regimes, see pp. 134–35. Steven Knapp, “Collective Memory and the Actual Past,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 123–50.
29. See also Margaret Popkin and Nehal Bhuta, “Latin American Amnesties in Comparative Perspective: Can the Past Be Buried?” Ethics and International Affairs 13 (1999), pp. 99–122.
30. See Marcher, “Hammarberg: Impunity Cambodia's Problem”
31. Beth Moorthy, “Govt [sic] Balks at UN Rights Inquiry,” Phnom Penh Post, April 30-May 14, 1999.
32. For a skillfully organized survey of U.S. official thinking about the Khmer Rouge, see Jamie Frederick Metzl, Western Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975–1980 (London: Macmillan, 1996). Ironically, hundreds of thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge, taking refuge in Thailand, soon found themselves “allied” with the Khmer Rouge.
33. On efforts to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice in this period, see Vickery and Roht-Arriazi, “Human Rights in Cambodia”
34. David Hawk, “International Law and the Cambodian Genocide: The Sounds of Silence,” Human Rights Quarterly 11 (1989), pp. 82–138
35. Ben Kiernan, “Cambodian Genocide,” Far Eastern Economic Review, March 1, 1990.
36. Roht-Arriazi, Impunity and Human Rights, p. 3.
37. See also Diane Orentlicher, “Settling Accounts: The Duty to Prosecute Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime,” Yale Law Journal (1991), pp. 2537–615
38. Nino, Radical Evil on Trial.
39. Orentlicher argues forcefully for across-the-board action and concern, while Nino makes a case for a more cautious, contextualized approach to dealing with past wrongs. A recent, eloquent survivor's tale, suffused with recurrent memories, is Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
40. On the UNTAC period, see Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
41. On the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge, see Ben Kiernan, “The Inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian Peace Process: Causes and Consequences,” in Ben Kiernan, ed., Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph 41, 1993), pp. 192–272.
42. David Ashley's interview with a Khmer Rouge defector in 1996, quoted in David Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), p. 179.
43. See also David W. Ashley, “The Failure of Conflict Resolution in Cambodia: Causes and Lessons,” in Frederick Z. Brown and David G. Timberman, eds., Cambodia and the International Community: The Quest for Peace, Development and Democracy (New York: Asia Society, 1998), pp. 49–78, for an astute analysis.
44. On the coup, see Jason Barber, “Democracy from the Barrel of a Gun,” Phnom Penh Post, July 12–24, 1997
45. David Chandler, “Democracy in Cambodia: Return to Sender, Not at This Address,” Asian Studies Review 21 (November 1997), pp. 31–38.
46. Quoted in Annette Marcher and Peter Sainsbury, “UN Seen Softening on Trial for Khmer Rouge,” Phnom Penh Post, September 3–16, 1999.
47. The preceding paragraphs benefit from my conversations with David Crocker and from a reading of his excellent essay “Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework,” Ethics & International Affairs 13 (1999), pp. 43–64.