As trials begin, questions shadow Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal.

Reuters Pictures - A painting is seen at a "Killing Fields" memorial in Batey district in Kampong Cham province, 125 km (78 miles) east of Phnom Penh, March 28, 2009. Former Khmer Rouge torturer Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, will face his second trial for crimes against humanity on Monday. At least 40 witnesses are expected to testify against the former chief of Phnom Penh's S-21 prison, where an estimated 14,000 people were tortured and killed

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Thirty years after the fall of the ultra-Maoist regime known as the Khmer Rouge that ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s, trials are set to begin to hold a handful of its leaders accountable. Under their fanatical regime, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died from overwork, starvation and murder.

After years of delays, testimonies begin Monday in the trial of Kaing Khev Iev, the chief of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious torture center, codenamed S-21.

Iev, better know by his nom de guerre, Duch, is one of five detained senior Khmer Rouge leaders believed to be the architects of the regime's reign of terror who are still living. They face a UN-backed war crimes tribunal and could receive a maximum of life imprisonment.

Court officials went to great lengths to frame last month’s procedural hearings for Duch as an historic moment of progress for the court and for the impoverished country’s healing.

But even as some degree of official accountability is materializing, a storm of criticism and controversy surrounds the war crimes court — a hybrid structure with both international and national judges, lawyers and administrators presiding.

The Cambodian side is struggling to keep financially afloat following a funding halt after allegations arose last July that national staff, in order to secure their jobs, were forced to pay sizable portions of their salaries to their bosses.

Donor countries have provided the bulk of funds to run the tribunal, and the bitter pill of backing a court associated with corruption has become more difficult to swallow as the court’s budget, originally set at $53 million for three years, has ballooned to $170 million for five years just one-and-a-half years into the process.

Cambodian court officials have denied the allegations. A review last September by a UN oversight body has yet to be made public.

However, a report from a German parliamentary delegation, written last November after its members met with the tribunal's deputy director of administration, Knut Rosandhaug, presents a bleak picture: Referring to “grave corruption” problems, Rosandhaug said that if “the national government continues to object to following up on the corruption allegations … the United Nations should withdraw from the tribunal” or else it will risk tainting its image.
But UN officials have yet to voice such stern words.

“The only real pressure can come from the donor countries and the UN — with one voice — but they have never done that,” said Brad Adams, head of the London-based Human Rights Watch in Asia, and an early member of the negotiations with the government to establish a war crimes court.

By failing to throw down the gauntlet, the UN has undermined the court’s entire mandate, he said.

“We thought we should have an international standard court,” Adams said. Instead, he continued, in this case "the government considers the UN an intruder.”

Indeed, Canadian co-prosecutor Robert Petit is being made to feel he overstepped his mandate.

Petit’s move to add more suspects to the docket — a handful of figures he describes as having been key to implementing the policies set by the regime’s top leaders — was blocked by his Cambodian colleague, Chea Leang, a niece of the current deputy prime minister.

She argued that additional prosecutions could prove destabilizing, overstretch the tribunal’s limited resources, and would run against the spirit of the 2003 U.N. treaty establishing the court, which called only for “senior leaders” of the regime and “those who were most responsible” to be tried.

Many senior government posts are currently held by former Khmer Rouge cadre, and experts say the government fears a wider roundup could expose them to scrutiny. For his part, Prime Minister Hun Sen made his position clear in 1998 when he recommended Cambodians “should dig a hole and bury the past.”

But Petit says casting a wider net would play a key role in validating the court’s work. “It would allow the court to achieve as much justice as possible even within its limited confines.”

For Adams, the move is more essential: “Unless there are more cases, it will not have done the minimum necessary for all of this to have even been worthwhile.”

The country is divided over whether additional high level cadre should be tried — with 57 percent in favor and 41 percent opposed, according to a recent poll. It is safe to say, however, that the decision will come down to politics between Cambodian and international officials, and have little to do with local public input.

As the court makes slow progress, old wounds fester.

“Thirty years later, the memories are still excruciating,” said Van Nath, who witnessed prisoners being waterboarded, doused with battery acid or simply bludgeoned to force them to admit to trumped-up crimes against the regime.

Nath, 63, is one of S-21’s few surviving victims. While he was electrocuted and faced constant threat of execution, he survived only by dint of his artistic skills, which he was forced to use to paint propaganda portraits of Pol Pot.

Unlike the other figures in detention, Nath’s former keeper, Duch, now a born-again Christian, has acknowledged his crimes and asked for forgiveness. He is, however, expected to argue in court that he was following orders from his superiors and would have been killed had he not obeyed.

Even if the rail-thin, seemingly benign former schoolteacher cuts a sympathetic figure on the stand, to Nath he remains “a man who gave orders with authority” while presiding over a prison where more than 12,000 men, women and children were brutally tortured before being executed in the “killing fields” outside the city.

Making more Cambodians with blood on their hands face trial would help the country’s healing, he said.

But, he added, “with the limited movement we have so far, that doesn’t seem possible … and I’m still waiting every day for judgment on these five.”

Brendan Brady is a reporter and editor at The Phnom Penh Post.

Labels: Kaing Guek Eav, Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Pol Pot

Khmer Rouge trial: the British victim John Dewhirst

(Getty Images)
Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, the former Khmer Rouge prison chief of S-21, or Tuol Sleng prison, is pictured in the courtroom at the Extraodinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh on March 30, 2009. Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes tribunal on March 30 resumed the trial of the Khmer Rouge's prison chief, the first person to face justice at the court for the regime's atrocities, the chief judge said.

By Anne Barrowclough (Times Online)

As hundreds of Cambodians crowded into a courtroom today to see the chief torturer of the Khmer Rouge finally brought to trial, a lawyer in Britain quietly got on with her work. Only those closest to her know how, 30 years ago, Kang Kek Ieu, alias Comrade Duch, destroyed Hilary Holland’s family.

In 1978 Ms Holland’s brother, John Dewhirst, aged 26, was captured by the Khmer Rouge and sent to be tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng, the regime’s infamous prison. He was the only Briton among 17,000 Cambodians to die at the prison. Three decades on, as Cambodia watches the first trials of the Khmer Rouge’s leaders, his fate continues to devastate his sister.

"The horrific circumstances and the manner of how John was killed still makes it so difficult to cope with," Ms Holland told The Times from her home in Cumbria.

The young Newcastle teacher had been sailing through the Gulf of Thailand with two friends in July 1978 when their boat was intercepted by a Khmer Rouge patrol boat.

The boat’s skipper, Stuart Glass, a Canadian, was killed instantly. John and the other crew member, Kerry Hamil, a New Zealander, were sent to Tuol Sleng, a former school turned into a torture centre presided over by Duch.

They were tortured until they “confessed” to being CIA agents and taken to Cheong Ek, a pretty orchard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. There they were bludgeoned to death with an iron bar.

Back in Britain Ms Holland was increasingly concerned at her younger brother's unusual silence, but it was not until she switched on the news one evening that she learnt he had become a victim of a regime she had hardly heard of. Shortly afterwards the Foreign Office called to tell her that John had been captured and imprisoned. He was almost certainly dead, they said.

The pain of that moment has never left her. "It was indescribable," she said. "I don't think I have got the words to explain how I felt. I used to think that if you could die from emotions like this I would have died.

"I have experienced death – I have experienced the death of my husband when I had two young children. But this is completely different."

Yesterday, in a wood-panelled courtroom on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city, Duch identified himself quietly before charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, premeditated murder and torture were read to a UN-backed war crimes tribunal.

He is the first of five former leaders of the Khmer Rouge to be brought to trial, 30 years after the fall of Pol Pot and his regime.

Nearly two million Cambodians died between 1975 and 1979 as Pol Pot pursued his ideal of an agrarian communist utopia. Tuol Sleng was the most notorious Khmer Rouge prison: of the 17,000 people sent there, only 15 are known to have survived.

Behind a bulletproof screen at the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, the 66-year-old former maths teacher who presided over their suffering listened impassively as the court was told that the sole purpose of Tuol Sleng – known by the Khmer Rouge as S-21 – was to kill its inmates.

According to the thick file of charges read to the court: "Every prisoner who arrived at S-21 was destined for execution. The policy at S-21 was that no prisoner could be released... prisoners brought to S-21 by mistake were executed in order to ensure secrecy and security."

During his trial Duch’s brutality will be described in detail. On his orders, victims were plunged head first into tanks of water, often drowning; they were given electric shocks to their genitals and their ear drums. The strongest were hooked up to intravenous pumps and literally bled dry.

It was cruel fate that delivered John Dewhirst into Duch’s hands. The carefree, adventurous young man had taken a break from his teaching job in Japan to go sailing with his two friends on their motorised junk Foxy Lady. Their boat drifted into Cambodian waters but, to the Khmer Rouge, their presence had no innocent explanation.

Yet even after she had heard of his incarceration in S-21 his sister hoped his friendly nature would help him to survive. "I thought if anyone could develop a personal relationship with his jailers, it would be him," she said. "I thought he would charm his way out of there."

She had no way of knowing that nothing could have saved him – although the meticulous Duch, who catalogued the details of all his prisoners, described him as a "polite" young man.

Before he died John was forced to write a detailed confession explaining how he was recruited and trained to be a CIA spy.

The confession, in Cambodian and English, entitled “Details of my course at the Annexe CIA college in Loughborough, England”, claims that John was recruited into the CIA by his father and from 1972 to 1976 was taught CIA techniques, including photographic skills and weapons-handling, by retired agents at his teacher-training college in Loughborough.

The confession, a mixture of the dull and the ludicrous, claims that Loughborough was one of six CIA colleges in Britain. Others, John wrote, were in Cardiff, Aberdeen, Portsmouth, Bristol and Doncaster. His college, he said, was run by “retired Colonel Peter Johnson” while the bursar was a CIA major.

Among many bizarre admissions was a claim that his father was a CIA agent whose cover was “headmaster of Benton Road Secondary School”.

The confession is signed and dated 5/7/1978. John's thumbprint sits along his signature. Like those made by thousands of innocent inmates at S-21, the confession was probably dictated by his interrogators on Duch’s orders.

Hilary Holland wants answers. She wants the Khmer Rouge leaders to admit their guilt and to explain why they destroyed so many lives. "There must be a public accountability," she said. "I would like it to be seen that they understand what they did. We still seem to know so little."

It is too painful for Ms Holland to attend Duch's trial, but she is relieved that after all this time the leaders will finally be brought to justice.

"No one is going to undo the horrors, but bringing these people to account is important. I don't care what happens to them but I would like them to tell the truth, to explain their motivation."

Duch, who was arrested in 1999 after being tracked down by a journalist, is alone among the defendants in expressing remorse and has agreed to co-operate with the tribunal.

At a procedural hearing last month, he made it clear through his lawyer that he would use his trial to apologise to his victims, although he did not expect “immediate” forgiveness.

His French lawyer, Francois Roux, said: "After ten years of prison at last the day is coming where he can in public respond to the questions."

But Duch cannot expect no forgiveness from Ms Holland. "People like Duch, who ordered the atrocities, were the worst," she said.

Labels: Comrade Duch, John Dewhirst, Kang Kek Ieu, Khmer Rouge Tribunal

The long search for justice

Labels: Khmer Rouge Tribunal

Labels: "country for sale", Cambodia for sale, eviction, Global Witness, hun sen

US: drug problems in Cambodia, Philippines

Labels: drug, US State Department