Officials and judges from the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal for former members of the Khmer Rouge traveled to one of the disposed regime's villages to hold a town hall meeting for local residents. Five senior members of the Khmer Rouge were arrested in 2007 and charged with a variety of atrocities, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. It's estimated than nearly 2 million people died in a quasi-eugenics campaign backed by the Khmer Regime to form an ultra-communist agrarian utopia through forced labor camps.
The senior members included 66-year old “Duch”, a former math teacher who lead the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, or S-21, where more than 14,000 people were tortured under his strict authority.
“Justice is not only for the victims, but also for those who have been charged. For truth to be found, your participation is needed,” said Cambodian tribunal judge, You Bunleng.
Villagers sat on a tile floor thumbing through a brochure titled “An Introduction to the Trial of Khmer Rouge Leaders” whose cover depicted villagers in the 1980s discovering the skulls of victims.
“I can't read,” said one 50-year-old woman. “But this picture shows the killing during the Khmer Rouge era.”
The audience also watched a 25-minute film explaining how the tribunal process works.
Several members of the audience expressed outrage of the alleged unbalanced portrayal of the Khmer Rouge as the sole party responsible for the millions of deaths in Cambodia. The United States heavily bombarded Cambodia during the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia after toppling the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.
“The Khmer Rouge is the victim,” one man declared to thunderous applause.
You know what? Good for him! Last year, this tribunal was on the verge of collapse. I remember studying this one in grad school and there was a boat load of criticism heaped on the tribunal's hybrid system of justice for allowing undue Khmer Rouge sympathy to influence the legislative outlines of the tribunal. It's refreshing to see such a transparent, grass-roots system emerging out of this one. It's frustrating to see the opaque trials, such as the Iraqi Tribunal and some of the more sterile prosecutions, like the Yugoslavian examinations, take place without this sort of community town-hall effort. The tribunal examining Liberian President Charles Taylor is okay at this too. In that system, the heavy-hitters are being prosecuted in a hybrid system seated at the Hague because the domestic systems simply can't handle that level of examination for several reasons. I’m a big fan of this bubble-up type of system it seems to be helping things along in Iraq for whatever that's worth. It's striking how many lessons the Big Bad West can learn from countries typically seen as bass-ackwards. Let's hope the Khmer Rouge system keeps this momentum up, albeit 30 some years after the atrocities were committed.
