5 January 2007
Cambodian Prime Minister Puts His Weight Behind Khmer
Rouge Trial
Friday to publicly put his full and unequivocal support behind a
trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders, saying the crimes perpetrated
under the regime could not go unpunished.
Speaking at a rally in the eastern district of Memut in Kampong Cham
province, the first territory to be liberated from the Khmer Rouge's
grasp by Vietnamese-backed forces in late 1978, Hun Sen said former
Khmer Rouge leaders being brought to justice was a lesson that must be
taught to ensure future governments understood the price of despotism.
"The crimes against humanity of the Khmer Rouge genocidal clique must
not be tolerated," he said in a speech broadcast on national radio.
"We should bring them to trial to give justice to the victims, and
this should serve as a warning to all people in power that they must not
create this kind of brutality," Hun Sen said.
Friday's address lacked the apparent ambivalence of a speech the
prime minister made late last month when he said that as far as he was
concerned, "the story had ended" when former senior Khmer Rouge leaders,
including former head of state Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot's former deputy
Nuon Chea, had dined at his home in December 1998.
That date marked the formal surrender of the Khmer Rouge and began
a period referred to by the government as national reconciliation. The
term "story" is also a Cambodian euphemism for its 30-year civil war.
Critics have consistently questioned the government's political will
to go through with the joint UN-Cambodian trials of a handful of the
remaining ageing and mainly ailing former leaders and some have even
gone as far as to accuse the government of meddling in the process.
They pointed out that many of the current members of the government
were themselves former Khmer Rouge cadres of varying rank before they
defected and fled to
would return to overthrow it.
Although the prosecution stage of the proceedings, scheduled to
take three years, began in mid-July, the process has again stalled
amid bitter wrangling over the internal rules necessary to proceed.
The site where Hun Sen chose to make Friday's speech, combined with
the imminent celebration of Sunday's anniversary of the 1979 ousting
of the Khmer Rouge from power, is likely to reassure some, at least, that
the government does have the political will to hold the trials although
exactly who will be prosecuted remained unclear.
Up to 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, torture, disease, overwork
and execution during the 1975-1979 rule of the ultra-Maoists in one of the
worst genocides of the past century.
Advocates of a trial have warned that it must proceed with haste or risk
never going ahead at all. Former leader Pol Pot died in 1998. Former military
commander Ta Mok also died in hospital last year without ever facing court,
and most other former leaders are in their 70s and 80s and complaining of
failing health.
Copyright 2007
Deutsche Presse-Agentur