Cambodia's Curse (49 page)

But then Youk Chhang’s victims were not alone. Across society, older people, particularly, decried the trial. “PTSD, everyone has it,” said Khieu Kanharith, the information minister. “That’s why Cambodians don’t want to bring this up again. The wounds are deeper than anyone could imagine.” Kek Galibru lamented, her voice heavy with the pain, “It is still a trauma, and the trial has reopened the wound.” She was director of Licadho, the human-rights group. “Now they say they are going to clean the wound. They didn’t clean it. It’s hemorrhaging!”

 

In the courthouse, meanwhile, the corruption allegations were stymieing any hope of progress. The Cambodian employees had gone unpaid for so long that even Kong Srim, the Cambodian chief judge, suddenly decided he wanted the investigation concluded. “I see this as our most important challenge,” he said in March 2009, “as it hardly seems reasonable to continue working without remuneration.”

Another UN official, Peter Taksoe Jensen, assistant secretary-general for legal affairs, met with Hun Sen and Sok An repeatedly, trying to resolve the disagreement between the UN’s insistence on autonomy for a corruption monitor and Cambodia’s determination to remain in control. At about that time a defense attorney produced a government memo of uncertain provenance that plainly showed Hun Sen’s direct control of the trial thus far. He and Sok An had handpicked the Cambodian judges and all of the court’s Cambodian legal staff, even though the government’s Supreme Council of the Magistracy was supposed to have done that. When asked, government officials evaded questions about the memo. All the while the international judges were saying they wanted to bring in more defendants, additional senior Khmer Rouge leaders still at large—such as Meas Muth, former Khmer Rouge southwestern division commander.

Meas Muth was seventy years old now, but still active—and wealthy. He wasn’t hiding. He lived in southwestern Battambang Province, part
of the area he controlled as Khmer Rouge commander. His house was lavish by Cambodians’ standards—a three-story wood-frame structure powered by generators, with a shiny blue-tile roof decorated with ornate Asian filigrees. Two cars, both large SUVs, sat out front under custom-fit tan covers. Two satellite dishes on his roof fed programming to flat-panel televisions inside. In numerous interviews Meas Muth insisted that prosecuting him would be a mistake because that might destabilize the nation. “To add five, six or 10 more, or more than that, that’s not for justice, but to stir up Cambodia, causing instability,” he told the Voice of America.

One afternoon in the summer of 2009 he was not home, but his son was there: Meas Savuth, thirty-four. He adored his father and pointed to a wooden shrine of sorts he had built for his dad on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. It looked vaguely like a gallows. “I had been separated from my father since I was six years old,” said Meas Savuth, a handsome, rugged-looking young man wearing flowered shorts and no shirt, eating lychee nuts, and throwing the shells on the ground. He was born in 1974 and during the Khmer Rouge years lived with his mother and father, the military commander.

He was five years old when Vietnam invaded. While most Cambodians rejoiced, his parents fled. “Everyone ran off in all directions,” he recalled. “My mother went one way, my father disappeared. They left me with my aunt. She was killed by the Vietnamese. I had foster parents. I lost track of my father.” Along the way he never went to school. He remained illiterate. “But then in 2002 I heard he was here. I came here in 2002 and saw my older brother. But he did not trust me. Did not believe it was me. He said the rumor was that I had been killed by the Vietnamese. He wouldn’t believe me, so I went away.” Later, “I went to a fortune teller who told me to look for my father. She told me, ‘You cannot see your father until your daughter is a teenager.’ So when my daughter turned thirteen, I came back.” That was in 2007. “This time they accepted me.”

Down the road, Sit You Sous, a sixty-one-year-old blacksmith, grew excited when asked about Meas Muth, his neighbor. He had
been twenty-eight years old when the Khmer Rouge took power, and he had been certain then that he would die. He’d been thrown into a rice field to work, he said, though he had never spent a day as a farmer. “Other people from my village surrounded me in the field, hid me, and chanted that I could make knives, axes, and machetes,” he recalled, sitting shirtless in his front yard. His grandchildren, giggling, crawled in and out of a small wooden box lying in the dirt. “A Khmer Rouge soldier heard that and pulled me out. I was very frightened. I thought they would kill me. But they brought me some tools and asked me to make something. I did, and that is what they had me do for the rest of the war.” Even now, he had a blacksmith shop around the back of his house with a foot-powered bellows.

Across the road one of his daughters was doing laundry in a little stream. She wet clothes then laid each one on a board resting in a tub of soapy water and scrubbed it with a brush. Sit You Sous said he didn’t know what to do about Meas Muth now. “I don’t know how to feel angry because this is the system here. But that regime was too brutal. I will let the government take care of it. I depend on the government. That’s its function.” He sprang up from his chair all of a sudden, saying he wanted to get something out of the house.

He brought back some papers on U.S. State Department letterhead. “I applied to go to America because I want my children to see the developed world. I dream that they can go to a better school in the modern world, then come back to help this country.” The letter showed that he had applied for a residency permit in early 2006. The department sent back that letter simply acknowledging receipt and informing Sit You Sous that the application would expire if further documentation was not supplied by June 1, 2007—two years earlier. “I have been holding on to this,” he explained, waving the papers, “waiting for someone to come by who could read it to me.”

 

As soon as word about prosecuting additional suspects began leaking out of the court, Hun Sen went on the offensive. He had already said anyone criticizing the trial’s Cambodian judges “are not human; they
are animals,” who “even want to seduce their own parents.” As for the additional defendants, he insisted, “This will not happen on my watch. The UN and the countries that supported Pol Pot to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN from 1979 to 1991 should be tried first. They should be sentenced more heavily than Pol Pot.”

Then later that year he took up a new, illogical argument. “If you want a tribunal, but you don’t want to consider peace and reconciliation and war breaks out again, killing 200,000 or 300,000 people, who will be responsible?” he asked. “Finally, I have got peace in this country, so I will not let someone destroy it. The people and the nation will not be destroyed by someone trying to lead the country into instability.”

During the early debate over the trial ten years earlier, Wiedemann said, several senior government officials, including Sihanouk, had openly worried that calling for a trial would spook Khmer Rouge officers and their men still living in Pailin, prompting them to leave the jungle and “make trouble again.” But Hun Sen, Wiedemann added, never voiced that concern back then. Now, the prime minister never explained exactly how or why the unrest he predicted would come about, given that the Khmer Rouge movement was dead. Most Cambodians had ignored the Duch trial; there’d been no known incident of unrest. Another time he lashed out against the idea of more prosecutions. “I would rather see the court fail than let the country fall into war.”

Even so, in the court’s offices sat more than a dozen legal investigators, foreigners on the UN payroll who were researching new suspects and couldn’t care less what Hun Sen had to say about it. And in the fall of 2009 the court did announce that it intended to charge additional suspects. Though the judges did not name them, speculation centered on Meas Muth and a few others.

 

On July 26, 2010, the court convicted Duch of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to thirty-five years in prison—by almost every reaction an exceedingly light sentence for a man who oversaw the torture and deaths of 15,000 people. But he will not serve even thirty-five
years. After subtracting his time already spent in jail, more for cooperation and good behavior, and more still for a period of illegal detention in a military jail, the court left him with nineteen years to serve. When the judge sentenced Duch, he was sixty-seven years old, meaning he could conceivably walk out of prison a free man one day.

This was the first time in recorded Cambodian history that a former senior government official was actually sentenced to prison for a human-rights violation. And as best as anyone can tell, this was also the only trial ever conducted in Cambodia under true international standards of justice. Still, many surviving victims were distraught. “This is a slap in the face,” said Bou Meng, who had testified against Duch. Shouting at the crowd in the muddy yard outside the courtroom, Chum Mey, another survivor, complained, “We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and now once again. His prison is comfortable with air conditioning, food three times a day, fans and everything!” So limited was Chum Mey’s existence, like those of most Cambodians, that a life in prison seemed preferable.

Most people involved with the court wondered if that would be the last trial. After all, Duch had been the youngest of the defendants. His trial took three years—and he was cooperative; he readily admitted his guilt. All of the others were in full denial. In fact, Ieng Thirith threatened that anyone who accused her of murder “will be cursed to the seventh circle of hell.” Ieng Sary was eighty-four, and since he was put in jail he’d been hospitalized several times for heart problems and blood in the urine. He could barely walk. Khieu Samphan and his wife were both in their seventies and in frail health. Nuon Chea was in his eighties and no better off. Which of them would still be alive in three years?

But there was more. Everyone involved with holding the trial was by now battered and weary. Every step along the way had involved brutal fights with Hun Sen and Sok An, constant threats, and manipulation. Most reporting on the trial focused on corruption, political manipulation, and money shortages. No one spoke any longer of their dreams that the trial would strike a blow to impunity and injustice. In
fact, the trial had offered new demonstrations of impunity and injustice. Already donors had given more than $100 million to the court, knowing that some was lost to corruption. Now the court was asking for another $93 million for just the next two years—not enough time, more than likely, to complete another trial.

But then in the fall of 2010 the court surprised everyone by issuing indictments for the four remaining defendants at the same time, charging them with crimes against humanity, genocide, murder, and religious persecution. Mindful of their ages and health, the court planned to try them together. All of them were members of the government that ordered the killing. But unlike Duch, these people probably did not actually kill anyone themselves.

The United Nations and other assorted international organizations that followed the trial were pleased. But, as usual, Cambodians were barely aware. Various surveys and anecdotal evidence—I asked every Cambodian I met about the trial—showed that most people simply weren’t paying attention. They didn’t have a television, or they couldn’t get the station that aired the trial, some said. Others shrugged and professed to have little interest. They were too busy. The trial was on during the day, when they were at work in the rice paddies. If they had time to watch TV, they wanted to be entertained.

The trials might finally bring some Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. But so many other hopes had also been attached to it. The trials would wake up the Cambodian people. They would demand an end to impunity and use the Khmer Rouge trials as an example for reforming the state’s dysfunctional court system. None of that came to pass.

The government and United Nations did finally agree on the selection of a corruption monitor. They chose Uth Chhorn, Cambodia’s auditor general, a seemingly independent official. But then no one in Cambodia’s government was truly independent. In the end, after more than a year of argument and debate, the UN seemed simply to have given up.

Uth Chhorn had been running the National Audit Authority whose job was to review the finances of government agencies. Of course, honest
reports on that subject were certain to be toxic, so the authority was years behind in issuing its findings. When Uth Chhorn did issue a report, the government forbade him to publish it, though the law required that the authority’s work be made public. If Uth Chhorn had fought back against any of this, there was no public record of it. Now he was to be the court’s corruption monitor, someone victims could trust to take their reports and complaints in confidence. But he was given no investigative authority or mandate, and a few weeks after his appointment, Uth Chhorn betrayed his true intent. He told reporters it was not his job to resolve corruption charges. Instead, he said he would simply pass complaints to senior UN officers—and to Sok An, the deputy prime minister, as well as other Cambodian officials, the very people the complaints were likely to be about. Just like the Office for Reports on Corruption in downtown Phnom Penh.

Only four people came to see him in the first six months. And in 2010 donors to the trial wondered why he deserved a $140,394 salary, given that all he did was make a few phone calls and hold an occasional meeting. Uth Chhorn’s salary was cut to $32,000, recognizing his role as a cipher in the courtroom—nowhere near the robust and independent corruption investigator the UN had wanted.

Hun Sen had beaten the United Nations once again.

S
erge Thion, a French sociologist, said it best: “Explaining Cambodia is typically a foreigner’s business,” he wrote. “For about one century, foreigners have been providing explanations.”