Dear Blog Pals,
I am posting my most recent column on the Tiki Lounge. I doubt you'll enjoy it -- it's not very light-hearted or whimsical. But it's an important moment in history...
Andrew
Years of hard work worldwide helped make Khmer Rouge trials a reality
From The Waterloo Region Record
February 21, 2009
Norng Chan Phal has waited patiently for justice. In fact, he’s waited more than thirty years for it.
Phal, 38, lives in Cambodia. He still has vivid memories of being forced out of his home with his family and relocated to a Khmer Rouge death camp called S-21 (also known as Toul Sleng).
Phal lost his parents to the Khmer Rouge killing fields. His father was arrested in early 1978. The authorities came for the mother and her children six months later. The last time Phal saw his mom was through one of the windows at the detention centre. “I never saw my mother again,” he said.
Phal’s parents were but two Cambodians killed under the Khmer Rouge regime, which lasted from April 1975 until Vietnamese forces invaded and overthrew the fanatical Maoists four years later.
Nobody knows exactly how many people perished in the madness. Somewhere between 1 million and 1.7 million lives were lost in a country with a population of 8 million.
The Cambodian killing fields came after years of destructive warfare in the countryside. The Vietnam War spilled into Cambodia in late 1960s and early 1970s. Round-the-clock bombing by American planes resulted in substantial civilian deaths.
When the Khmer Rouge took control of the battered nation in 1975, they promised a “Super Great Leap Forward” and forced the urban population into collectivist forced labour camps. Untold numbers perished.
Now, justice might finally be arriving in Cambodia.
Thanks to years of hard work by legions of human rights activists, aided by the United Nations, a series of trials are shining the spotlight on some of the key architects of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. New information is coming out, which will help future generations understand this tragic time.
So far, the trials have focused heavily on Kaing Guek Eav, alias “Duch,” director of the centre where Norng Chan Phal’s parents were killed. But other key Khmer Rouge figures are also being put on trial.
These trials almost didn’t happen. There are still ex-Khmer Rouge members in the Cambodian government who didn’t wish to see them. Organizers had a difficult time raising funds and finding adequate resources to carry out the trials. In such a desperately poor country, many ordinary Cambodians are focused on day-to-day survival and don’t have the luxury of dwelling on the past.
It took years of hard work by Cambodian human rights activists and their allies around the world to make these trials to happen.
In a packed courtroom outside of Phnom Penh, more than a thousand people are gathered to witness this landmark event. Observers include journalists, attorneys, Buddhist monks in saffron robes and survivors of the Khmer Rouge killing fields.
Of course, justice is never guaranteed. Just as the rest of the world looked the other way during the Holocaust in the 1940s, so the international community failed to act and thus let down Cambodia in the 1970s.
There are fragments of hope, though. Already, the eyewitness testimonies from the trials have helped preserve a painful moment in Cambodia’s history. And most importantly, they’ve managed to put a human face on the cold death toll statistics that people cite as if they’re discussing miles to Mars.
Novelist Milan Kundera once wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” For genocide survivors such as Norng Chan Phal, these trials are about more than simply achieving justice. They’re also about preserving the memory of the men, women and children who perished in the killing fields of Cambodia.
Andrew Hunt is Chair of the
Department of History at the University of Waterloo.
