CAMBODIA: ANOTHER MASS MURDER SUSPECT ESCAPES JUSTICE

News of the death of Ieng Sary, 87, one of the high level officials of the country’s deposed Khmer Rouge regime, has been met with a range of responses. The responses have broadly fallen into two categories with some ecstatic that Sary has now met his maker and will accordingly be judged for his hand in the pogroms committed in his time on earth and many who are disappointed that Sary will not now face justice as well as his accusers in the courts of law.

Ieng Seng served as foreign minister in the 1970s and at a time at which the country’s leadership was headed by the murderous Pol Pot whose dictatorship was responsible for the killing of between 1.7 and 2.5 million people. In the aftermath of the pogrom, the United Nations (U.N.), with the agreement of the Cambodian government, created the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, now officially referred to as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, with the aim of trying senior and the most culpable members of the regime. The Tribunal’s processes are overseen by locally qualified and international judges working hand in hand to ensure the achievement of objectives placed within its remit, i.e. facilitating access to justice for victims of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide committed by the regime between April 1975 and January 1979.

Elisabeth Simmoneau Fort, a legal representative of some of the victims echoed the sentiments voiced by many that Sary’s death is a big blow to the authorities’ efforts which are aimed at bringing those responsible for the mass crimes to book. Ms Fort stated: “For the victims, this death narrows the scope of the trial and limits their search for truth and justice.” She added: “We can say that by death, Ieng Sary escapes justice.”

Sary’s death comes against the background of claims that the Cambodian government has impeded the Tribunal’s efforts by repeatedly interfering in its work and the rather shambolic conviction rates of the Tribunal constitutes, in the writer’s view, sufficient evidence to buttress this. Thus to date, only one high ranking official of the regime Kaing Guek Eav, famously known as “Duch” has been convicted for his hand in the massacres. Compounding matters further is the fact that there are only two surviving high ranking members of the regime, the majority being deceased and one having been declared mentally unfit to stand trial. With the twin evils of government interference and lack of funding impeding the process one finds it difficult to see how an ending which involves the conviction and subsequent imprisonment of those in custody will ever be achieved.

For reasons of expediency perhaps the cases should be transferred to a neutral country, possibly within the area in which Cambodia is located, appointed by the U.N. as this may rid the issue of government interference which is seen as a major stumbling block in the way of the Tribunal. While many call for increased funding of the Tribunal, one struggles to see how this would result in speeding up the process as it is the interference in the first place which has resulted in the gridlock currently being experienced by the Tribunal, and as a consequence, the Tribunal’s costs have risen accordingly. The Tribunal is clearly not short of funding, what with a reported $175 million having been spent in the five and half years from mid-2006 when it was founded to the end of last year. The writer’s sentiments are seconded by Surya Subedi, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia in last week’s speech in Geneva, Switzerland. To sound-off, Subedi, in urging the Tribunal to exhibit some urgency in dealing with the trials, asserted: “We owe it to the surviving victims of the Khmer Rouge, the families of the victims, and the whole of Cambodian society that continues to suffer from the impact of the Khmer Rouge.” Admittedly, the writer couldn’t have highlighted the significance of the trials to the Cambodian people any better than Subedi did.