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.

GUATEMALA: HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATORS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE A DECADE AFTER CIVIL WAR

A few months ago, 1worldinternational published a feature on the Argentinean Generals who had been made to face justice decades after their involvement in crimes against humanity committed during the darkest period of the country’s history. The same fate has befallen military officers in Guatemala who presided over alleged crimes against humanity and genocide committed mainly against the country’s indigenous Mayan populace.

The UN Truth Commission set up in the aftermath of the country’s 36-year civil war which lasted from 1960 to 1996 estimates that 200,000 people were killed and/or are still missing since the civil war. The country with a population of 13 million and second only to El Salvador as Central America’s most populated country comprises mainly of indigenous Mayan Indians.

During the ‘dark period’, the country’s army was engaged in a war against left-wing guerrillas who comprised mainly of individuals of Mayan origin. As a result, the government endorsed death squads and paramilitaries akin to the Sudanese government’s use of the Janjaweed in Darfur in its attempts to squash the guerrillas and suspected collaborators. In fact the UN backed Commission for Historical Classification also surmised that Guatemalan security forces were behind 93% of all human rights atrocities which took place in that period and that 83% of the victims of the crimes were Mayans.

The worst of the human rights violations including rape, wanton executions and massacres of whole villages are said to have occurred during the rule of Generals Efrain Rios Montt and Oscar Meja Victores between 1970 and 1983. Survivors of the civil war welcomed last week’s conviction of five right-wing paramilitaries (Eusebio Grace, Julian & Maria Acoj, Santos Rosales, Lucas Tecu) and their subsequent sentencing to a total of 7,710 years in jail for their role in a 1982 massacre in the village of Plaza de Sanchez. The sentence is largely symbolic as the maximum term served under Guatemalan law is 50 years. Four of those individuals were members of a government-sponsored militia and the fifth was a former army intelligence officer.

These latest convictions follow the earlier conviction of a former Guatemalan soldier, Pedro Pimentel Rios, who was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the massacre of 201 people in the village of Dos Erres during the brutal 36-year civil conflict. Amnesty International, for long a solitary voice in advocating the bringing to justice of the perpetrators of the mass crimes has welcomed the latest convictions. Sebastian Elgueta, Amnesty International’s Central America Researcher, said: “slowly but surely, justice is beginning to prevail for these horrendous crimes that have hung over Guatemalan society for three decades.” He continued “each new verdict erodes the long entrenched impunity in the country and the authorities must continue to ensure that the thousands of victims and their relatives are given access to justice and full reparation as well as the truth about what happened.”

General Efrain Rios Montt for his own part in the civil war faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity following the Guatemalan court’s recent revocation of an amnesty granted to Montt by his successor. General Victores on the other hand was ruled unfit to answer to charges of genocide as a result of a stroke suffered recently. Despotic governments around the world will do well to monitor the developments in Guatemala not least because of the message the recent convictions send to the world, that being that as was also the case in Argentina, justice delayed is not justice denied.