via Khmer NZ
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated 7 hours ago
Sath Prum was just a boy when the Khmer Rouge came to take away his father. But he was old enough to know that he would never see his dad again.
“I knew that they would execute him,” Prum said. “They tied him up and put a blindfold on him. I didn’t know where they were going to take him. I didn’t know how it would be done. I just knew that he would be killed.”
Prum’s sister, two brothers and a brother-in-law were also killed during Pol Pot’s four-year reign of terror in Cambodia, when about 1.7 million people died of hunger, disease and execution.
On July 26, Cambodians scattered across the world will gather around computers, television sets and radios to hear the verdict in the case of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as “Comrade Duch,” who oversaw a Khmer Rouge prison system in which thousands of Cambodians were tortured and executed between 1975 and 1979.
Three decades have passed, but Duch is the only Khmer Rouge leader who has been tried for crimes against humanity. Pol Pot died in 1998. The trials of four additional defendants are expected to begin later this year. But it is uncertain if the U.N.-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia will indict many others — if anyone at all.
And that has left many Cambodians, like Prum, feeling as though the tribunal has failed to achieve anything resembling justice.
“It’s too late to save anyone,” said Prum, a 49-year-old assembly line worker who lives in West Valley City. “They cannot give me my father back.”
The handful of indicted leaders “are very old now,” Prum said. “They’re going to die soon anyway. So what is the point?”
Donor countries have poured more than $100 million into the tribunal, but on the eve of the Duch verdict, Japan sent an emergency payment of $2.26 million to keep the cash-strapped court solvent.
Prum doesn’t think that’s a good investment — particularly not given the small number of people the court has managed to indict. He believes the money could have been better spent in a nation that continues to suffer from the economic legacy of decades of war and political strife.
Markus Zimmer, who recently returned home to Utah after an assignment as a judicial systems consultant to the Cambodian court, understands the criticism. Zimmer noted that Duch was a cooperative and contrite defendant. The next trial will likely be more complicated, with the defendants mounting “vigorous defenses with international defense teams.”
Those cases could take years to complete.
“There’s kind of a race going on,” he said. “They’re trying to get these cases processed before people die or before they become mentally incompetent.”
But Zimmer, who has served as an advisor in 27 nations, also sees promise in tribunals like the one in Cambodia, which have the potential to leave the legacy of a better functioning justice system. After all, he said, a nation that can handle the complexities of decades-old war crimes cases should be better situated, in the future, for simpler criminal prosecutions.
What the courts can’t do is promise even justice for every offender and every victim. They also set a standard that some believe is unsustainable for nations with few legal resources and little experience.
The justice provided in U.N.-backed tribunals “is a standard of justice that would be justice in a really good world,” said University of Utah philosophy professor Leslie Francis, who lectures on the intersection of international law and ethics. “But that’s not the world we live in.”
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