MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Alex Hinton provides analysis of the Cambodian tribunal, charged with prosecuting members of the Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for at least 1.5 million deaths from 1975 – 1979.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me today is Alex Hinton who is the Director of Rutgers University Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, and also author of Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, in addition to a wide range of other books and articles on Cambodia as well as on genocide. Alex, thank you for joining me today.
ALEX HINTON: Thank you for inviting me.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So we’re going to talk today about the ongoing trials at the court for Cambodia. Can you give us some background on what this court is, what its jurisdiction is, and its composition?
ALEX HINTON: Well, the court’s been in the making for quite some time since the genocide took place over 30 years ago. There’s been a long history of politics that led us to this point, but basically after the UN came in in 1993 conditions shifted because prior to that there had been different factions fighting the government in Phnom Penh, and you began to have the possibility of having a tribunal. So negotiations for the tribunal began in 1997 and dragged out until 2003 when an agreement was signed. In 2006, the court actually began to get in motion and we have just begun this year with the first trial of Duch who is the former prison chief at Tuol Sleng which was a torture, interrogation and execution center in Phnom Penh.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And there was a lot of time spent negotiating how the court would function. What were some of the debates and challenges in the lead-up to this court being able to bring people to trial?
ALEX HINTON: Well, to really understand what happened you have to go far back in time to just after the genocide when the Khmer Rouge had initiated a number of purges and people had fled over to the Vietnam border, and several thousand former Khmer Rouge came over with 150,000 Vietnamese troops. They came to power and they deposed the Khmer Rouge. Then a coalition of China, Thailand, and the United States and other powers brought the Khmer Rouge back up into the fighting force. In 1979 the new Cambodian government with the assistance of Vietnamese advisors held the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal. It was actually the first genocide tribunal ever. They convicted Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia and it was dismissed as a kangaroo court. Throughout the 1980s the Cambodian government continued to call for an international tribunal and because various geopolitical powers were at odds with the Cold War, nothing was going to happen. People in the international community wouldn’t even use the word genocide to refer to what the atrocities the Khmer Rouge had perpetrated.
All that changed in 1993. Originally it was the UN election, the UNTAC. When they came in originally the Khmer Rouge was supposed to be part of the process. They withdrew. After the election the government initiated the defection program. And at that time people who had formerly, in the 1980s that wouldn’t even refer to the genocide as a genocide, began to call for a tribunal. The conditions began to emerge at that point in time where we could have a tribunal. But the Cambodian government, because it was now trying to get Khmer Rouge defectors, suddenly said, they started delaying and say they didn’t want a trial. Enough people had defected by the late 1990s that you began to get this movement forward.
In terms of history you had this period of geopolitics which led to a delay and then in the name of reconciliation you had a delay and things really got going much more recently. At the very onset the Cambodian government, which was led by Hun Sen said that they wanted an international tribunal, but as things moved forward and there were delays I think the government also wanted to maintain some degree of control over the process.
Ultimately now have a very unique institution where there is a majority of Cambodian judges on each of the trial chambers and a minority of international personnel. To avoid political influence, and this actually relates to different issues that are in play right now, you have to have a super majority to stop decisions. So, for example, in the pretrial chamber there are five judges, three Cambodian and two international. Right now the prosecution has asked that they try, the rumor is, six more people, so for several months now we’ve been waiting to see what they’re going to do. But for them to stop additional trials one of their international personnel will have to side with all three of the Cambodian personnel. This was something that was negotiated. It was highly criticized, but we’re at a really key juncture that relates to the credibility of the court. I suspect we’ll get a decision within this month or perhaps next month.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And the court has, I think is this right, five people in custody or five people have been charged?
ALEX HINTON: That’s correct, yes.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And among them is some of the top leadership. Pol Pot died before he could be brought to trial, but even among the people who have been charged are there any genocide charges?
ALEX HINTON: No, so far there hasn’t been, though I think that would be something that would be relevant to the second case. We have right now Duch, who is the former head of Tuol Sleng as I mentioned before, is on trial. The second case at this point people suspect that all four of the people will be jointly tried in the second case which is known as Case II. If we’re going to see genocide charges they would emerge in that case. There has been discussions about having Joint Criminal Enterprise move forward with this and I suspect that would be a way to lay a basis for a genocide charge. It doesn’t really make that much sense in case number one because this was a prison chief and he wasn’t in the standing committee of the Khmer Rouge, though he was very closely linked to them.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Have you heard any discussion about the difficulty of applying the legal term “genocide” to Cambodia? The vast majority of people who were killed or who died because of the conditions that they were forced to live in were not of a separate ethnic, national, racial or religious group. Have you heard any of the discussions about how that would be dealt with in potential charges?
ALEX HINTON: Sure. Well, I mean, if there were to be charges based on the UN definition, I think that it would relate to the killing of ethnic Vietnamese, virtually all the ethnic Vietnamese were killed, to the ethnic Cham Muslims who were killed in disproportionately high numbers. Some people had talked about the killings of Buddhist monks. Some people have even said ethnic Chinese. So I think within those different groups there definitely is room to get a charge of genocide. The important thing to remember is that the UN Genocide Convention as it was negotiated originally in the drafts of it they included political and economic groups. That was actually taken out through a political discussion and that’s why we don’t have it more broadly. So you have a legal definition. You also have a common lay definition and I think the Cambodian case clearly fits the common lay definition which is the destruction of a group of people.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Okay. In the Duch case he’s a former interrogator from Tuol Sleng, our S21 prison, what are we learning new about what happened in the areas under his control and about the period in total through his case including the former subordinates of his who are testifying? What new information is coming out of that?
ALEX HINTON: Sure. Well, again, this goes back what’s the purpose of a tribunal in the first place, obviously to hold people accountable, but there’s also the truth seeking dimension of it. This is really a fascinating trial because Duch converted to Christianity in the late 1990s. He was arrested. He’s been in jail, and he’s said effectively that he wants to confess. So he’s been sitting in jail for ten years. Recently the court found that that detention was illegal and that would be taken into consideration when he is sentenced.
He has freely been speaking throughout the process beginning with an apology that he made on the second day of the trial. He is an active participant in the entire process. He speaks frequently, almost every day. Witnesses speak to him, civil parties have spoken to him, the judges have questioned him for days on end and he has had some conflict with some civil party lawyers, but by in large he has been talking non-stop.
In terms of what we’ve learned I think we knew the basic outline of what had occurred at S21, but the detail has just been unbelievable, the detail that we’ve got throughout. If you also go back in terms of sort of unique things that we’ve discovered, Duch also headed an interrogation and torture center before S21 during the civil war in the early 1970s called M13. And the first couple weeks of the court were focused on M13. That was all extremely new information that we knew little about.
Some of the details have been quite shocking. For example, we’ve had testimony just this week and we’ve heard earlier in the trial that a number of prisoners were effectively killed by having their blood drained out of them. What we’ve learned is that the blood was actually taken to soldiers at a hospital, but some of them literally had the blood drained out of their body and that’s the way they died. That’s been quite shocking. Scholars had guessed about what had happened, or based on documentary evidence and a lot of that’s been confirmed, but I think it’s really knowing how Tuol Sleng ran, the connections to the standing committee who was talking to Duch, who Duch was talking to. We just have incredible amounts of detail filled in.
Besides this sort of truth dimension I think it’s also in terms of what’s going on in the courtroom has been fascinating to watch where many of the tribunals, you know, you have the Rwanda tribunals being held in Arusha outside of the country. You have the ICTY being held in The Hague. This tribunal’s being held in Cambodia. It’s about an hour outside of Phnom Phen. Just this week the court announced that actually 12,000 people had attended the tribunal since it began, and I don’t know if we’ve had anything like that that’s occurred with an international tribunal, so that’s quite remarkable. Outreach began, it was very problematic with regard to this tribunal, but especially recently this court has been doing important things. In terms of truth Cambodians on the radio, by going to the court, reading in the newspapers, word of mouth there is a degree of interest in this court that is also something that contrasts to other tribunals.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: One of the things that’s always most difficult for people to understand, and by people I mean people who come from societies where genocide happens, and those of us who work on it, and people who just become interested, is how can perpetrators, and why do they do what they do, an excess of killing that’s much more cruel than just ending life. It’s torture. Are you learning anything more through his testimony about the psychological or the inner-workings of perpetration? How does he explain why he did what he did, or does he?
ALEX HINTON: Well, I think that’s always at these trials and there are a lot of, well there’s some parallels and resonances with the Eichmann trial just in the sense that Duch has basically from day one, when he got up and spoke he said, “I’m sorry for what I did. I apologize to all Cambodians. I know you may not be able to accept my apology, but I apologize and I accept responsibility for all the people who died there.”
As soon as he had finished speaking, this was on day two of the trail and that was a huge moment in the trial, the defense got up and began saying, “Well, he was really just sort of a cog in the machine. He was basically carrying out the orders of the standing committee and he would pass them on to his subordinates.” So you have this sort of twist where he’s saying, “Yes, I’m responsible,” but the defense, the larger argument of the defense and actually he has increasingly said this in his remarks, is that “Well, I was just carrying out the orders of my superiors.”
Again, in this trial while we have gotten incredible detail about the mechanics, I think in terms of motivations, that’s something that has to be inferred. We have learned more about the, for example, the socialization of interrogators. Just this week there’s an interrogator who said that Duch personally told him and his comrades to treat the prisoners like animals. You know, so in terms of dehumanization -- these are things we know about but I think, again, as we go though this trial and we hear from more of the personnel who worked at S21, we’re going to continue to learn about the socialization process, about the humanization. We’ve learned a lot about ideology. We’ve learned about the command structure. At the end of these trials these questions are never completely answered and they’re basic questions that we all have to consider.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And as you have alluded to at several points in your comments thus far, this is a unique case in the landscape of the contemporary use of criminal justice as a post-conflict or transitional justice mechanism in that it’s dealing with a case that happened decades ago. How would you situate the functioning of this court on that larger horizon of Cambodia’s efforts to deal with the past and to rebuild society?
ALEX HINTON: Yeah, that is...
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Sort of a small question, you know?
ALEX HINTON: To really answer that question you have to go back in time, and before I do that briefly I just wanted to mention, earlier you had asked about jurisdiction, so this trial is restricted to those senior leaders and people who are most responsible. That’s the personnel jurisdiction. The temporal jurisdiction is the period that the Khmer Rouge were in power: from April 1975 to early January 1979.
To the question of the history, if you go back in Cambodia to the immediate aftermath of the genocide, the governments that came in had issues of legitimacy because they, of course, were former Khmer Rouge, or the party was predominately composed of former members of the Khmer Rouge. So this is part of the reason you had that 1979 tribunal that I mentioned earlier. It tried to differentiate between the current government, and they portray themselves as the true revolutionary movement that had been subverted by the Pol Pot/Ieng Sary clique. And actually in Cambodia today when people often refer to the past they refer to the Pol Pot period. A lot of that’s linked to what happened in the 1980s. But what I think is important is as the government held this tribunal, they reintroduced education and kids would literally learn to read and write by reading about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. You would see this in elementary school textbooks, for example. You had the creation of Tuol Sleng. The prison that Duch oversaw became a very highly politicized side of memory in Cambodia. School kids went there. Visiting dignitaries went there.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: There’s this infamous map made out of skulls, right?
ALEX HINTON: And that’s a whole other issue. I can talk about it if you want but, right, it ended with a map of skulls and the skulls had to come from every province of Cambodia, and the rivers were colored red for the blood of Cambodia. And eventually it came down because, in this reconciliation period after the UN in the name of reconciliation the King was calling for the skulls to be cremated and to release the souls of the dead. So that’s a whole other long argument.
The important thing is in terms of reconciliation, do we need the tribunal? It’s important to recognize that actually the government focused extensively in the 1980s on the genocide. Some people went to jail. Some former perpetrators went to jail for a short period of time on the local level. Former perpetrators and people they had abused were living on the local level. There was some local level mediation and sometimes there wasn’t.
Over the course of 30 years, you have a situation where the people know that another person they see riding by on their motorcycle everyday was the person who had killed someone in their family. You have situations like that. You have a lot of other people who say, “Well, in the name of Buddhism, I’ve sort of forgotten about this, put it out of my mind. I’ve forgiven them.” So you have a wide mix of opinions about whether or not there should be a tribunal.
What has been really fascinating to me is that as the tribunal has become a reality, and as it’s been on the media since March, Cambodians by and large everyone I now speak to, I was in Cambodia about a month ago, everyone says, “Yes, I know a little bit at least about the tribunal and I want him to be tried, and I’m in favor of the process.”
If you’d asked people 15 years ago you would have gotten a very different response, I think. So, again, I think it’s important not to think of a tribunal as coming in, as something people have always waited for. It’s something that arrives at a certain historical moment when conditions are appropriate. Certainly there was a lot of work prior to this that’s gone on in Cambodia that sort of helped with local level reconciliation. This is, I guess, just another piece in that process.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Alex, you had also mentioned to me that there’s a website where people who are interested in following the proceedings with video and transcripts and all. You said it’s Cambodia Tribunal Monitors website?
ALEX HINTON: Yeah, there are a few different websites. One is the website of the tribunal itself which is the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and that website is www.eccc.gov.kh. The court people refer to it commonly as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, but it’s actually the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. The second website is the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor, which has a daily blog about what happens, and also has video. It actually has the entire proceedings on video and that’s www.cambodiatribunal.org.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And for people who are interested in your work, you said you’re currently working on a new project on transitional justice. They can learn more about you and your research from your website or the faculty page on Rutgers site. Is there another page that’s helpful?
ALEX HINTON: Sure. They can go to cghr.newark.rutgers.edu and that’s the website for the center that I direct and there is information about publications. If you go under people, staff and click on my name it has links to my different books, and one will be coming out next year on transitional justice called Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Murder. And the book I’m currently working on, probably I’ll finish it in the next year and it’ll be out the year after that, will specifically be on the tribunal itself, but also consider issues of how a society comes to terms with genocide.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Great. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me and I hope we’ll be able to talk with you more to learn more about the trials, particularly if the next four are held in a single trial that would be a fascinating way to catch up with you and with what’s going on with the court.
ALEX HINTON: Absolutely, thank you.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Thanks.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about responding to and preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/genocide.
