By LUZ RIMBAN
PHNOM PENH—In a village 15 kilometers south of this city, tourists from all over the world arrive every day to pay their respects to the victims of Asia’s own holocaust, burning incense sticks, offering flowers, or simply gazing at the skulls piled 10 levels high inside a Buddhist stupa standing over what was once a mass grave.
This is the Choeung-Ek Genocidal Center in Dong Kor district, one of nearly 200 sites known as the “killing fields.” Here, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as the Khmer Rouge, executed, tortured or forced into labor thousands of Cambodians while it was in power from 1975 to 1979.
On Monday, March 30, the world will finally know what really happened in these killing fields as the Khmer Rouge trials enter what is called the substantive phase. For the next three months, evidence will be presented and testimonies will be heard of events that transpired 30 years ago, considered one of the worst atrocities in human history.
“We will see justice actually happening,” said Youk Chhang, director of a nongovernment organization called Documentation Center Cambodia or DC-Cam, which is playing a significant role in the trials as the source of raw data needed by all sides in the case.
The trials are not just for Cambodians, Chhang said, as he addressed a group of journalists from China, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines which have undergone or are undergoing human rights abuses by their own governments. “This is something we should share with the rest of Southeast Asia,” he said.
The cases against the Khmer Rouge will be heard by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a special court that came into existence after the Cambodian National Assembly passed a law in 2001 creating a legal venue to try the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.
Although there had been attempts to charge and try the Khmer Rouge through a tribunal and a truth commission in the early 1980s, these were local attempts that proved unsatisfactory, and ending with no one being punished. Key Khmer Rouge leaders such as Prime Minister Pol Pot have since passed away, while his deputy minister, Ieng Sary, is said to be living in a mansion in Phnom Penh.
Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and other leaders of the Khmer Rouge are blamed for the deaths of two to three million Cambodians under Democratic Kampuchea, which is what the Khmer Rouge called the country while it was in power. These millions died from starvation, exhaustion, disease and summary execution, after being separated from their families, hauled off to the countryside and made to work in agricultural cooperatives to fuel Cambodia’s agricultural economy. Many were tortured and killed in the most brutal manner.
“The abuses of the Khmer Rouge regime are not just shards from the country’s shattered past; they are alive in the hearts and memories of millions of ordinary Cambodians,” said John D. Ciorciari, international lawyer and DC-Cam legal advisor, in the book The Khmer Rouge Tribunal. “The pain of that period cannot be erased, but a credible accountability process can help Cambodians come to terms with their troubled history and move toward a promising future.”
DC-Cam has collected five types of primary evidence, Chhang said. These are documents, physical evidence, interviews, photographs and films. So far, it has gathered 600,000 documents which include telegrams, minutes of meetings and confessions. Physical evidence includes the mass graves which were identified using GPS equipment. Interviews that are part of the primary evidence are those taken of both victims and perpetrators. So far, there have been 25,000 photographs and 245 films from that period already discovered.
DC-Cam is making the evidence available to all sides in the case, Chhang said.
The ECCC, which opened the trial with procedural matters in February, is composed of local as well as international judges and prosecutors.
“Cambodia invited international participation due to the weakness of the Cambodian legal system and the international nature of the crimes, and to help in meeting international standards of justice,” said the ECCC.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, in a message on the Khmer Rouge trials, said: “Over three million of our people lost their lives. They were our parents, our children, our relatives, our colleagues and our friends. Those of us who survived have lived for a quarter of a century bearing pain and grief for those we lost and being haunted by the nightmare of our own experiences.”
Cambodians, and the rest of the world, are unlikely to forget. Symbols of the Khmer Rouge period have become must-see tourist attractions, among them Choeung-Ek as well as the Toul Sleng, a secret prison that has been turned into a museum.