Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary (C) standing next to Pol Pot (L) |
A verdict was never reached in Ieng Sary's human rights abuses case. His story reveals the limitations of international tribunals.
Apr 1 2013
Sebastian Strangio
The Atlantic
"it remains doubtful that the ECCC will successfully complete its current caseload and make a positive contribution to ending impunity and increasing respect for the rule of law in Cambodia."
MALAI, Cambodia-- It was the sort of send-off his own regime would never have permitted: an elaborate Buddhist funeral that ended with prayers, reminiscences, and the crackle of fireworks in an inky night sky.
Ieng Sary, one of the last surviving leaders of Cambodia's murderous
Khmer Rouge regime, died of a heart attack on March 14, at the age of
87. For a week afterward, hundreds of white-clad mourners turned out in
this former communist stronghold to pay their last respects to a man
they remembered as a comrade and patriot--a man who thought only of his
nation.
To everyone else, Ieng
Sary enjoys the dubious distinction of being the only person to be
tried for genocide on two occasions: first in 1979, shortly after the
Khmer Rouge fell from power, and then more recently at a UN-backed
tribunal in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. By dying in the dock, he escaped justice for his role in the Khmer Rouge regime,
which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Led by "Brother Number One" Pol
Pot, the Khmer Rouge conducted a hellish communist experiment--a "super
great leap forward" that killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians and
sowed a green land with hundreds of mass graves.
But that's not how Sary is remembered in this forgotten corner of the
country, a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge until the mid-1990s. On the day
of his funeral, monks chanted as wartime comrades and sun-cured farmers
arrived at Sary's country villa to pay their respects. Wreaths of
flowers surrounded his gold casket, which sat alongside a
jasmine-fringed photo of the former leader. Later the casket was moved
into an elaborate two-story crematorium festooned with blinking lights.
During a 10-minute eulogy, Sary's
daughter Hun Vanny made just one reference to his involvement with the
Khmer Rouge, a period when "he sacrificed his life by leaving his wife
and family, moving from place to place." (sick! puke! disgust!)
"Cambodians talk about the purity of water, purity of gold, purity of silver," she said of her father. "None of these can compare with the purity of heart." (sick! puke! disgust!)
Also paying a final farewell was Sary's frail widow and fellow defendant
Ieng Thirith, who was led to the base of crematorium before being
bungled into a van and driven away. Thirith served as the Social Affairs
Minister under the Khmer Rouge and was also on trial until her release
in September, when the court ruled she was unfit to stand trial due to
dementia. As Sary's body burned and fireworks flowered overhead, old
comrades reminisced about a boss who fought to free his country from
foreign domination. "Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot were not
communist people--they were liberators," said 58-year-old Chan Sary, a
former Khmer Rouge soldier who lost a leg to a landmine in 1990. "At the
top they didn't know the hardships," he added, leaning on his crutch.
This is not the story historians usually tell. When the Khmer Rouge took
power in April 1975, toppling a U.S.-backed republic, they treated
Cambodia's people as an expendable raw material with which they planned
to forge a rural utopia of unsurpassed purity, an agrarian dream-state
whose name would "be written in golden letters in world history." Money
was abolished, the cities were emptied, and the entire population put to
work on vast rural communes. Sary was one of the six members of the
Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)--the
nerve-center of the regime. Appointed foreign minister of "Democratic
Kampuchea" -- as the new regime euphemized itself -- Sary issued calls
for sympathetic Cambodian intellectuals to return to reconstruct a land
destroyed by five years of civil war. Of the 1,000 or so who returned,
most were jailed, executed, or perished from starvation or disease.
Many years later Sary would deny any involvement in Khmer Rouge atrocities,
but experts have little doubt there was enough evidence to convict him.
In 2001, Steve Heder, a leading historian of the period, concluded in a
paper co-authored with the legal scholar Brian D. Tittemore that arrest
and execution orders routinely crossed Ieng Sary's desk. They concluded
there was "significant evidence of Ieng Sary's individual
responsibility for CPK crimes, for repeatedly and publicly encouraging
arrests and executions within his Foreign Ministry and throughout
Democratic Kampuchea."
Ieng
Sary was the most slippery of the Khmer Rouge leaders--a master
dissimulator who easily shed old revolutionary convictions and adopted
new guises. He was "a devious manipulative man, crafty rather than clever,"
wrote Philip Short in his book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. "He
concealed insincerity beneath a calculated ability to make himself
agreeable." Unlike his austere comrades, Sary was also a revolutionary
with a taste for the finer things, such as lobster thermidor, cognac,
and French perfume, which he enjoyed during years of starvation and
civil war. "When he dropped his normally radiant smile, [it was clear]
how dark and harsh his face could become,"wrote James Pringle, a former
Reuters correspondent who first met Sary in China in 1971. "I would hate
to have faced him across an interrogation table."
After the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in January
1979, Sary and his colleagues fled to the Thai border, where they
re-established themselves in jungle bases and, with Chinese and Western
support, waged war on the new Vietnam-backed government that had
replaced them. Sary, now in charge of the movement's finances, installed
himself in Pailin, a dusty boomtown surrounded by rich gem and timber
deposits. By the 1990s he had grown rich -- much richer than his austere
revolutionary colleagues. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the two
remaining defendants at Cambodia's war crimes court, did not profit from
their careers. Pol Pot died, defeated and penniless, in 1998.
In August 1996, Sary defected to the government in return for a royal
amnesty that quashed a death penalty handed down by a Phnom Penh
tribunal in 1979. Sary and his wife lived a comfortable life in a shady
villa in central Phnom Penh, jetting off to Thailand regularly for
medical treatment. Justice finally caught up with the pair in November
2007, when they were arrested and charged with crimes against humanity.
It was a heady moment: Nearly 30 years after the Khmer Rouge fell from
power, there was a hope that at last justice would be done.
But Ieng Sary's death mid-trial is a major setback for Cambodia's war
crimes court, known officially as the Extraordinary Chambers in the
Courts of Cambodia. After six years and more than $150 million, the
tribunal has secured just one conviction--that of Comrade Duch, a former
school teacher who was sentenced to life in prison for his role in
running S-21, a grisly security center where he oversaw the
interrogation and torture of as many as 15,000 people.
The two remaining defendants in the court's second case, known as Case
002, are also frail and in uncertain health: 86-year-old Nuon Chea, the
Khmer Rouge's chief ideologue and "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, has
been in and out of hospital and was reported earlier this year to be
"approaching death." Khieu Samphan, the regime's former head of state,
is 81. Peter Maguire, the author of Facing Death in Cambodia, compared
Sary's death to that of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died
in 2006 while on trial at The Hague, and argued that both tribunals
allowed themselves to become mired in legal minutiae. "This is typical
of the UN's post-Cold War war-crimes trials," he said. "Like the
Milosevic case, there is no urgency."
The
court has also been dogged by allegations of political interference in
connection with two possible future cases, Case 003 and Case 004,
involving five more senior regime figures. Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former mid-ranking Khmer Rouge commander
who defected to Vietnam in 1977, has ruled Cambodia in various
coalitions since 1985, and retains a strong grip over the domestic
courts. In October 2010 he told visiting UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon that more trials at the ECCC--a hybrid court composed of local
and international judges--would not be "allowed." Because of these two
impediments, the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a
court-monitoring group, said last week that "it
remains doubtful that the ECCC will successfully complete its current
caseload and make a positive contribution to ending impunity and
increasing respect for the rule of law in Cambodia."
But the problem runs deeper. In some ways Sary's death has heightened the contradictions of a tribunal process that has
always struggled to reconcile the irreconcilable: to map the
abstractions of international criminal law onto the social and political
realities of contemporary Cambodia--a
post-conflict country with virtually no history of independent courts.
This gulf was illustrated shortly after Sary's death, when the
London-based human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement
urging the expedition of the trials. "Ieng Sary should not be presumed
guilty of the crimes alleged," it said, "as the proceedings against him
were not completed and there has been no verdict." In legal terms this
was exactly correct, but how just or moral was it?
The ECCC was explicitly established with the victims in mind, and was
the first tribunal of its kind to invite participation from civil
parties representing those who suffered under the Khmer Rouge. How much
solace were victims expected to take in the fact that the legal
procedures had been followed, and that a man whose crimes are well
attested by the historical record had gone to his grave--as many will no
doubt interpret it--"not guilty?"
It showed, above all, that Cambodia remains a long way from The Hague.
Sary's death, like Milosevic's before it, demonstrates that one of the
saving ideas of our times--the hope that international criminal
tribunals can punish atrocities, deter warlords and provide closure for
victims--remains burdened by serious limitations. "Cambodia is a
complex, mostly Buddhist country," said Maguire. "The idea that Western outsiders can transplant Western modes of conflict resolution is incredibly naïve."
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