Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
line under the past and absolve its own leadership, while keeping the door open for future
defections.
Starting in 1984, the PRK staged annual “Days of Anger” when victims delivered
speeches condemning the “genocidal clique” and actors re-enacted the liberation of Janu-
ary 7. These still take place every year at Choeung Ek, the partially exhumed killing
field on the outskirts of Phnom Penh where thousands of S-21 victims were executed and
thrown into pits. Taken together, S-21, the “killing fields”, and the Days of Anger became
the stage for a selective telling of history, one that featured a handful of genocidal mas-
terminds, millions of innocent victims, and a patriotic vanguard that delivered them from
the nightmare.
If this didn't look much like real justice and accountability, at least it was something.
Throughout the 1980s, the UN, the US and other Western governments showed nearly
no interest in putting the Khmer Rouge on trial. Even after the Paris Peace Agreements
were signed in 1991, political support for trials was elusive. The Western governments
that framed the treaty were more concerned with detaching themselves from the Cam-
bodian conflict than in dredging up the past, and so the agreements made no reference to
accountability. Under Chinese pressure, all references to genocide or specific atrocities
were whited out of the final treaty.
This question of justice was left to a small number of Western scholars and activists
centered around the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR), es-
tablished in the late 1980s in Washington. Under the leadership of its executive director,
Craig Etcheson, CORKR worked tirelessly to gather evidence and rally support for pro-
secutions. In the end it was the actions of the Khmer Rouge themselves that opened the
door to trials. Pol Pot's return to civil war in the 1990s put him beyond political rehab-
ilitation. In July 1994 the Cambodian government officially outlawed the Khmer Rouge,
and, after years of patient lobbying by CORKR and other activists, the idea of a trial also
started to gain traction in foreign capitals. In April the US Congress passed the Cambodia
Genocide Justice Act, which made support for a Khmer Rouge tribunal official US policy
and provided funding for the establishment of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale
University, as well as a local field office, DC-Cam, which set about gathering evidence
of DK-era crimes.
A couple of years later, as DK forces began defecting to the government in droves, the
UN finally got engaged. The first feelers were put out by Thomas Hammarberg, who ar-
rived in Cambodia as the Secretary-General's special representative for human rights in
mid-1996. In his encounters with ordinary people, Hammarberg recalled hearing strong
support for trials. After the establishment of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals in 1993
and 1994, he thought it obscene that piles of skulls still lay in the open in Cambodia while
