Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Cambodia tribunal negotiations coincided with the high noon of international crim-
inal justice. The ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia produced a mo-
mentum that led directly to the Rome Statute and the creation, in 2002, of the Interna-
tional Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. To their many boosters, these international
tribunals embodied the promise of the Nuremberg war crimes trials of the 1940s, a legacy
frozen by the superpower calculations of the Cold War. Kofi Annan hailed the establish-
ment of the ICC as “a gift of hope to future generations, and a giant step forward in the
War order, tyrants and mass murderers would no longer be able to bank on impunity. State
sovereignty would no longer be absolute.
Unfortunately the new world had turned out a lot like the old one. The early 1990s
were years of massacre and genocide—Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia—in which foreign gov-
ernments seemed as reluctant as ever to intervene and put an end to the killing. What
the West could offer, however, were trials after the fact. The international criminal courts
were totems of universal values, but also represented the failure or inability of those val-
ues to be applied while the slaughter was actually in progress. Within a few years the
great shining idea of the post-Cold War age—an end to genocide and crimes against
humanity—had been downgraded and farmed out to these new organs of international
justice.
In Cambodia, too, the idea of a tribunal was loaded with deferred hopes. Hun Sen's
brutal seizure of power in July 1997 had seemingly sounded the death-knell for the demo-
cratic system implanted by the UNTAC peacekeeping mission. Frustrated with their inab-
ility to prevent Cambodia's slide back into authoritarianism, many activists and observers
turned their focus to the past. “No peace without justice,” was the rallying cry. Without
addressing the crimes of the past, they said, it would be impossible to tackle the problems
of the present.
9
The idea of a Khmer Rouge tribunal soon became a blank screen for the projection
of every sort of individual and institutional agenda. A court could bring reconciliation,
“healing,” a reckoning with Cambodia's dark past. It could help end the country's “culture
of impunity” and advance international criminal jurisprudence. For the CPP, it was a
chance to bolster its own liberation myth; for its opponents, it was a chance to pick it
apart. That many of these aims were overambitious and contradictory didn't prevent the
tribunal from being seen implicitly as a rerun of the UNTAC mission—another trans-
formational foreign intervention that would reset Cambodian politics and again put the
country on a democratic path.
In August 1999, the UN and the Cambodian government began negotiations on the shape
of the Khmer Rouge tribunal. At the first morning session, the two sides took their seats
