Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
along opposite sides of a polished wooden table at the Council of Ministers. On one side
sat Deputy Prime Minister Sok An, head of the government's new high-level tribunal task
force. On the other sat Ralph Zacklin, the UN's Assistant Secretary-General for Legal
Affairs. Zacklin, a brusque British lawyer, had worked for more than two decades to ad-
vance the idea of a norms-based international order. He had had a hand in the establish-
ment of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, and would later play a role in setting up
the Special Court for Sierra Leone. But in Cambodia he faced a government with a very
different view of justice, and how it should be pursued.
There were two main disagreements between the UN and the Cambodians. The first
was the balance of power within a “mixed” tribunal. Whose laws would prevail and
which side would have a majority of judges? The second related to the court's jurisdic-
tion. Both sides agreed that only leading Khmer Rouge figures would be indicted—a
tribunal aiming to try thousands of low-level perpetrators was clearly impractical—and
there were too many skeletons in too many closets to extend the court's temporal juris-
diction beyond 1975-9. But this was where the agreement ended. As in the 1980s, the
Cambodians wanted to try a hand-picked clique of DK leaders. The UN favored a more
open-ended legal process.
These differences were underpinned by fundamentally divergent perspectives of
justice. Like the development experts who jetted into Cambodia during the UNTAC
years, Zacklin and his legal team were dedicated professionals with little experience of
Cambodia and how it operated. From a legal standpoint, of course, it didn't much matter.
The law, after all, was the law: neutral, universal, categorical. The main issue was wheth-
er the tribunal would uphold international standards of due process.
The Cambodians, on the other hand, saw justice in essentially political terms. They
pointed out that when the Khmer Rouge were still a threat, it was their own policy of force
and diplomacy that had brought them to heel, not the proclamations and “mandates” of
the UN. Hun Sen and other Cambodia officials questioned whether the UN even had the
moral authority to lecture it about justice, given the fact that Pol Pot enjoyed the world
body's support until 1991, and they bristled at the arrogance of the UN's lawyers, who
seemed to look upon them with enlightened disdain. Straight away it was clear the two
sides were “on completely opposite paths,” recalled Zacklin, who retired from the UN
in 2005. “The Cambodian side did not truly want to have a tribunal at all. For politic-
al reasons they had decided to go ahead with the calls for a tribunal while at the same
shuddered to a halt.
Again the Americans helped break the deadlock. Since the passage of the Cambodia
Genocide Justice Act in 1994, the Clinton administration had become perhaps the most
energetic international proponent of a trial for the Khmer Rouge. In 1997 it had even
