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In-Depth Information
ronage. At the ECCC, the international judges and their Cambodian colleagues operated
in very different worlds.
When Tolbert arrived in Cambodia on a UN trouble-shooting mission in April 2008, he
was shocked. A laconic North Carolinian, Tolbert had just wound up a five-year stint at
the Yugoslavia tribunal. To Cambodia he brought long experience with the nuts and bolts
of international criminal law. As the UN's first special expert to the ECCC, his job was
simple: get the tribunal into a shape to allow it to begin holding trials. After the arrests
of the four Case 002 suspects in early 2007, things had ground to a halt. Tolbert found a
court that was administratively in a state of “near-disaster.” “They didn't have the judicial
infrastructure in place,” he told me. “They didn't have the court management systems in
place, they didn't have much of anything in place.”
Then there was the issue of corruption. In February 2007, the Open Society Justice
Initiative (OSJI), a court monitoring group funded by the Soros Foundation, had aired
allegations that Cambodian staff at the ECCC were paying a portion of their salaries to
their boss, the Cambodian administrator Sean Visoth. It called for an immediate investig-
ation. The government's first reaction was to lash out at OSJI, threatening to expel it from
Cambodia; the UN's was to wait for the issue to go away. But in mid-2008, after further
reports of corruption, the UN was eventually forced to act. The UNDP, then providing
backing to the Cambodian side of the ECCC, froze its funds until the issue was addressed.
In late 2008 a deal of sorts was reached. Visoth was cashiered and sent on indefinite
“medical leave,” and the court agreed to set up a new anticorruption mechanism. Another
round of negotiations ensued to hash out the details. Hoping to avoid further delays, key
donor countries again pushed the UN to compromise. The final formula consisted of a
single anticorruption counsellor, appointed by the Cambodians. The lucky candidate was
Uth Chhorn, the head of the National Audit Authority, a mirage-body which in seven
years of operations had yet to make any of its reports public. 18 It wasn't a good sign. The
new anticorruption body was “a face-saving, essentially empty mechanism,” said Heath-
er Ryan, then head of OSJI's Cambodia office. But it achieved its main purpose, giving
donors just enough confidence to keep the ECCC moving toward its first case.
On March 31, 2009, a 67-year-old Cambodian man rose and prepared to address a packed
auditorium on a military base 15 kilometers outside Phnom Penh. He wore a short-
sleeved white shirt and baggy grey trousers fastened high on his skinny frame with a
leather belt. The old man adjusted his reading glasses. Clutching a pile of papers tightly
with his right hand, he began to read aloud: “I would like to express my regret and my
deepest sorrow …” The man's name was Kaing Guek Eav, but most people in the audien-
ce knew him as Duch. As head of S-21 prison, he had presided over the death of at least
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