Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Only two people survived the massacres of the Cham Muslims in Sambor Meas village.
Him Man and his wife Him Jas live in a dim corrugated iron shack with a roof slanting
down to a hatch overlooking the fast-moving waters of the Mekong River. Thirty-seven
years ago, in 1977, when Khmer Rouge soldiers rounded up the Chams and marched them
to the killing field at Wat O Trakuon, the couple escaped by jumping into a stream and
hiding out beneath a thick carpet of water hyacinth. Man, still sprightly at 60 years of age,
has since become something of a folk hero in Sambor Meas. Everybody in the village
knows
Kamphlaok
, as he is nicknamed, after the Khmer word for “water hyacinth.” They
all eagerly pointed out the winding dirt path that led to his home.
Man has told the story of his daring escape many times. As he ran through the familiar
narrative, he grew animated, shouting, jumping up, drawing imaginary lines on the wood-
plank floor to indicate the location of pivotal rivers and trees. Neighbors crowded around,
adding their own details and embellishments. When asked about the ECCC, Man and his
neighbors grew quiet. For a moment there was no sound but the crackle of a nearby cook-
ing fire. Man then said he was happy to see senior leaders on trial. Everybody was. But
like many other people in the village, he wanted something the ECCC, with its interna-
tional standards, would never be able to provide. “To satisfy us, they should be killed,”
he said, to nods of agreement from those around him. “These people owe us their blood.”
What will be the ultimate legacy of the ECCC in places like Sambor Meas? Nobody really
knows. To be sure, there have been many positives to the tribunal's work. One of the
greatest was the massive historical archive created by the trials, a gift to a future gen-
eration of historians and researchers. Another was the education of young people about
the DK period. In 2007, DC-Cam published a history textbook that is now widely used
in Cambodian schools—something that is hard to imagine without the momentum gen-
erated by the ECCC. People have finally grown comfortable with openly discussing the
crimes of the Khmer Rouge. For DC-Cam's Youk Chhang, there was power in simply
seeing once-untouchable figures like Ieng Sary on trial.
But in a broader sense the ECCC has struggled to live up to massively inflated expect-
ations. Long before the first trial had started, the court bore the crushing burden of dashed
democratic hopes. It became a sort of UNTAC Redux, a legalistic salve for the woes of
democratic demoralization. It soon formed an entire wing of the Cambodian development
complex, employing dozens of mostly foreign lawyers, judges, experts, and commentat-
ors. The more people analyzed and debated the court and its supposed benefits, the more
expectations were forced to the outer limits of the possible.
There was a notable absence from most of these discussions. While everybody vent-
riloquized the victims of the Khmer Rouge, the vast majority remained silent, with little
say as to the sort of justice they wanted to see, if any at all. Surveys conducted in Decem-
ber 2010 found that while there was strong support and awareness of the trials at the
