Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ECCC, they weren't a high priority. A full 98 percent of those polled said the economy,
jobs, and poverty reduction were more important than justice; 83 percent said the gov-
ernment should address people's daily problems rather than crimes committed more than
three decades earlier.
34
As far as international legal advocates were concerned, however, the question was
already settled. Though they cared deeply about how the court might benefit victims, they
assumed, axiomatically, that international legal norms dovetailed with the needs and de-
sires of ordinary people. That Cambodia was a poor, rural Buddhist society with no his-
torical experience of independent courts or impartial justice—to say nothing of the at-
omizing effect of conflict and mass killing—was largely irrelevant. If anything, it only
increased the urgency of the task. Like the development industry, the international justice
project had a global, universal scope. “As much as anyone,” the British political scientist
Stephen Hopgood has written, “the beneficiaries of international trials are international
advocates. Victims are collateral damage, the raw material for building the machinery of
interventionary power necessary to do good in a world of sovereigns.”
35
It was perhaps always inevitable that the Khmer Rouge tribunal would fail to reconcile
the irreconcilable, to map the visionary abstractions of international law onto the messy
realities of contemporary Cambodia. And so the legacy of Nuremberg, implanted on the
banks of the Mekong, produced another mirage—perhaps the most distorting, disorient-
ing mirage of all.
