Leseprobe

C A M B O D I A 6 5 To this day, it has proved extremely difficult to come to terms with the crimes. Many of those responsible and involved in the Khmer Rouge regime at the time are at large and have no fear of prosecution. Some of them are now members of the government and parliament. In a few cases, the perpetrators and victims live next door to one another in the same towns. Although an inter- national criminal court consisting of Cambodian and international judges which operates in accordance with the Cambodian Criminal Procedure Code was set up in 2004, only two cases have thus far gone to trial. In the first trial, “Comrade Duch”, the director of the torture prison Tuol Sleng where over 20,000 people died, was sentenced to life imprisonment. In the second trial, a total of four Khmer Rouge leaders—Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith, and Khieu Samphan— were indicted. Only two of the accused—Khieu and Nuon—received life sentences for crimes against humanity. Ieng Sary died in prison; his wife Ieng Thirith was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial due to dementia and was released from prison. The two who were convicted did not accept the verdict and described the proceedings as a “show trial”. The last commander of the Khmer Rouge, Ta Mok, who succeeded Pol Pot as “Brother No. 1” in 1997, was detained and charged with crimes against humanity. However, he died in 2006 before the case went to trial. The Cambodian government under Hun Sen, also a former Khmer Rouge official who fled to Vietnam in 1977, rejects further trials. After the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnamese troops in 1979 and the discovery of the “Killing Fields” and the torture prisons, the Vietnamese had bones and skulls exhibited publicly in so-called “stupas” to publicly document the crimes committed. Many of the mass graves have not yet been located. With the support of international organisations, in particular Yale University, a documentation centre was set up in Phnom Penh in 1995 to collect the names and biographies of the victims and to implement reconciliation and healing projects. A memorial was set up in the Tuol Sleng torture prison and in Choeung Ek, one of the “Killing Fields”. In view of the increasingly repressive climate in Cambodia, civil society initiatives and actors find it difficult to initiate processes of reckoning with the crimes of communist rule and their consequences. A map of Cambodia made from the bones of the victims of the Khmer Rouge in the Tuol-Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh