A note on news in Cambodia

I am not sure how much we shared in the past about the atrocities that have taken place in Cambodia in recent years, but if you know nothing about it, it is worth taking some time to Wikipedia the whole thing. You could look up Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge. It was basically a huge annihilation of Cambodian people by their own. It took place between 1975 and 1979.

This was significant in why we chose this place to come and teach, but it is also significant to my post today. Many of the people we have met here are lawyers with the tribunal that is just now taking place. We were supposed to go to the trials starting last Monday for one man named Duch. He ran a genocide prison called S-21 which you can visit in Phnom Pehn.

His address to the courtroom and the jury was in the newspaper recently and I decided to include snipets here...
"Making good on a pledge to account for his past, the former director of Pol Pot's uppermost secret prison addressed his judges and the nation Tuesday both to acecpt responsibility for the killings of the Khmer Rouge regime and express remorse to his victims. 'I believe in general that at this time peopel regard me as a coward and an inhuman person. I would like to accept this with honesty and respect,' Duch told the court. 'In my position as head of S-21, I dared not think about any possibility beyond following orders from superiors, although I knew that enforcing the orders would lead to the end of thousands of people's lives. I attest under the law to all the murders in S-21, espeically to the torture and carnage.' "

Although he admits to the crimes he is accused of, his lawyers are trying to get him off the hook since he is the only one who is being tried currently and he was not the head of operations throughout the country. His defense lawyer says he was only one of 200 prison directors and he was not the deadliest, as at least one other man was responsible for as many as 150,000 deaths at another prison camp.

This approach is one reason the Cambodian people do not take the trials too seriously. The people we have talked to consider them to be mainly for show, and mostly ineffective. The coverage of the trials can be found on CNN in the States, but it is also constantly in the papers here. The Prime Minister, Hun Sen, declared Tuesday that he was opposed to further prosecutions of former Khmer Rouge leaders becuase he feared they would prompt a return to civil war. He also said that he hopes the UN backed court would run out of money so that the Cambodian judicial system can take over and speed up the exsisting cases. Hun Sen has connections with the Khmer Rouge party in his past, perhaps this is why he wants the UN to back off. This is from another article in the same newspaper, hopefully the irony is not lost on any of you reading this.