Ex-Khmer Rouge in former stronghold play the numbers game (Feature)

By Robert Carmichael Oct 3, 2010, 3:44 GMT

Pailin, Cambodia - 'They do not have blood on their hands,' said Mey Mak, Pailin's bespectacled deputy governor, of the four former Khmer Rouge leaders indicted last month by the war crimes court.

'Khieu Samphan, for example, he was responsible for the economy. Ieng Sary just went in and out of the country, and Ieng Thirith was only in charge of the social affairs ministry.'

'So it seems to me that they are victims,' he said of the movement's former head of state, foreign minister and minister of social affairs respectively.

The fourth person indicted was Nuon Chea, known as Brother Number Two, and regarded as the movement's chief ideologue.

Mey Mak, who worked for a decade as secretary to the Khmer Rouge's late leader Pol Pot, was speaking at a public meeting in late September in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin in western Cambodia.

Senior members of the UN-backed war crimes tribunal had travelled there from Phnom Penh 400 kilometres away to explain the court's work.

Their trip into the movement's old heartland came just days after the court indicted the four surviving former leaders for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Across Cambodia their indictments are regarded as long overdue. But that is not the case in former strongholds such as Pailin, where the defendants used to live.

Mey Mak told the audience of several hundred police, military and civilians, most of whom former Khmer Rouge, that power lay in Pol Pot's hands. Therefore trying anyone else was inherently unfair.

His comment drew a dry response from international co-prosecutor Andrew Cayley.

'I certainly anticipate in this trial, as in many others I have done, that responsibility will be laid at the feet of the dead, and the living will claim innocence,' Cayley said.

The court estimates that up to 2.2 million people died during the Khmer Rouge's catastrophic rule between 1975 and 1979. More than a million likely died violently.

But it turned out that the former cadres at the gathering were more interested in another number: How many people does the court want to try? The answer, Cayley told them, is no more than 10.

The first defendant was Comrade Duch, who was jailed in July for 30 years for his role as commandant of the S-21 torture and execution centre. Then there are the four former leaders, whose trial will likely start next year.

Lastly, the court is investigating five more, who remain unidentified.

'Those five may or may not go to trial, depending on the work of the investigating judges and what they find,' Cayley said. 'So with those 10, that is it.'

It is an answer that goes down well in places like Pailin, but which mystifies the rest of Cambodia. How can no more than 10 people be held accountable for so many deaths?

A large part of that answer is politics, which has constrained the court since before its inception. Many senior figures in Cambodia's government were in the Khmer Rouge, and a court with a wide remit might reveal some uncomfortable truths.

Further afield, the United States and China were among the countries involved in supporting the movement at one point or another, but would rather the spotlight shone elsewhere.

Other nations were involved too, but politics has dominated the life of this tribunal. It will likely rear its head again if - as some expect - the court eventually shelves the five new investigations.

Doing so would suit Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has come out strongly against them. And it seems unlikely that many of the court's Cambodian staff would feel comfortable going against the premier's wishes.

Mey Mak suggested the court should focus more on national reconciliation and less on investigating the five new suspects, although he conceded that trying the four ex-leaders fits with the tribunal's legal remit.

'But like me and others, they wanted to escape from the regime and could not,' he said, before asking his home audience: 'How could they have escaped?'

Just how responsible these four were for what happened lies at the heart of the tribunal's second case. But a more pressing fact is that the youngest defendant is 78, and one or more might not survive a lengthy trial.

So there remains the possibility that 67-year-old Comrade Duch will be the only person held accountable for one of the 20th century's most destructive regimes.

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