Righting wrongs

Imagine that over one million people were systematically killed in a country of seven million inhabitants. Imagine that most of the world decided to do nothing about this injustice, and even blocked certain efforts to prosecute the perpetrators.

A member of the Cambodia Genocide Project, with some of the project's documents

There is no need to imagine. The countless human skulls and bones wantonly scattered through fields, or meticulously piled at thousands of mass grave sights throughout Cambodia are proof of the genocide undertaken by the Khmer Rouge during its reign from 1975 to 1979.

As the world opens its eyes to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a congressionally sanctioned project at Yale seeks to bring the guilty parties to justice--not just for the families of the victims, but for a nation that continues to struggle with its not so distant past.

With the first installment of the project drawing to an end, the findings are encouraging, but project leaders insist that more time and more money are required to fully bring to light the gravity of the warcrimes committed by the Khmer Rouge.

In a radical Marxist attempt to transform Cambodia into an agrarian society, Pol Pot seized power in 1975 in the name of the Khmer Rouge. Quick to eliminate any resistance, he organized mass labor camps in rural areas, and methodically murdered Cambodian elite, minorities, monks, and soldiers belonging to the pro-U.S. army.

The Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979 by Vietnamese forces, and many efforts to bring the ringleaders of the Khmer Rouge to justice were unsuccessful.

In 1994, the normalization of bipolar relations and a build-up of international political indignation caused the U.S. Congress to pass the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, which had been rejected on two previous occasions. The act created a program to gather information which would eventually be used to bring the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge to justice.

In May of 1994, Congress chose and sponsored Yale to conduct a two-year Cambodian Genocide Project (CGP) with a grant of half a million dollars. The project was formed in conjunction with the Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Schnell Center for International Human Rights at Yale, and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which contributed $20,000 for the mapping of mass grave sights across Cambodia.

The head of the CGP, Yale history professor Ben Kiernan, and his on-site manager Craig Etcheson, DIV '69, have been at the forefront of this program since its beginning, and have worked for the past two years to compile enough evidence to bring the leaders of the Khmer Rouge to trial.

According to the First Progress Report of the CGP, the major problems which Cambodia faced in its efforts to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice were a paucity of specific documentary evidence linking officials to the genocide and a lack of legal training on the part of Cambodian officials. Other difficulties included insufficient awareness among Cambodian officials of how to redress the genocide, and the lack of a permanent independent Cambodian program to do what the CGP was formed to do.

Kiernan

As the report states, "The CGP thus far is making excellent progress toward [the] solution of these four problems." The first problem, for example, was easily solved because of the fact that the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of the systematic genocide.

As one Khmer Rouge clerk told The New York Times recently, "I was just making lists." These lists contained the names of the people executed with orders that were initialed by Khmer Rouge officials. In effect, these lists of victims are the smoking gun that many Cambodians were seeking in order to see the killers of their friends and family finally tried and convicted.

According to Kiernan, "The lists have been loaned to the CGP by the Cambodian government as a segment of three archives ferreted out in Phnom Penh, which together comprise over 100,000 documents that are in course of being processed, catalogued, and recorded."

To process this colossal amount of documents and make them available to the public, the CGP has established "The Documentation Center of Cambodia" (DC-Cam) in Phnom Penh staffed by indigenous personnel.

The CGP has concomitantly created the Cambodian Genocide Database which includes lists of victims, authentic "rare" photos of the killings, biographical information on the Khmer Rouge, and scanned images of all documents related to the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.

By 1997, the CGP hopes to transfer the entire database to a site on the Internet. Kiernan hopes that "The photos of genocide victims on the Internet will permit relatives across the globe to identify their kin."

Thanks to the Yale Law School, the CGP has also been able to legally train dozens of Cambodians over the last two summers so that they can form the nucleus of the effort that will try the Khmer Rouge.

Despite these definite successes, which could not have occurred without the firm support of the current Cambodian government, many obstacles remain before justice can be done.

One such hindrance happened on Sept. 16, when Ieng Sary, a leader of a Khmer Rouge faction clashing with Pol Pot's central guerilla force, was given full amnesty by Norodom Sihanouk, the current President of Cambodia, for his past crimes in exchange for cooperation and peace. Sary stated that he had no remorse for the alleged deaths he had ordered.

On a more positive note, Kiernan is optimistic about the findings of the CGP. "I think the CGP was extremely successful relative to its financial and logistical limitations," Kiernan said.

He said the GCP's successes were impressive "in comparison with the U.N. Security Council-sponsored investigations of genocide in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Those very [financial] limitations had seriously affected the swiftness and extended efficiency of processing the large caches of uncovered documents," Kiernan said.

Leslie Timko, a CGP assistant, said, "Due to the unanticipated discovery of another pivotal and bountiful archive, the CGP wishes to get funding to continue for another six months."

Unfortunately, the CGP might find the continuation of their effort more difficult. "The future of the program remains uncertain as its funds run out in December," Kiernan said.

"While the advent of a U.N.-sponsored Cambodian genocide trial depends entirely on the will of the Cambodian government, the completion of CGP's work in processing and recording information related to the genocide remains essential, regardless of the outcome," Kiernan said.

Most scholars agree that the research seems to be solid and invaluable in recording a dark yet undeniable section of history.

The CGP is currently seeking new funding through European and private channels and plans to eventually transform the Documentation Center in Phnom Penh into a viable non-governmental organization.