By Brian Calvert
The cambodia daily

Police suppress a procession of about 600 monks Sept 8, 1998, near Phsar Thmei. Many of the monks were beaten or shocked with cattle prods.

On the last weekend of December 1998, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea laid down their arms and joined the very government that had mounted a relentless campaign to destroy them and their failed Khmer Rouge.

It was Christmas time, and upon hearing the news in the US, Youk Chhang felt a pang a regret, knowing that a giant obstacle had been thrown across the path to justice. With those two—and, since 1996, Ieng Sary—in the cozy embrace of the government, Cambodia’s search for real peace could begin, but Youk Chhang knew too that peace of mind was a long way off.

“It was really a blow,” he said recently.

To see the leaders brought to justice, “hope was slim at that time,” he said. “Hope was a bit fading away when they defected.”
The executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Youk Chhang is dedicated to documenting Khmer Rouge atrocities for use in a trial someday.

The defection was more a political integration than anything, he said. It offered the two a kind of protection they had not enjoyed on the run, in the jungle.

Nearly five years later, the government’s failure to prosecute any Khmer Rouge leaders has fortified the trepidation Youk Chhang felt that Christmas.

Ieng Sary, Brother No 3, lives in absolute freedom in a Phnom Penh villa. Khieu Samphan, the public face of the secretive Democratic Kampuchea government, lives in a little wooden house in Pailin. His worries go no further now than keeping his ducks out of the neighbors’ vegetables, and growing banana trees in his back yard.

Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the ultra-Maoist experiment, also lives in Pailin, at the end of a winding, rutted road, secluded in the woods, hidden from the countrymen whom his policies nearly obliterated.

Khieu Ponnary, the first wife of Pol Pot, who suffered dementia and a sociopathic paranoia of Vietnamese assassins, died July 1, 2003, at 83. Her madness precluded her as a suspect in any Khmer Rouge trial, but her death was a nettling reminder that the men responsible for more than 1 million corpses could elude prosecution by dying, peacefully, of old age.

Put simply by Youk Chhang: “No justice, no peace. No tribunal, no justice.”

The double defection marked the end of a military campaign led by Prime Minister Hun Sen to eliminate the Khmer Rouge, which in 1993 boasted a fighting force of 10,000 guerrillas, but had imploded in the subsequent years of guerrilla war. With the defection of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the bedraggled remains of the movement were doomed.

Almost immediately, Hun Sen pronounced that the two men should not face a trial in Cambodian courts.

“We must dig a hole and bury the past, and look ahead into the 21st century,” Hun Sen said on the Monday following the defections. “This is the new government’s policy of pacification and national reconciliation.”

The UN and the government reached an agreement for a trial in June 2003, and Youk Chhang said that the murderous leaders will, one way or another, meet with a reckoning.

“The Khmer Rouge cannot fool God,” he said, “and they cannot fool us.”

The defections came eight months after the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s leaders—Pol Pot—escaped justice when he died from a reported heart attack in Anlong Veng on April 15.

The death came just two weeks after the US had revived a plan to capture and try the infamous leader for crimes against humanity. A faction of the Khmer Rouge was reportedly planning to hand him over.

The timing of the death raised the suspicions of many diplomats and observers, but Khmer Rouge officials insisted that there was no foul play.

King Norodom Sihanouk said Pol Pot’s death had “liberated” the nation.

“Let him be dead and now our nation will be peaceful,” the King said.

The one and only prime minister
Hun Sen came to be the sole premier through general elections in 1998. His win was not undisputed, however. On July 26, a Sunday, Cambodians cast their ballots in their first self-organized election since the Khmer Rouge. Election Day was peaceful, even if some polling booths were mobbed with voters.
The CPP won.

Though international observers lauded the elections as free and fair, opposition leader Sam Rainsy joined with Funcinpec President Prince Norodom Ranariddh in calling for a recount. The elections had been fraudulent, the two said. Support for a recount gained momentum, and by the end of August, the streets were full of demonstrators, thousands of them.

A woman in Takhmau who cast her vote shortly after Hun Sen told the Daily: “It’s good, very good. I am not afraid anymore. Today, I have the same right as the prime minister.”

That lack of fear—reflected and magnified in the courage of the thousands of post-election demonstrators—was no small matter. Already shell-shocked Cambodians had witnessed street fighting in their capital only a year before, when Hun Sen wrested power from Prince Ranariddh with tanks and troops.

People had been executed.

People had disappeared.

But here now were people unafraid, railing against the election results, encamping themselves in front of the National Assembly and refusing to budge. Demonstrations and marches went on for weeks. The park in front of the Assembly building became known as Democracy Square, and a sign was staked into the ground saying so.

In photographs taken at the time, people cry out with their fists held high, their faces filled with passion and, sometimes, elation.
As the protests dragged on and the clashes intensified, photographs show people with their lips sealed in grimaces. They cannot raise their arms because they are carrying wounded comrades.

Protesters clashed with riot police, police beat monks, students wound up dead in ditches, and, by mid-September, the demonstrations had been quashed.

Cambodia has seen nothing like them again. Some of the spirit that led to those demonstrations, which numbered as high as 15,000 people, has since eroded, edict by edict, crackdown by crackdown.

“I think the spirit is less than before,” Thun Saray, director of the Adhoc human rights organization, said recently.

Demonstrations in recent years have faced ferocious opposition, from public officials refusing assembly permits on the grounds of city beautification to police with cattle prods and youth defense leagues whose foot soldiers wade into demonstrations swinging bamboo batons.

“That also makes the people frightened...to hold demonstrations,” Thun Saray said.

In 1999 and 2000, he said, the government allowed increasing freedom of assembly. But in the years after that, rights slipped, he said. “Sometimes it’s worse than before.”

Since 1998, he said, small improvements have been made in Cambodia’s human rights movement. Now several political parties have networks spread wider than before, and they are able to broadcast their own radio stations.

“The people, now they are more aware of their rights than before,” Thun Saray said, and they are less fearful in demanding them. Journalists aren’t killed anymore, he said, even if they are still threatened and intimidated.

The number of poor people has increased since 1998, he said, as has the number of landless. Three percent of the rural population had no land in 1993. That number has jumped to an astounding 20 percent today.

Gauging the success or failure of Cambodian human rights since 1998 is difficult, said Eva Galabru, who witnessed the post-election demonstrations as a rights worker for Licadho.

“I’m still trying to figure out what happened in 1998,” she said.
She was, however, certain of one thing: “Is the government more responsible? No.”

Many Happy Returns

By Brian Calvert
The cambodia daily

Nineteen ninety-eight was a homecoming for many, not least of whom was Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who returned to Cambodia after fleeing Hun Sen’s power play in July 1997.

The prince was swarmed by supporters when he landed in March, under international pressure to join in the general elections. Upon arrival, the prince gave a nod of respect to the man who had unseated him, thanking Hun Sen in a letter delivered by the UN for his cooperation, and requesting a meeting.

The prince was willing to let bygones be bygones, even as tens of thousands of his loyal supporters were huddled in Thai border camps following the factional fighting.

“I have to say that we should not talk about the past. We should not talk about everything bitter, but we have all together to talk about the future,” the prince said.

Many of the prince’s once-loyal supporters have never forgiven him for what they say amounted to abandonment and neglect following the elections in 1998.

The bulk of the refugees remained on the border throughout 1998, returning only after the hostilities between the CPP and Funcinpec eased through the diplomacy of the international community with military leaders.

Funcinpec military commander Nhiek Bun Chhay did not relinquish command of his resistance forces until early December, nearly a year and a half after the briefest of battles in July 1997. The relinquishing of his command allowed thousands of royalist troops to melt into the government’s army.