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Documenting the Cambodian Genocide
From: Columbia University
| By:
Susan E. Cook |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was established to provide "a thorough account of the gross human rights violations that occurred in South Africa between March 1960 and May 1994," a means of identifying perpetrators and restoring dignity to the victims, among many other honorable goals. A similar program has been recommended for those involved in the genocide in Cambodia, although current political realities in that country make the establishment of a Cambodian Truth and Reconciliation Commission unlikely. Susan Cook is the director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University. In this essay, she argues that, in the absence of a true commission, her program can serve to bring justice to those whose lives were affected by the Cambodian tragedy. |
 lthough a commission of inquiry has been one of the many possible responses to the Cambodian genocide, this option has not been one of the more popular ideas in Cambodia. In 1997, then co-Prime Ministers Hun Sen and Norodom Ranariddh wrote to the UN asking for help "in bringing to justice those persons responsible for the genocide and crimes against humanity during the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979." The UN responded by sending a panel of legal experts to assess the available evidence and to recommend mechanisms for holding the perpetrators accountable. In their final report, published in February 1999, the group of experts strongly recommended that criminal trials be held but also raised the possibility of forming an investigatory commission that could "paint a broader picture of the events of the period." They went on to say, "By telling a story beyond that concerning the defendants alone, including one that includes the historical context of the atrocities and the roles of many actors, it could contribute to achieving the educational, psychological, political and justice goals we elaborate in the introduction to this report. By listening to and acknowledging the victims, a commission could provide a form of spiritual reparation for them." |
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However, given the political instability in Cambodia, the unlikelihood of getting alleged perpetrators to testify before a commission, and the apparent lack of enthusiasm for the idea of a truth commission among Cambodians, the group of experts felt that they could not recommend this mechanism without qualification. Instead, they recommended that the idea be debated and considered by the Cambodian people and government. In short, there was never any significant momentum behind the idea of a truth commission in Cambodia, and it has long since been discarded in favor of a criminal tribunal for the Khmer Rouge leaders who presided over the deaths of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. The form of that tribunal is yet to be agreed upon by the Cambodian government, the UN and other interested parties, but it appears that some kind of limited legal proceedings may take place in the near future, and that any additional attempts to bring closure to the tragic events that occurred in Cambodia in the late 1970s are unlikely. |
Using the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a point of reference, I'd like to suggest that there are three important ways in which the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale (CGP) acts like a truth commission: first, in the attempt to create a comprehensive public account of the events in question; second, in its willingness to embrace more than one kind of "truth"; and third, by virtue of the fact that documentation work cannot replace legal prosecutions in a court of law in searching for adequate and necessary responses to the crimes committed in Cambodia during the period in question. |
Truth commissions
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in December 1995 under the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, has been much celebrated in South Africa and around the world, as well as much maligned, depending on whom you ask. The TRC's purpose was to provide a thorough account of the gross human rights violations that occurred in South Africa between March 1960 and May 1994, to identify the perpetrators of these acts, to restore dignity to the victims by providing them with a public forum in which to tell their stories, to grant amnesty for politically motivated acts of violence, to recommend a system of reparations for victims and to write a report of its findings. Most agree that the TRC was successful in bringing to public attention as never before many of the details about the evils of apartheid. Of course, what this really means is that white audiences who chose to attend hearings or who tuned in to media coverage of the proceedings had the chance to hear what blacks and other nonwhites had experienced under apartheid. But even though the facts themselves were not big news to most blacks, the effect of seeing these stories told publicly in a safe and sympathetic setting was very important. People spoke of catharsis, relief and regaining their dignity, all crucial developments in a society trying to transform itself. |
The TRC has been considered unsuccessful for a whole host of other reasons. Some of the criticisms include claims that it didn't create the comprehensive account it was mandated to construct, that it didn't adhere to established legal standards, that it was biased in favor of the African National Congress and was therefore partial in its attempt to contextualize the events it was recording and the history it was effectively writing. The TRC's final report, five volumes and 3,500 pages long (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1998), is alternately being hailed and lamented as the new official history of South Africa. |
The Cambodian Genocide Program
The Cambodian Genocide Program is a research and documentation project established at Yale's Center for International and Area Studies in 1994. Our mandate, and initial funding, stemmed from legislation passed by the United States Congress in 1994 that expressed the US commitment to pursuing justice for the crimes committed in the Cambodian genocide. Congress's Cambodian Genocide Justice Act describes the purpose and activities of an "Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigation." The purpose of this office was, to quote Section 573, "... to support ... efforts to bring to justice members of the Khmer Rouge for their crimes against humanity committed in Cambodia between April 17, 1975, and January 7, 1979, including (1) to investigate crimes against humanity committed by national Khmer Rouge leaders during that period, (2) to provide the people of Cambodia with access to documents, records, and other evidence held by the Office as a result of such investigation, and (3) to submit relevant data to a national or international penal tribunal that may be convened to formally hear and judge the genocidal acts committed by the Khmer Rouge." |
These three items form the core of the CGP's work; that is, documenting as thoroughly as possible the crimes that took place in Cambodia during the genocide and presenting that information to a tribunal and to the Cambodian people. The CGP's mandate is thus quite similar to that of a truth commission, specifically to the TRC in South Africa. In addition, the TRC's hearings were mostly open to the public, and the commission actively generated publicity about its proceedings so that its work might reach as broad an audience as possible. |
One of the criticisms that has been leveled against the TRC is its willingness to define and embrace multiple forms of "truth." Some have felt that, as a statutory commission, the TRC should have upheld established legal principles, such as ensuring due process and corroborating evidence more strictly. Instead, the TRC consciously allowed people to tell their stories, and these stories became part of the TRC's record, whether or not the "facts" in them could be verified. This may be one of the most important differences between a truth commission and courtroom prosecutions of human rights abuses. With reference to the various forms of "truth" the TRC explicitly allowed, and even celebrated, I'd like to elaborate a little on the kinds of information or "truth" the CGP has assembled. |
The TRC report claims that the commission based its final conclusions only on factual, objective or "forensic" truth--that is, facts that can be corroborated, verified or otherwise proved. The CGP has also made an effort to compile information that could stand up to courtroom rules of evidence, and a good example of this is the work we've done mapping mass graves and other genocide sites in Cambodia. Since 1995, teams of field researchers in Cambodia have been using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to visit and document mass graves, prisons and genocide memorials throughout the country. This work has been painstaking and slow, because of problems such as land mines and climatic conditions, but a very accurate and incontestably factual picture is gradually emerging of who died under the Khmer Rouge, when, and how. We are hoping that prosecutors in a genocide tribunal in Cambodia will be able to enter this material into evidence. |
In addition to factual or forensic truth, the TRC has also articulated the need for the commission to hear "personal and narrative truth." This refers to people's own stories, told from their own perspectives, which, when assembled, add up to some kind of narrative truth or oral history about what took place under apartheid. The CGP has also assembled individual accounts in order to get an overall picture of what happened in Cambodia. These accounts are mostly in the form of interviews conducted with individual survivors and perpetrators years ago that have been mined for details relating to the activities of specific individuals. For example, historian Ben Kiernan obtained the following information about Mok, a notoriously cruel military commander in the Khmer Rouge. "In 1972 Mok called a meeting of over 3,000 monks in Kampong Chhnang in order to persuade them to defrock and join the military ('the first known example of such a CPK [Communist Party of Kampuchea] policy')" (Cambodian Biographic Database record Y00487, Cambodian Genocide Data Base). Detailed information such as this has been compiled into a biographical database, which now holds more than 10,000 records, with another 3,000 or so in process. Although much of the information in these records would need to be investigated and corroborated for use in a court of law, they are nevertheless an accurate portrait of what thousands of people have said, directly or indirectly, about their involvement in the Cambodian genocide. |
The TRC also defined "social or dialogue truth" as an important category of truth-telling. This concept was derived from Justice Albie Sachs, a member of South Africa's Constitutional Court. Although not necessarily verifiable, social truth is "the truth of experience that is established through interaction, discussion, and debate." This kind of truth was meant to provide information about the motives and perspectives of everyone involved in the apartheid regime, not just the victims. The CGP has attempted to do essentially the same thing by including complete verbatim transcripts and/or translations of diaries and autobiographies authored by people such as an aide to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, Ieng Sary, and Thiounn Prasith, the Khmer Rouge representative to the UN for 15 years, as well as certain Khmer Rouge propaganda materials. While the information in these documents might be only marginally useful in a courtroom proceeding, they are of critical importance in helping us to reconstruct the motives and aspirations of the people who adopted such radical ideas about their society that they resulted in the deaths of a quarter of the population. |
Finally, as a victim-centered body, the TRC embraced the concept of "healing and restorative truth ... the kind of truth that places facts and what they mean within the context of human relationships, both amongst citizens and between the state and its citizens." In the South African context, this meant that while the TRC may have been sponsoring testimony that was only news to people who did not suffer under apartheid, it was the act of acknowledging these facts that achieved the TRC's goal of restoring dignity to the victims. This goes to the heart of the CGP's work as well. One of our most striking collections is a photo archive that includes pictures of about 5,000 victims of torture and execution, taken by the Khmer Rouge themselves. These haunting images of nameless men and women, including elderly people and children, are personal, individual and intensely sobering. Of all the CGP's materials, it is these photos that have generated the most interest, inquiry and action on the part of the public. |
In addition to the content of the CGP's work, we have also made every attempt to present our materials and findings in such as way that they are maximally accessible to people around the world. We have done this by mounting our databases, translations and other information on a website that currently includes information in four languages, including Khmer, the national language of Cambodia. We have also disseminated the databases within Cambodia on CD-ROM, and have published papers on new research and findings. And although it's stating the obvious to point out that most Cambodians do not have easy access to the electronic media we use to publish most of our work, it is important to note that many Cambodians are grateful to know that the information is available for the rest of the world to see, so that their suffering might be acknowledged and understood by the world in a way that it has never adequately been understood by individual governments. I should add that we made a commitment early on in the design of our work to permanently house all the primary documents, photos, videos and other archives in Cambodia, where they are most accessible to the Cambodian people. Although there are some obvious security risks associated with this plan, the CGP felt that the social and political benefits of keeping the documentation in Cambodia outweighed the risks. |
A virtual truth commission
The CGP is not a court of law or a legal body with any jurisdiction over the crimes committed in the Cambodian genocide. While it is meant to support any court that asserts jurisdiction over those crimes by providing information, documents, etc., the CGP has another purpose as well. By gathering all existing information about the genocide, representing as many information formats, languages and perspectives as possible, and making it all accessible to anyone who can log on to the Internet, the CGP is, in effect, a virtual truth commission. Quoting again from the TRC's final report in 1998, "It is not merely the actual knowledge about past human rights violations that counts; often the basic facts about what happened are already well known, at least by those who were affected. What is critical is that these facts be fully and publicly acknowledged. It is this ... which restores the dignity of victims." |
In no way is the work of the CGP a replacement for legal proceedings that identify and punish perpetrators. But, while a genocide tribunal should be an essential part of achieving justice and healing in Cambodia, certain political realities leave the progress and outcome of a tribunal in question. For this reason the Cambodian Genocide Program is all the more resolved to pursue the mandate of creating as comprehensive a record of the genocide as possible, and to let the truths contained therein stand as an important and far-reaching legacy of the Cambodian genocide. |
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