more than thirty years later + media resources

I have to admit, I know very little about Cambodia's history. Until I met someone who worked there, I hadn't heard about the UN Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT), which is bringing to trial a few surviving members of the regime that killed 1.7 million Cambodians, or 1/4 of the population, in the 1970s. The Khmer Rouge has come up twice in conversation in the short couple of weeks that I have been here: once, with a co-worker who explained that he was educated in a camp in Thailand because he "couldn't live in Cambodia" at the time, and again, with a farmer who was talking about his fields and motioned to a nearby Khmer Rouge burial ground.

Here is an article in the Phnom Penh Post about the first case that will receive a verdict, a man called Duch who was the director of the Tuol Sleng Prison and responsible for 16,000 deaths. I've seen articles that are hoping for a life sentence for him; he is hoping to be released. With internationally-supported tribunals like this, some say that the money (more than $50 million) would've been better spent for poverty alleviation efforts in Cambodia today, rather than seeking largely ineffective "justice" for unimaginable genocide decades after it occurred - after all, what single penalty can possibly make up for the death of 16,000 mothers and brothers? Since the fall of the regime, former Khmer Rouge members have been living in society, and two-thirds of Cambodians today were not even alive during the regime. This NPR segment talks about the feeling of ambivalence among some Cambodians towards the perpetrators. The following is a reporter's discussion of a woman's response to the question of how she feels about living in the same community as a former Khmer Rouge member:

Nobody here has a problem with him, she says. He's a good neighbor, he's gentle, and he comes to all the weddings and funerals and helps out around the village when needed. I'm not angry at him, she says, I'm angry at the Khmer Rouge who killed my husband and my two sons. But he is not that man.
Hod Troy says she's not paying much attention to the tribunal, either. I'm too busy, she says - and she's not alone. The day Duch's trial opened, I stopped at a small cafe just down the road from the trial venue. You could see the court from the cafe, but nobody was looking. All eyes were glued to two televisions on the back wall airing a Khmer soap opera.

Here is some video coverage of Tuol Sleng and an interview on NPR.

Here's a summary of a documentary screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York last Sunday, called "Enemies of the People," which includes interviews with former Khmer Rouge members. Here's a trailer, where you see Thet Sambath, the Cambodian co-director, talk in an almost eerily friendly way with Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, to get information about what happened in the killing fields.

Perhaps as important as the trials, here is an article about the push to teach about the Khmer Rouge in schools.