Extraordinary Chambers

What questions will, as a result, be left unanswered?

For starters, did Americans violate international laws when they bombed Cambodia between 1965 and 1973? The bombings, which took place under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, often with direct oversight by Henry Kissinger, targeted Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, and later the Khmer Rouge itself. But the US wasn’t striking just military targets. Using recently released American government documents, scholars Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan have estimated that the United States dropped more than 2.7 million tons of explosives on Cambodia — more destructive power than the Allies dropped on Europe during the whole of World War II. The best estimates to date of Cambodian civilians killed in those bombings vary from 50,000 to 150,000, but Owen and Kiernan’s work suggests the number is significantly higher.

Americans aren’t the only foreigners in the dock of public opinion. What about the Chinese leaders of the time, who provided weapons and funds to the Khmer Rouge government as it oversaw 1.7 million deaths? And although the Vietnamese helped free the country from the Khmer Rouge, some Cambodians have stories of brutal treatment at the hands of their liberators.

These are valid legal questions. Answering them, however, could seriously embarrass powerful members of the international community, which might explain why, in creating the eccc, donors pushed for an exclusive focus on the Khmer Rouge. And Prime Minister Hun Sen was happy to go along. His defeat of the Khmer Rouge, first as a part of the invading Vietnamese forces in 1979, and then as the government leader who engineered the rebels’ final surrender in 1998, continues to lend legitimacy to his corrupt and repressive government. But Hun Sen doesn’t want too exhaustive an investigation of the Khmer Rouge regime either. Before defecting, he was himself a Khmer Rouge soldier, and several powerful members of his government held more senior positions in the movement. Wide-ranging trials, let alone a South Africa–style truth and reconciliation commission, could bring out dark, uncomfortable secrets. By contrast, a few carefully chosen indictments could make the government look good, and help the international community wash its hands of complicity.

Nuon Chea’s defence team will likely argue his distorted view of Cambodian history (in which the country was a puppet manipulated by external interests) hoping to convince the general public — and perhaps the judges — that the eccc is a political show trial, the latest instance of outside meddling. That strategy would probably fail, because the Khmer Rouge leaders cannot realistically portray themselves as victims of circumstance. But Chea and his comrades shouldn’t be the only ones to address international involvement. With a little nimbleness and fortitude, eccc prosecutors and judges could devote some attention to the broader historical context. Foreign governments could open their files to historians, and even make public apologies for past actions. And civil society groups in Cambodia could use revelations from the trials in more balanced public education campaigns about the country’s history.

Chea exemplifies another difficulty posed by the eccc’s narrow focus, however. Will Cambodians look at the former Khmer Rouge leaders in the courtroom and see tyrants brought low, or defendants too old and frail for punishment? For this reason, among others, the trials will likely yield only modest benefits. The perpetrators of major atrocities are almost never revealed as evil masterminds or psychopathic monsters, and the suffering they have caused is never matched by a sufficiently profound motive or shocking courtroom revelation. As Hannah Arendt observed while reporting on the trial of the Nazi high official Adolf Eichmann, the answer to the question “Why were so many people killed?” is always somewhat banal.

But there is, perhaps, something redemptive in this very banality. That thought crossed my mind in the market in Pailin, as I tried to decide whether to add lychee or melon juice to Nuon Chea’s fruit basket. Was it right, I wondered, to bring a gift to a man believed to be one of the great murderers of the twentieth century?

It then occurred to me that I was about to enact a familiar custom, presenting a gift of food to an elder. Respect for age and gustatory pleasures were the kinds of traditions the Khmer Rouge had tried to stamp out, when they induced children to inform on their parents and forced a nation to live on rice gruel. What was more, I could, without fear, meet a man whose government once plunged an entire country into terror. As I added a plump, fragrant orange to Chea’s basket, I realized that these militants and their ideology had truly been defeated. If nothing else, the trials of Khmer Rouge leaders will remind Cambodians of this happy fact.