Burying Asia's savage past

Jun 25th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Balancing reconciliation with justice may be impossible. A tiny bit of
either would be nice

Illustration by M. Morgenstern

FOR several weeks a neat former schoolteacher has sat in a Phnom Penh dock,
detailing before the tribunal how meticulously he used to carry out the
orders of his bosses. As a child, he said by way of clarification, he had
always been “a well-disciplined boy, who respected the teachers and did good
deeds”. This is Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, former commandant of Tuol Sleng,
a Khmer Rouge torture-centre and prison, which 14,000 men, women and
children entered but only a dozen survived. Duch has admitted blame for the
horrors at Tuol Sleng. According to the New York Times, he couldn’t bear to
hear the late Pol Pot claim that Tuol Sleng was a fabrication of his
enemies. He thus seems certain to be the first person convicted for playing
a part in Khmer Rouge atrocities from 1975-79 that killed up to 2m
Cambodians.

This is not unqualified good news. Justice comes years too late. The United
Nations and Cambodia haggled for a decade just over the details of the
court, eventually set up in 2007. The costs have been gargantuan, though,
according to its outgoing chief foreign prosecutor this week, it is still
“underfunded and under-resourced”. Political meddling is high, and
corruption apparently abounds. Some of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders who
gave Duch his orders await trial, but they are frail and may not live long.
Besides, Cambodia’s strongman leader, Hun Sen, is a former Khmer Rouge
himself and may be unwilling to see too much dug up. Duch may be the first
to be tried, but also the last.

Asia has plenty of killing grounds, and their story is similar. In
Timor-Leste two truth-seeking commissions have looked respectively into the
death of 200,000 people during Indonesia’s scorched-earth occupation after
1975, and into an orgy of arson and killing by the Indonesian army and its
vigilante henchmen after East Timorese voted for independence in 1999. By
coming up with a record, and by even eliciting an admission of blame by
Indonesia, the reports exceeded expectation. Yet many Timorese want a proper
reckoning. Reconciliation can get in the way. The reports have gathered
dust. Timor-Leste’s present leaders argue that, with aid scarce, filling
bellies trumps paying for tribunals.

Above all, they do not want to open old wounds. Timor-Leste’s first
president, Xanana Gusmão, who like Nelson Mandela was a former prisoner of
the old regime, also followed Mr Mandela in calling for forgiveness. His
successor, José Ramos-Horta, has since pardoned the very few men to have
been imprisoned for the 1999 violence. A culture of amnesty prevails. There
is little evidence that it has helped stability. On the contrary,
Timor-Leste has seen gang warfare, a mutiny by part of the army and an
assassination attempt on Mr Ramos-Horta.

Political leaders’ wish to sweep the past under the rug is such an Asian
habit that suspicions are aroused when a government seems too keen to try
the opposite. Take Bangladesh. The Awami League under Sheikh Hasina wants to
try 50 Bangladeshis for atrocities in the 1971 war of secession, in which
perhaps 3m died. The suspects include nearly the entire current leadership
of Jamaat-e-Islami, the biggest Islamic party and a former coalition partner
of Sheikh Hasina’s nemesis, Khaleda Zia. Jamaat-e-Islami’s youth wing, in
league with the West Pakistani army, specialised in killing intellectuals.
Still, Sheikh Hasina’s nakedly political motives would undermine a tribunal’s
credibility abroad.

In the end the international response makes, or more usually breaks, the
search for justice, which almost always needs foreign support. Who, for
instance, pays for reparations? In Cambodia it will not be the doddery
former Khmer leaders. In Timor-Leste it was suggested that those who sold
arms to the Indonesian army should stump up a share. And pigs may fly. As
tribunal costs (and failures) mount, the United Nations and rich-world
donors tend to slough off responsibility.

More than that, the process of justice and reconciliation is usually hostage
to hard-nosed geopolitics. In private, diplomats from China, staunch ally of
the Khmer Rouge and still Cambodia’s chief patron today, put down the
tribunal’s aims. It is easy to forget how the United States also backed the
Khmers Rouges as victims of Vietnamese expansionism. Support for the
Indonesian army during the cold war meant that America overlooked atrocities
in East Timor. That had changed by 1999. But after September 11th Indonesia,
the scourge of East Timor, became a chief ally in the war against terror. A
newly democratic Indonesia is hardly to blame for its army’s past. Besides,
many Indonesians were themselves victims of state-backed violence during the
Suharto era.

Might is right
Similarly, hard-nosed geopolitics bodes ill for any accounting in Sri Lanka,
now that the Sri Lankan army has defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, with both sides accused of war crimes. For the process to start now
is out of the question. Domestic critics of the army’s conduct fear for
their lives as “traitors”. But the response of the UN Security Council was
dismal during this year’s military endgame, in which tens of thousands of
civilians were trapped. Though the UN agrees that “timely and decisive”
action should be taken when governments fail to protect their own people,
lobbying for pressure on Sri Lanka by the West was mild, and cynical
opposition to council action by China and Russia, two chief sellers of arms
to Sri Lanka, was vigorous.

As for China itself, Banyan lived a decade ago in a Beijing compound whose
backdoor guard, a soft-spoken bourgeois type, had not exchanged a word with
the frontdoor guard, his tormentor during the Cultural Revolution, since the
last ghastly struggle session in 1969. The era remains nearly off-limits for
public debate, and the only reckoning was the show-trial of the Gang of Four
in 1981. In that light, any attempt at a first draft of historical honesty,
as in Cambodia or East Timor, looks far better than nothing.