Justice for the Khmer Krom

Wednesday, 26 May 2010 15:02 John D Ciorciari

As KR leaders face their fate at the ECCC, the court should not forget other
victims.

After more than 30 years of impunity, some key architects of the Khmer Rouge
reign of terror are finally being held accountable at the Extraordinary
Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The upcoming joint trial of Nuon
Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirth and Khieu Samphan holds promise for survivors
who have waited too long for justice.

Unfortunately, one important set of crimes is in danger of exclusion. In
January, the ECCC's co-investigating judges decided to charge the suspects
with genocide and crimes against humanity against Cambodia's Cham Muslim and
ethnic Vietnamese minorities, but not the Khmer Krom - ethnic Khmers with
roots in southern Vietnam. The ECCC's pre-trial chamber recently upheld that
decision.

The pre-trial chamber grounded its decision partly on a technicality. Months
ago, the co-prosecutors sent a memo to the co-investigating judges about
possible genocide against Khmer Krom in Pursat province. They titled the
memo an "investigative request" rather than a "supplementary submission".
The latter title would have triggered an investigation; the former may cost
some Khmer Krom survivors their deserved day in court.
But the pre-trial chamber's decision does leave some room for
reconsideration. It does not bar the possibility that the co-prosecutors can
simply white-out the old title, type on a new one and resubmit their memo as
a "supplementary submission". The co-prosecutors ought to do so.

The ECCC cannot account for the myriad offenses of Democratic Kampuchea
(DK), but there are good reasons to hear out the Khmer Krom, who have long
argued that their community suffered genocide and targeted crimes against
humanity. Indeed, documents and survivor accounts indicate that the DK
regime sometimes targeted Khmer Krom for abuse. In at least one
well-documented case, Khmer Krom were butchered en masse. In 1977, hundreds
were rounded up and massacred in Pursat's Bakan district - a calculated mass
murder with some chilling parallels to the Srebrenica Massacre of 1995. Such
offenses demand investigation and justice.

The reasons for these atrocities remain subject to debate. The Khmer Krom
spoke Vietnamese and brought syncretic cultural practices from the Mekong
Delta. Cultural disdain may thus have contributed to their plight. Under the
Pol Pot regime, persons with foreign cultural characteristics were suspect.
Depending on the evidence, the ECCC could find that senior DK officials
committed genocide by seeking to destroy Khmer Krom based on their perceived
ethnic impurity.

The case for crimes against humanity is easier because it encompasses abuses
based on political motives. Political targeting of the Khmer Krom was
clearly at work. The communist DK regime bitterly resented the prominent
roles Khmer Krom played in Lon Nol's Khmer Republic and the CIA's Mobile
Strike Force Command during the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge also regarded
ties to Vietnam as politically suspect after 1975, when the xenophobic DK
regime turned its back on Hanoi. Documents show that Vietnamese-speaking
Khmer Krom were often singled out as potential spies and purged for that
reason.

The complex case of the Khmer Krom lies at the heart of unresolved questions
about the DK regime. For three decades, survivors and scholars have tried to
discern the motives for Khmer Rouge brutality. Was the killing driven
primarily by excesses in radical communism? Or was the violence also rooted
to a considerable extent in racism and nationalism?

The legal distinction between genocide and other grave crimes is sometimes
unhelpful. In Cambodia, it risks suggesting that certain victims suffered
more than others, when in reality all suffered horrific abuses. This
distinction is nevertheless useful in trying to properly understand the
terror in Democratic Kampuchea. By examining crimes against the Khmer Krom,
the ECCC can help shed light on the true animus of the DK regime.

The ECCC does not have infinite resources, and it is rightly under pressure
to rein in its budget and speed up the trials. However, ECCC officials must
be wise in deciding how and where to cut and prune. Adjudicating crimes
against the Khmer Krom in Pursat would add little to the hefty sum of time
and money already spent on the trials. In fact, the court's investigators
and prosecutors have completed most of the necessary investigation
evidencing these crimes. Bypassing the Khmer Krom case would deny this
important and courageous community a sense of justice. The ECCC could also
fail to reveal some of the most illuminating truths about the Pol Pot
regime.

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John D Ciorciari is an assistant professor of Public Policy at the
University of Michigan and a senior legal advisor with the Documentation
Centre of Cambodia.

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