The 1999 war in Kosovo was defined by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as the world’s first humanitarian war. The war was followed by international intervention in East Timor—first by Australia and then by the United Nations—to end Indonesia’s brutal twenty-four-year occupation of the island. At the end of the old millennium, the world seemed to be changing the way it thought about humanitarian intervention. On September 20, 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke to this subject in his address to the last UN General Assembly session of the twentieth century. He pointed out that the notion of state sovereignty, central to the concept of the United Nations, is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation. Individual rights, Annan went on to argue, were now seen as more important than in the past, and the international community was searching (at least rhetorically) for new ways to intervene effectively and to limit the impunity of dictators.
The reports that Annan commissioned at the end of the nineties on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the 1995 massacre of civilians at Srebrenica revealed in painful detail how very hard it is, for both organizational and political reasons, for the international community to respond with necessary speed to unfolding humanitarian disasters. The bottom line in both crises was that major governments did not want to do more. They did not keep their promises to protect people. Annan was correct in his assertion that when the international community promises to protect citizens, “It must be willing to back its promises with the necessary means. Otherwise it is surely better not to raise hopes in the first place.” Others went even further in pointing up the perils of humanitarian intervention. Edward Luttwak argued that humanitarian intervention can be counterproductive and that the international imposition of cease-fires often ignores the underlying problems that led to war in the first place. In an essay in the July/August 1999 Foreign Affairs entitled “Give War A Chance,” published at the time of the Kosovo War, Luttwak argued that sometimes only the evil of war can resolve a political conflict and bring about peace.
What is certainly true is that the history of interventions in the last decade shows how immensely difficult it is for the world to impose the solutions it seeks on recalcitrant regimes. Slobodan Milosevic ruled Serbia throughout the 1990s until NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 led, with the help of the Serbian people, to the collapse of his regime, and he was finally turned over to the International Tribunal in The Hague to face trial for war crimes. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, is still in power, and the Taliban were removed from power in Afghanistan only because the United States, after the atrocity of September 11, was willing to assault them with full military force. Before then, the chronic crisis in Afghanistan had been ignored by the international community for more than a decade. In his 1999 speech, Kofi Annan criticized this partial vision, which is often governed by something as capricious as the access of television cameras. He decried “our willingness to act in some areas of conflict, while limiting ourselves to humanitarian palliatives in many other crises whose daily toll of death and suffering ought to shame us into action.”
The ultimate consequences of the humanitarian interventions that took place in the former Yugoslavia and East Timor are still unclear. In the short term, conditions for the vast majority of people in both crises have improved immeasurably, as have those of the people of Afghanistan with the fall of the Taliban. There is reason to hope that such improvements will be sustained. But if we want historical perspective on the long-term difficulties we face in these countries—and on how whatever happens in them is bound to reach beyond their borders—it is instructive to look at some aspects of the story of Cambodia over the last twenty years. What happened after Cambodia became a vast killing field?
It was clear from the moment the Khmer Rouge won victory in April 1975 that it was intent on creating a radical revolution of extraordinary brutality. But the outside world paid very little attention. The regime immediately drove the population of Phnom Penh into the countryside, expelled almost all foreigners, and closed off the country from the outside world. Its intention was to create an autarchic agrarian dictatorship. Over the next three and a half years, refugees were the main witnesses to what was occurring within, and they brought with them consistent stories of horror. They told of mass starvation and disease in the work camps created by the Khmer Rouge leaders and the systematic murder of people linked to the old regime, as well as those who questioned the wisdom of the revolution.
Before the Khmer Rouge victory, reports of its atrocious rule had filtered out of the areas it controlled. But few people listened. Even after April 1975, it took a long time for the world to accept the reality of the horror within Cambodia. Western intellectuals, many of whom had been opposed to the U.S. war effort in Indochina and tended to see Washington’s enemies as courageous freedom fighters, were slow to accept that the refugees were telling the truth. Some even argued that their reports were CIA propaganda, designed to justify the claim that a communist victory would lead to a “bloodbath.” But in March 1977, the French socialist and expert on Indochina Jean Lacouture denounced the Khmer Rouge for practicing what he called “auto genocide.” Lacouture wrote, “After Auschwitz and the gulag, we might have thought this century had produced the ultimate in horror, but we are seeing the suicide of a people in the name of revolution—worse, in the name of socialism.”
In 1978, the continued refugee tales of atrocities drove Senator George McGovern to ask, “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch a population slaughtered or do we marshal military force and put an end to it?” “One would think,” he went on, “the international community would at least condemn the situation and move to stop what appears like genocide.” McGovern was making serious points, but he was dismissed by both right and left.
At the end of 1978, Vietnam, for its own strategic reasons, invaded Cambodia to overthrow its former Khmer Rouge allies. For the Cambodian people this was a liberation; by then an estimated 1.7 million of Cambodia’s seven million people had died from starvation, forced labor, and mass execution during the Khmer Rouge period. But Vietnam’s intervention, which Hanoi declared was “irreversible,” quickly became an occupation that lasted until the early nineties. Hanoi created a client regime largely out of defectors from the Khmer Rouge, including a young man named Hun Sen, who became the dominant figure in Phnom Penh. For more than ten years, this government ruled Cambodia, isolated from most of the world.
Even though the new regime ended mass killings and forced starvation, impunity remained complete. No effort was made to punish the authors of the genocide. The puppet Communist Party installed by Vietnam set up nationwide secret police structures and used systematic torture as one of its primary tools to combat Khmer Rouge guerrillas and other enemies of the regime. The director of the T3 prison, Sin Sen, infamous even in a closed regime for ordering the torture and deaths of real and perceived political opponents (not just Khmer Rouge), was rewarded for his work by a steady series of promotions, until he became the national chief of police. Throughout the eighties, Vietnam’s dictatorship held on to power.
Loath to tolerate the notion that states may conquer weaker neighbors for any reason, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly not to recognize the Vietnamese-controlled regime in Phnom Penh. Instead, it ousted the representative of the old Khmer Rouge government and allowed a coalition that included the Khmer Rouge—and was led by Cambodia’s former ruler, Prince Sihanouk—to hold Cambodia’s UN seat.
Meanwhile up to half a million refugees fleeing first from the Khmer Rouge, then from the Vietnamese, and finally from famine, camped along the Thai Cambodian border. Some of the camps were controlled by the Khmer Rouge, who were armed with Chinese weapons supplied through Thailand. Most of the refugees were in camps controlled by non-communist groups, including the royalists led by Prince Sihanouk’s son Prince Ranariddh. The most fortunate were in refugee camps just inside Thailand run by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.
The world’s continued support for the remnants of the Khmer Rouge regime provided Vietnam and its supporters with an effective propaganda weapon. But in truth the autocratic and brutal regime they controlled in Cambodia showed little sign of seeking either the truth about the Khmer Rouge period or justice for its victims.
Throughout that period, humanitarian aid was the only intervention allowed by the Vietnamese and their client regime. Both in Phnom Penh and along the Thai-Cambodian border, food provision undoubtedly saved lives but, as it had done since the first great international humanitarian intervention in Biafra, it also fed and fueled the continuing war.
By 1983, the Cambodian relief effort was already one of the largest the world had ever mounted, certainly in terms of dollars spent per head of the population. In the Bangladesh crisis of 1971-1973, about thirteen hundred million dollars were spent on behalf of a population of seventy-five million. For Cambodia, close to a thousand million dollars were spent over three years on a population of seven million. Much of the money was ill spent, because the Western donors and agencies wanted to act as quickly as possible, without the necessary preparation, and because the Vietnamese imposed political rather than strictly humanitarian priorities on the aid program inside Cambodia. The same factors were at work in the camps along the border controlled by the Khmer Rouge, but fortunately most of the border refugee population was outside Khmer Rouge control. These were the Cambodians who benefited most from international concern. The relief agencies, despite their many failings, were at least able to educate children and teach skills to the adults in a way that was impossible under Vietnamese rule inside Cambodia.
Only the collapse of the Soviet Union—Vietnam’s principal patron—and the end of the cold war, ended Cambodia’s limbo. As a result of efforts led by the Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, and Steven Solarz, a veteran member of the U.S. Congress, a plan was produced to bring Cambodia back into the international community. In October 1991, the Paris Peace Agreement created a virtual UN Trusteeship. The agreement was signed by the four main parties to the conflict: the Vietnamese client government in Phnom Penh under Prime Minister Hun Sen, two noncommunist opposition groups, and the Khmer Rouge. Including the Khmer Rouge, rather than attempting to put its leaders on trial, was distasteful to say the least, but it was essential for getting China, still the Khmer Rouge’s principal sponsor, to agree to the peace process and to stop arming the Khmer Rouge. Many of those who argued for such a compromise believed, correctly, as it turned out, that the Khmer Rouge would wither once forced to come in from the cold. But in any case, they had few options. The alternative in the early nineties was a continuation of the war, no international recognition for Cambodia, and no chance for peace.
This is not the place to retell the story of the efforts of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). It did have considerable successes, but it also created huge expectations that it was only partly able to fulfill. The UN was unable to take control of ministries in the government of Hun Sen as the Paris Agreement proposed. The Khmer Rouge withdrew from the process and then attacked it.
The Hun Sen regime also did everything it could to undermine the attempt to enforce democratic political and judicial norms. The national police chief, Sin Sen, created a network, known as the “A teams,” which was responsible for the murder of political opponents in the run up to the 1993 elections sponsored by the UN. In spite of the presence of about 16,000 UN blue helmets and 3,600 CivPol (UN civilian police), more than a hundred opposition party members were killed by these forces. Members of the network have acknowledged the crimes to the American writer Brad Adams. But they maintain that they would have been killed themselves if they had not followed orders and that they had been brainwashed into believing their victims were actually Khmer Rouge operatives.
UNTAC officials gathered some information about the operations and personnel of these forces, but fearful that the Cambodian People’s Party would withdraw from the elections if confronted directly, they made only token efforts to disrupt the network. For the most part the UN chose to work quietly behind the scenes, releasing only one report on political violence during its eighteen month tenure. When UNTAC demanded the resignation of one particularly brutal provincial governor, Ung Samy of Battambang province, Hun Sen said that if Ung Samy went, he would go too. The UN backed off.
In principle, UNTAC offered the best opportunity in modern Cambodian history to address the question of justice and begin to hold perpetrators accountable. Many Cambodians saw this development as one of the primary purposes of the UN “occupation”—even more important than the election, which became the centerpiece of what is better described as the UN’s trusteeship. Nonetheless, the Cambodian courts, firmly under the control of Hun Sen’s People’s Party, steadfastly refused to investigate even the clumsiest political murder, and without the backing of most of its member states, UNTAC was reduced to belatedly setting up a special prosecutor’s office that in the end ordered the arrest of only four alleged murderers, and was unable to bring even one of them to trial. One of the accused died in custody, and the other three were released after the UN left. Sin Sen later said that he was amused at watching the UN spin its wheels while his operatives continued their work.
Violence did not stop the well-managed elections held in May 1993. These elections returned a majority for the royalist party (FUNCINPEC) led by Prince Ranariddh against Hun Sen’s People’s Party. But Hun Sen and his communist cadre would not accept the result; they threatened war with the UN and the secession of the eastern half of the country if the UN tried to impose the choice the people had made. The UN had neither the mandate nor the muscle to challenge them. As a result UNTAC presided over the creation of an unhappy coalition between royalists and communists. Ranariddh and Hun Sen became co-prime ministers. But Hun Sen’s Communists, with their entrenched organization, dominated the new regime until, eventually, they destroyed it and resumed sole power again. The new government urged the UN to leave quickly, and the vast army of men and women in their white cars departed in summer 1993. Only a new and important UN human rights office remained.
The first year of the new regime was relatively free of gross human rights abuses. It even seemed at first that it might take action against those accused by the UN human rights investigators of political murders in Battambang. It did not. In 1994, the government enshrined impunity in the law by prohibiting government employees, including soldiers and police, from being charged or arrested without the permission of the relevant minister. Unsurprisingly, that permission was rarely given. Thus, while the prisons overflowed with ordinary citizens, the most dangerous and violent elements of society—soldiers and police—were virtually never prosecuted. Instead, Hun Sen built up a new security network. In 1994, he was able to wrestle the national police chief job away from party rivals and appoint his own man, someone with a reputation for brutality. Overt political violence returned, with the killing of three journalists, threats to members of opposition members of parliament, and a grenade attack on an opposition party—the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party. This attack was even publicly announced in advance by Hun Sen, who said that if the party congress went ahead, grenades might be thrown at it. While pro forma denunciations were issued by some donor governments, little pressure was put on the new rulers in Phnom Penh to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The single worst case of impunity was the attack on a legal, peaceful political rally by the Khmer Nation Party led by Sam Rainsy, a popular former minister of finance who had been dismissed from the government in 1994 after organizing a campaign against official corruption. On March 30, 1997, Rainsy led a protest against the corruption and lack of independence of the Cambodian judiciary in a park across from the National Assembly. Four grenades were hurled into the middle of the crowd, killing sixteen and injuring more than a hundred. Rainsy was saved by his bodyguard, who acted as a human shield, dying in the process. Witnesses chased the grenade throwers toward the People’s Party compound, but were stopped at gunpoint by Hun Sen’s bodyguards.
The FBI was called in because an American was injured in what was considered a “terrorist attack.” It quickly concluded that Hun Sen was the only person who could have given the order for the grenade attack. Virtually everyone in Cambodia saw this incident as an attempted assassination of the leader of the opposition—so as to send a message to Cambodians to avoid oppositional politics. Worried that the investigation was moving too close to Hun Sen and would further destabilize Cambodia, the U.S. ambassador ordered the FBI out of the country, and the investigation ground to a halt.
Many senior Cambodian officials, even in the People’s Party, hoped that the FBI would publicly announce its findings, believing that this would force Hun Sen from power. But this did not happen. Although the identities of at least some of the perpetrators are known to the police, no one has been arrested. Hun Sen attempted to blame Sam Rainsy for the attack, suggesting he organized it to discredit the government.
Later that year Hun Sen staged a bloody coup d’etat against Ranariddh, his co-prime minister. The UN human rights office confirmed more than ninety extra-judicial executions after the coup, most of them of senior members of FUNCINPEC’s military organization; Ho Sok, FUNCINPEC’s deputy minister of the interior, was murdered in the office of a police general on the day after the coup. The murder was not even investigated.
Since the UN left in 1993, the impunity of murderers, old and new, has become standard in Cambodia. The UN human rights office and the UN special representatives for human rights have each produced extensive reports on the subject of impunity and on individual cases. Local human rights organizations have also written extensive reports on the subject, taking great risks to document case after case of violence that has led neither to investigations nor prosecutions.
Even senior military and police officials admit to the problem and complain about it, although when specific cases are raised they often go into denial. Freedom from punishment extends, too, to lower levels of government. Everyone in Cambodia is familiar with drunken soldiers refusing to pay their bills at restaurants, or illegal military and police checkpoints where one must pay a bribe to pass, or ordinary citizens having to move out of a line when a man in uniform arrives. Everyone knows who these people are, but no one dares to touch them.
Something of the same attitude applies to the Khmer Rouge. They had been weakened by the UN intervention, but Hun Sen has since been more interested in embracing than prosecuting them. In August 1996, to the dismay of King Sihanouk, the government rushed through an amnesty for a Khmer Rouge leader, Ieng Sary—who was now a warlord controlling the gem mines on the Thai-Cambodian border—to detach him from the rump of the Khmer Rouge still controlled by Pol Pot. Amnesty International complained that “amnesties which have the effect of preventing the emergence of the truth and subsequent accountability before the law should not be acceptable.” The king agreed. As Amnesty International pointed out in its letter to the king, “Impunity is one of the main contributing factors to continuing cycles of human rights violations worldwide.”
In 1997 Hun Sen requested an international tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge, but it is now clear that he did so only as part of a strategy for defeating them politically and strengthening his own hand. He was not interested in seeking justice for Cambodians or in trying to figure out, as Cambodians wanted, why the Khmer Rouge had killed so many of its own people. By the time the international Commission of Experts published its report in February 1999, Pol Pot was dead, the Khmer Rouge had collapsed, and Hun Sen had shared a champagne toast at his house with two of the most notorious Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea—“Brother Number Two”—and Khieu Samphan. They apparently negotiated their defection to the government in return for a promise that no charges would be brought against them. Both live in quiet liberty in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin on the Thai-Cambodian border, receiving guests and traveling freely.
A few weeks after the Commission of Experts report was issued, the last senior Khmer Rouge holdout, Ta Mok, was handed over to Cambodia by the Thai Army, which decided finally to wash its hands of the Khmer Rouge problem. Mok has been held since at the military prison in Phnom Penh with Duch, the former chief interrogator at the Khmer Rouge’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. These two are the only people ever arrested for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Mok and Duch receive deluxe treatment: Mok is the only prisoner in Cambodia to have a private bathroom. Duch has air conditioning.
For Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge battalion commander himself, the Khmer Rouge problem had been solved. Trials for the Khmer Rouge were no longer politically useful, given the many deals he had struck with people like Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and lower ranking Khmer Rouge commanders—and they could cause trouble with his new ally China, which vehemently opposed a tribunal given its close ties to the Khmer Rouge while it was in power.
Instead, Hun Sen began to throw up obstacles to a tribunal at every opportunity. But when he announced to Cambodians that they should “bury the past,” the public response was negative; even some elements of the Cambodian People’s Party protested. Hun Sen then shifted gears, announcing his support for a Cambodian tribunal with international participation. Under intense pressure from the United States, which had been a staunch supporter of an international tribunal, the UN reluctantly agreed to a “mixed tribunal.” In a February 2000 letter, Kofi Annan established four principles for its operation: The tribunal must, Annan argued, contain a majority of foreign judges in order to address the question of judicial independence, have an independent international prosecutor so as to ensure the power to indict, receive a commitment from the Cambodian government to arrest any person indicted by the tribunal, and agree that the amnesty granted to Ieng Sary would not be a bar to prosecution.
Hun Sen rejected these conditions. Instead, he demanded a domestic tribunal with the involvement of judges from friendly states willing to supply them. The Clinton administration, which appeared to want a tribunal at any cost, then announced its support for a complicated arrangement in which there would be a majority of Cambodian judges and no independent international prosecutor, but where a “super majority” of judges would be required for any acquittal and an appeals panel would be created to break any deadlocks between the Cambodian and international co-prosecutors.
This new arrangement was a dangerous precedent for international justice, but the UN accepted it. Still, this capitulation was not enough for Hun Sen. He imposed new conditions and raised new objections. He frequently raised the specter of renewed civil war if Ieng Sary or others were arrested and pushed through a law that conflicted with commitments he had made to the UN.
He then delayed final passage of the law creating the tribunal for almost a year and failed to respond to UN concerns over the operating agreement governing the relationship between the UN and the Cambodian government.
Senior UN officials became increasingly frustrated and concerned about Hun Sen’s apparent lack of good faith and “lack of urgency” in concluding negotiations. In February 2002, the UN announced its withdrawal from the process. The UN said it had concluded that as currently envisaged the mixed tribunal “would not guarantee the independence, objectivity and impartiality that a court established with the support of the United Nations must have.” The UN was particularly worried that Cambodia had refused to sign a legally binding agreement specifying the rules by which the UN would participate. Instead, Cambodia insisted that only its own rules would govern UN assistance. The delay in the creation of the tribunal allowed one of the most murderous Khmer Rouge leaders, Ke Pauk, member of the standing committee and the military commander perhaps most responsible for mass purges, to die in February of natural causes without having spent a day in jail. One by one, Khmer Rouge leaders are taking their secrets to their graves.
Astonishingly, several Western countries, including the United States, France, and Australia, responded to the UN’s decision by criticizing the organization publicly and insisting that it continue negotiations. This apparently reflected the fact that these governments were less interested in credible or substantial justice than in staging a trial—any sort of trial—in order to close the book on the dark Cambodian past and to improve relations with the Hun Sen regime. The UN has resisted this pressure and has continued to insist that its decision is final. That is undoubtedly the correct decision in the circumstances.
Given Hun Sen’s record, it seems unlikely that the UN and Cambodian governments will be able to reach an agreement for a tribunal that protects the sorts of judicial standards that the UN has tried to uphold in the war crimes tribunals in The Hague and Arusha. If no agreement is reached, then the Cambodian government will be in charge of any trials that do take place. In that case there is little prospect for anything more than a show trial of Mok and Duch.
It now seems probable that no judicial accounting of the Khmer Rouge period will take place. Even if the UN and Hun Sen had reached a satisfactory agreement, only a handful of people would have faced trial, whereas in both former Yugoslavia and Rwanda minor figures as well as major have been prosecuted. Many Cambodians still live in villages with their former tormentors and, with the exception of a spate of revenge killings in 1979, have waited patiently for the killers of their relatives to be brought to justice.
In short, the story of the world and Cambodia since the mid-1970s shows the immense difficulty that the international community has in intervening effectively to judge—much less to stop—massive abuses of human rights. Today the notion that there is a right or even a duty of humanitarian intervention is much more widely accepted than when Senator George McGovern first proposed it against the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. But it is still hard, verging on impossible, for the UN or other global bodies to make progress against the obduracy of autocrats, let alone of tyrants and mass murderers. The failure of the world to change the policies of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, or Hun Sen without resorting to military force shows that, despite the end of the cold war, the advantage still lies with those who abuse rather than respect the law.
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