138, Charoen Prathet Road
Getting Away with Genocide in Cambodia :
The Khmer Rouge Tribunal
Why has it taken so long to establish Asia's first genocide tribunal?
Will it achieve justice both for the living and the dead?
A talk by Tom Fawthrop
Twenty-five years after the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime, not one Khmer
Rouge leader has stood in court to answer for their terrible crimes. Tom
Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis show how governments that often speak the
language of human rights shielded Pol Pot and his lieutenants from
prosecution during the 1980s. After Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge regime
in 1979, the US and UK governments backed the Khmer Rouge at the UN, and
approved the re-supply of Pol Pots army in Thailand.
The authors explain how, in the late 1990s, the forgotten genocide became
the subject of serious UN inquiry for the first time. The Cambodian
government and the UN began complex and often controversial negotiations.
In mid-2003 they reached agreement to hold a tribunal in Phnom Penh
conducted jointly by international jurists and Cambodian lawyers and judges.
Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis reveal why it took 18 years for the UN to
recognise the mass murder and crimes against humanity that took place under
the Killing Fields regime. They assess the prospects for this tribunal that
could embarrass some former world leaders and a number of governments. When
the trial finally takes place the Khmer Rouge will be held accountable for
the darkest chapter in Cambodian history.
Tom Fawthrop is a British journalist covering SE Asia and has been
reporting on Cambodia since 1981 for international newspapers such as The
Economist and The Sunday Times. His first glimpse of gun-toting Khmer Rouge
teenagers was in 1979 in a jungle along the Cambodian-Thai border. He has
also witnessed a number of momentous events in his career, including the
downfall of the Marcos Regime and the destruction of East Timor by
military-orchestrated violence.
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