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VISITING the Killing Fields museum in Cambodia, one
is both appalled and mesmerized by the almost two million skulls and
skeletons of ordinary Khmers or Cambodians, aged at least 14 years
at the time of their murders, sickeningly piled on top of one
another. In response to the massive genocide committed by communist
forces led by French-educated Saloth Sar, also known as Pol Pot, the
United Nations established a national prison center to house the top
leadership of Khmer Rouge while awaiting prosecution to be
apparently initiated through an international criminal tribunal.
Unfortunately, after more than 30 years after the start of the
national massacre on a scale that former UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan says is still almost impossible to comprehend, the trial of
these ruthless Khmer Rouge leaders has not even commenced. Only a
single communist leader has been apprehended for the genocide.
Cambodia has already marked its
30th anniversary of the dubious liberation of Phnom Penh by the
Khmer Rouge, which then embarked in a national experiment of utopian
social engineering supposedly to create a singular and unified
proletarian class. The socio-political experimentation, however,
left more than a fifth of its population dead and the rest of the
nation mourning the decaying corpses and broken bones of their
relatives that continues to haunt them today.
But Pol Pot and many of his chief
lieutenants have already died while many of those responsible for
the genocide are aging. Kang Kek Leu, also known as Kaing Guek Eav,
is the Khmer Rouge chief executioner Duch, and director of the Tuol
Sleng torture prison. He was the first to be even arrested eight
years ago; there have been no arrests ever since. He just recently
became the lone inhabitant of the national prisons created by the UN
International Criminal Tribunal. It is anticipated that other top
regime leaders will soon be arrested, which may include Khmer Rouge
Head of State Khieu Samphan, Deputy Chairman Nuon Chea, and Foreign
Minister Ieng Sary. Although these murderers have denied their
leadership roles to the butchery claiming unawareness of the killing
fields occurring in distant zones under the command of more junior
communist cadres, Kang Kek Leu is the link, the middle person, or
the joint nexus anticipated to “explain the decision making for
the killings and the chain of command and responsibility” from Pol
Pot to the top leaders down to the senior officers then to the
junior cadres.
The international community seeks
a closure to the evils of the national massacre but this can only be
attained by sending the message that crimes against humanity, of
such massive degree, committed with impunity, shall never be
tolerated and those responsible for such universal atrocities and
gore must be punished. Many Cambodians may have no direct
recollection of Pol Pot or the massacres in their country and may
even wonder if the money is better spent on irrigation or drinking
water rather than for the initiative of a protracted, tedious trial
that may raise renewed violence and bloodshed throughout their
volatile nation. But many do clamor for justice.
Unfortunately, however, the great
vanishing tribunal to end the impunity of the worst genocidal
criminals of Asia is now a global embarrassment, with America
contributing nothing to the effort to hold those genocidal
terrorists accountable. While America aspires to pursue the
globalization of democracy, the world’s tyrants and genocidal
terrorists are escaping their deserved punishment because America
has not even contributed a single cent to the effort to prosecute
and to bring to trial these mass murderers that have committed the
worst crime since Adolf Hitler. If America refuses to act, will the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations take the cudgels for the
ordinary Asian? Or is respect for human rights and dignity of its
individual citizens just a myth that may never see fruition,
especially in the lands of tyrants?
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