Speech

The Khmer Rouge Genocide and the Need for Justice

Remarks by U.S. Ambassador Joseph A. Mussomeli

at meeting with Khmer Rouge Victims

March 28, 2006

One of the greatest crimes of the 20^th century has gone unpunished for 30 years.  As you all know, between April 17, 1975 and January 8, 1979 -- a period of less than four years -- the Khmer Rouge systematically tortured, starved, and eradicated (“smashed” was their preferred term) approximately 2.2 million fellow Cambodians.  This constituted between one-fourth and one-third of the entire population.  No one was safe from these “liberators of the people.”  Their list of enemies was long: the indigenous Muslim population, the Vietnamese minority, Buddhist monks, city dwellers, anyone with a diploma, anyone who wore eye glasses, and especially fellow Khmer Rouge suspected of treason.  All these groups and many others -- along with wives, husbands, and children -– were annihilated in arguably the worst genocide ever perpetrated.

Why do I say the “worst genocide ever” when there has been such stiff competition in a world that sometimes seems to have lost any sense of decency and compassion?  Because this genocide stands alone as having failed to bring any of the guilty to justice.  From the Nuremberg Trials to the more recent international and national tribunals to try the mass murderers in Bosnia, Serbia, Liberia, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, the victimized, their families, and the international community have been given some semblance of justice, some degree of retribution.  But not here in Cambodia.

Recently, there has been some progress in creating a Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT) with UN cooperation.  But time is running out as the killers grow old and fade away, but the pain and the horror that they perpetrated ought never to never run out, ought never to fade away.

Why does this matter?  Some would argue that expending scarce funding for a 30-year old crime when Cambodia suffers from so many other more immediate problems is absurd.   I hope the vast majority of Cambodians would disagree.  In Cambodia those who were responsible for the genocide for the most part live safe, free, even prosperous lives among the very people they terrorized.  There is not a single family in Cambodia that was not affected by the genocide.  Everyone alive today had fathers, mothers, siblings, aunts and uncles who perished in the slaughter.

The Khmer Rouge declared that they would bring the country back to “year zero.”  They kept good their promise and now 30 years later the country is still lost and broken.  Cambodia’s brokenness is more than just political and economic.  It is also legal and psychological and spiritual.  All the flaws of modern Cambodia -- from trafficking in persons to the drug trade and from the plundering of its natural and cultural resources to the rampant corruption that pervades all levels of the government – all have been exacerbated by the failure of the international community to bring the leaders of the Khmer Rouge to justice.

The culture of impunity that we see throughout Cambodia today is rooted in the irrefutable belief among its people that no crime is so great that it must be punished, and that whatever any Cambodian does is fine because it cannot possibly be worse than what the Khmer Rouge did – and got away with doing.  A Khmer Rouge Tribunal is a necessary first step to healing the three decades old wound that continues to fester.  There will remain severe limitations on how far Cambodia can progress and reform until some degree of justice is rendered.  All those who died and all those who suffered: their deaths and their pain need to be vindicated, need to be sacramentalized.  The victims of the genocide deserve justice; the victims of the genocide demand justice.  It is their right to receive justice, and it is our obligation to ensure that justice is done.