1 "Cambodia and the United States are both signatories to the Genocide Convention, and we will support efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the mass murders of the 1970s if the new Cambodian government chooses to pursue this path." The US ratified the Convention in 1986, long after Cambodia.
2
See Christophe Peschoux, Les "nouveaux"
Khmers rouges.
3
"An Overview of the Cambodian Genocide",
a paper prepared for the Yale Cambodia Conference (February 1992).
Kiernan's and Heder's surveys have not been published.
4
Cambodia, a Demographic Catastrophe, which I reviewed in Libération,
Paris, 17 Sept.1980. Michael Vickery discussed it in the Bulletin
of Concerned Asian Scholars.
5
On traditional wisdom, see the texts edited
and translated by Saveros Pou, Guirlande de Cpap'.
6
Pol Pot would agree. In December 1988, he
said in a speech to his Women's Association cadres: "Our
troops previously did not know how to conduct popular work because
the concrete fact was that they did not yet have any faith in
the people and instead relied exclusively on bullets and other
material things", an interesting comment coming from the
man who has been in charge of a guerrilla movement for 25 years.
7
Translated in Thion and Kiernan, Khmers
rouges!, pp. 358-61.
8Les États hindouisés, Introduction, p. 3.
9
See Keng Vannsak, Recherche d'un fonds
culturel khmer, unpublished thesis.
10
A good analysis of regional and local variations
is to be found in Michael Vickery, Cambodia, 19751982,
Chapter 3.
12
See Sarin Chhak, Les Frontières
du Cambodge. See above, Chapter 6, note 6.
13
See Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy.
14
See Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe. Lemkin had been a technician of law in the Polish
civil service until 1939. He then went to Sweden and in 1941 to
the US. He died in 1959. The concept of genocide occupies a rather
limited space in the book. In his view, it included cultural assimilation,
as a weapon to destroy one's identity: for instance, the Germans,
he said, were imposing a genocide on the Poles because they were
pushing pornography and gambling, thus destroying Polish culture.
Today, such an extensive use of the word is generally rejected.
The 1948 Convention still cites "mental harm" against
a group as a crime.
15
Gregory Stanton informs us that the former
president of (formerly Spanish) Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Macias
Nguema, a very bloody dictator indeed, has been condemned for
genocide. I still believe some more obvious candidates could be
found, excluding new regimes putting on trial their predecessors.
On the circumstances surrounding Macias coming to power, see Donato
Ndongo Bidyogo, Historia y tragedia de Guinea Ecuatorial,
1977.
16
"Will be punished [up to three years
in jail] those who will have contested [through the press] one
or several crimes against humanity as they have been defined by
Article 6 of the statute of the international military tribunal
annexed to the London Agreement of Aug. 8, 1945." (Art. 9,
Loi du 13 juillet 1990). This law is an obvious violation of basic
constitutional rights but, in France, citizens cannot appeal to
the Constitutional Council, which is usually stacked with former
politicians.
17
The very political nature of the wording
is fully recognized in the 1991 Annual Report of the Cambodia
Documentation Commission, headed by David Hawk in New York
when it says, p. 5: "At the 1989 Paris Conference on Cambodia,
the Khmers Rouges, China and Singapore insisted on the removal
of the reference to genocide." Then a footnote adds:"The
point is not a legal technicality. The use or non-use of the word
`genocide' (a crime under international law) was diplomatic
code language for the present and future role of the top Khmers
rouges leaders. The substitution of the more vague formulation
`past policies and practices' for the word `genocide' was the
signal that top Khmers Rouges leaders such as Pol Pot, Ieng Sary,
Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Son Sen, Ta Mok et al. would not be
barred from potential and actual, de jure and de facto,
leadership roles in Cambodia's future."
In a list of publications provided by Cultural Survival Quarterly (Cambridge, Mass.), 14, 3, p. 55, out of 46 titles, three refer to "ethnocide" and three to "genocide", to describe quite similar situations of threatened indigenous peoples. It does not seem any legal action is implied.
19
The case of Indonesia, for instance, is
heavily loaded, with the massacre of more than 500,000 communist
affiliates in 1965, the violent oppression exercised in Irian
Jaya since 1969 when the international community approved the
forceful take-over of Western New Guinea, and the invasion of
Portuguese Timor in 1975, followed by massacres equalling those
of Pol Pot. But Indonesia is a trustful ally of the West which
generously provides the weapons to carry the mass murders. In
which press would it be possible to call Suharto "perpetrator
of genocide"? On Irian Jaya, see Robin Osborne, Indonesia's
Secret War.
20
See Adhémar Leclère, Recherches
sur le droit public des Cambodgiens.
21
See A. Boudillon, La Réforme du
régime; Roger Kleinpeter, Le Problème foncier
au Cambodge. See above, Chapter 2.
22
People's Revolutionary Tribunal, Phnom Penh, 1988, 311 p.
23For an Asian context, see Paul Mus, "Cosmodrame»
et politique en Asie du Sud-Est", reprinted in L'Angle
de l'Asie.
24
The analogy is always tempting. See, for
instance, what a distinguished Khmer senior economist with the
Asian Development Bank, Mr Someth Suos, said recently in Penang:
"The killing field was a world major historical event that
surpassed Hitler's killing of the Jews." (Workshop on
Reconstruction and Development, p. 37). He later adds: "The
Khmer Rouge cadre should be accorded a role in the society."
The parallel with Nazi Germany is nothing but laziness of thought.
25
See the numerous references to "Mourning"
in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud and,
in particular, "Mourning and Melancholia" and "Thoughts
for the Times on War and Death" (written in 1915), in vol.
14, Standard Edition. For the Cambodian context, see James K.
Boehlein, "Clinical Relevance of Grief and Mourning among
Cambodian Refugees". I am grateful to Lane Gerber who provided
me with a copy of this article.
26 See below, Appendices.
27
Introduction, p. 35 in Thion and Kiernan.
28
Ieng Sary recently answered this question
in a talk with two journalists (Le Nouvel Observateur,
1723 Nov. 1991): Genocide? "A lie[...]. I am human. I never
thought I committed acts of genocide, I shall never recognize
that." Any regrets? "Yes, I regret I could not efficiently
oppose erroneous points of views which prevailed at certain times,
I regret I had not the courage [...] to directly oppose some people.[...]
Maybe I could not have stayed alive until now."
29
I wish to thank Helen Jarvis and David Chandler
for their useful suggestions when reading previous drafts of this
paper.