The Cambodian Genocide and the Khmer Rouge

Between 1975 and 1979, 1.7 million Cambodians (21 percent of the population) were murdered by the dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge party as he tried to turn the country into a totalitarian communist state modeled on China.¹

The violence was directed against native Cambodians, in an attempt to enforce the rigid new system of political and social organization, and against ethnic minorities, including Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai.

The Cambodian genocide came at the height of the Cold War, when U.S. involvement in Vietnam and opposition to the Soviet Union meant that the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter aligned the with and its ally, the Khmer Rouge. In 1979, the neighboring government of communist Vietname invaded Cambodia and deposed Pol Pot, thereby stopping the genocide.

Nonetheless, the led an international movement to support Khmer guerillas in their fight against the Vietnamese occupiers and to isolate Cambodia.²

It took nearly 20 years for serious negotiations to make progress on establishing a tribunal to prosecute accused Khmer Rouge war criminals. The Cambodian government wanted to jointly administer the tribunal with the UN. But UN officials, including Secretary General Kofi Annan, worried that the Cambodians could not “guarantee the necessary standards of independence, impartiality and objectivity” necessarily to legitimize the tribunal and allow for its effective operation in the search for justice. They were also troubled by the insistence that “Cambodian national law would prevail over the court.”³

In 2006, an agreement was finally reached for a UN-sponsored trial to commence. Many felt the tribunal was necessary but too late in coming. Pol Pot had already died in 1998, as had several other senior Khmer Rouge officials, therefore preventing the execution of justice that would have helped heal the country.⁴

Nonetheless, in July 2010, Khmer Rouge commander, Kaing Guek Eav was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was the first of five senior leaders to face trial.

Although the belated agreement for a trial is welcome, Cambodia offers an example of how geopolitical interests often trump humanitarian ones and of the dangers of waiting too long for mobilizing the machinery of international law in the service of justice.
* Picture: Pol Pot

The Rwandan Genocide: Hutu vs. Tutsi

The African country of Rwanda became a colony of Belgium in 1916. The population of Rwanda consisted of two main ethnic groups, the minority Tutsis (about 15 percent of the population) and the majority Hutus (about 85 percent). The Belgian authorities favored the Tutsis and empowered them to assist with the administration of the colony, essentially creating a class system that was formalized by the issuing of ethnic identity cards in 1926.

In 1959, the Hutus rebelled and over 150,000 Tutsi refugees fled to neighboring Burundi. Belgium was forced to grant Rwanda independence in 1961-1962, but ethnic tensions continued to intensify as the new Hutu rulers consolidated their power. Violence between the two groups dragged on for the next 25 years.⁵

The international community pressed Rwanda’s Hutu leader, General Juvenal Habyarimana, to open the government to the participation of multiple political parties. In the early 1990s, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a group comprised of Tutsi exiles, invaded Rwanda and opened hostilities with government forces. The government’s army responded by training and equipping a civilian militia, known as the interahamwe (literally, “those who stand together”).

The UN attempted to bring the two sides together to negotiate a peace settlement, but the country was thrown into chaos when a plane carrying Habyarimana was shot down and the general himself was killed.

Over the next 100 days, the interahamwe and government forces slaughtered 800,000 people, the vast majority of them ethnic Tutsis. UN peacekeepers, which had been sent to Rwanda to monitor the situation, lacked a mandate to intervene in the conflict and were unable to stop the carnage. The violence was not halted until the RPF succeeded in overtaking the capital.⁶

In 1995, the UN established an International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda based in Arusha, Tanzania. Since 1997, the Tribunal has completed 59 cases of which 37 people were convicted, one person was arrested for false testimony, and eight people were acquitted; 13 cases are being appealed. There have been several convictions on the charge of genocide, including one of a prime minister.

One of the achievements of the tribunal has been the important precedent it set regarding the prosecution of rape as an element of genocidal activity.⁷ Although the international community failed to intervene yet again while genocide was actually being committed, the Rwanda Tribunal has largely succeeded in introducing a measure of timely justice for these terrible crimes.

*Picture: Young boy in Rwanda who lost his family in a massacre, source: http://www.un.org/av/photo/