Varðmenn vítis

Nú er að styttast að hefjist réttarhöld yfir Rauðu Khmerunum í Kambódiu.  Það verður fróðlegt að fylgjast með því hvað kemur út úr þessum réttarhöldum, ef það verður þá eitthvað.  En það var ágætis grein sem ég las nú nýverið á vef Spiegel sem fjallaði um þessi réttarhöld.

Eins og þar kemur fram eru þessi réttarhöld ef til vill ekki síst merkileg fyrir þær sakir að líklega eru þetta fyrstu réttarhöldin þar sem reynt að taka með lagalegum hætti á framferði kommúnisma einhversstaðar í heiminum.  En það er í raun ekki síður eftirtektarvert hvað Sameinuðu Þjóðirnar og hið svokallaða "alþjóðasamfélag" er ófært um að taka á málum sem þessu.  Þetta er   "Alþjóðadómstóll", en samningaferlið sem fara þurfti í til að fá einhverja lögsögu er það flókið og erfitt að úr verður einhver óskapnaður.  Nafnið á dómstólnum segir líklega flest það sem segja þarf, en það er: Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea."

Svo ég reyni að snara þessu yfir á Íslensku, "Sérstök réttarhöld fyrir dómstólum Kambódiu, vegna glæpa sem framdir voru í stjórnartíð lýðræðisríkisins Kampútseu".

Það má því segja að dómstóllinn viðurkenni stjórn Pols Pots sem lýðræðisstjórn.  Hvað meinar fólkið með þessu?

En hér eru nokkir bútar úr grein Spiegel:

"Pol Pot and his minions committed mass murder against their own people. Now, an international tribunal is to judge the regime -- what some people call the first legal reckoning with communism. Can justice be served, 30 years on?"

"A year ago, authorities came to his yard and told Nhem Sal he'd been chosen to serve as a witness for the international human rights tribunal, officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Finally, in early 2007, after years of difficult talks between the government of Hun Sen and the United Nations, the last survivors from the so-called "Democratic Kampuchea," the regime of the communist mass murderer Pol Pot, will stand before an international court in Phnom Penh. For a quarter century, state prosecutors have been sifting through trial documents, and now they want to take depositions from the first witnesses.

The crimes committed were monstrous. Almost half of Cambodia's population of 7 million died in Pol Pot's barbaric attempt to turn his country into the ultimate communist society, says Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Foreign experts consider 1.7 million to be a more probable figure for the number killed. Nhem Sal's visitors said only seven of the approximately 20,000 inmates of S-21 survived the torture camp. Five are still living, and Nehm Sal is one of them."

"White letters announce over the entrance: "Genocide Museum." On the ground floor are long rows of boards affixed with photos. All prisoners had been photographed by Pol Pot's guards upon their arrival at this tropical gulag, and their personal data noted.

Nhem Sal spends some time examining the walls of photos, searching in vain for his own image. Suddenly his memories overwhelm him and he runs outside.

Why did the Khmer Rouge exhibit such barbarity? Who gave the order to commit mass murder of their own people? French scholar Philippe Peycam has tried to answer such questions. "Indirectly, the catastrophe began with us, the French," says the director of the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap, which is located near the world-famous site of the temple Angkor Wat, which also had housed the Khmer Rouge."

"When the French colonial army crossed into Indochina in the middle of the 19th century, Cambodia was under the rule of Thailand and Vietnam. In 1863, the colonial rulers turned it into a protectorate. The French first permitted Cambodia's independence in 1953 under King Sihanouk. But by the end of the 1960s the country became entangled in the Vietnam War. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, left-wing guerrillas emerged -- the Khmer Rouge -- which fought against the government and finally came to power in 1975.

The communists combined their ideology with an extreme xenophobia, says Peycam. The more people they killed, the surer they felt that they would rid themselves of every foreign influence. A murderous nationalism had taken over.

Nhem En, 46, a member of the staff of S-21, lives near Siem Reap, in the border region of Anlong Veng. He took most of the photos now on display at the Genocide Museum. He, too, joined the Khmer Rouge as a child soldier. It was a decision he has never regretted. "The B-52 bombers shattered our country," he says."

"The tribunal will begin its work at the start of this year. The trial is likely to take years, and it must be limited to handling human rights violations committed during the period of the Pol Pot dictatorship between April 17, 1975, and Jan. 6, 1979.

Most Khmer Rouge leaders have already been pardoned; others have reached high positions in Cambodia's current government. The contract between the UN and Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party determines who can be charged: "Upper ranks of leaders and those who bear the greatest responsibility for the crimes." Pol Pot, "Brother No. 1," bore the greatest responsibility.

In July, Ta Mok, military head of the Khmer Rouge, died at age 80 in the military hospital of Phnom Penh. Nuon Chea, 79, "Brother No. 2," lives in the last retreat for the former communists. Both the former foreign minister, Ieng Sary, and head of state Khieu Samphan also live there in luxurious villas. Only Duch, the feared head of the torture center S-21, is sitting in jail.

Claudia Fenz, 48, is one of 13 international judges and attorneys who will sit on the 30-member court. The Viennese attorney is no longer sure whether the case is more about justice or politics. Cambodian judges can overrule their UN colleagues at all levels of jurisdiction. Then, of course, there is the court's unusually cumbersome name: "Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea."

Even so, expectations are high. At the opening reception for the diplomatic corps, the South Korean ambassador summoned the foreign judges and urged them to take their historical responsibility seriously, "because the trial is the first legal reckoning with communism."

Gregory Stanton, law professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, is skeptical. He's been dealing with the genocide in Cambodia for years. He first came to the country in 1980 as a member of a humanitarian organization, just after the arrival of troops from Hanoi. At the time, there were only 30,000 people still living in Phnom Penh: The capital was like a ghost town.

Stanton saw rice fields overflowing with corpses. He heard stories of how babies were smashed against trees; he heard about mothers asphyxiated with plastic bags.

When Stanton returned to the United States, though, no one was interested in Cambodia. Says Stanton: "It was none other than Vietnam, which had delivered a shameful defeat to the USA, that would liberate Cambodia from the mass murderer Pol Pot, with help from its vassal, Hun Sen."

He was trained as a photographer in 1976 in China, and then assigned to Tuol Sleng. "I heard the people screaming, but my hair grew on my head." In other words: To survive, worry about yourself first. "Every day they brought in new ones," he says. "We had to take drastic measures." When Pol Pot fled in 1979, pursued by Vietnamese troops, Nhem En followed him and became his private photographer. "He was not a bad man," he says of the dictator. "He always took care of his comrades. Without him, we would have been an American province.""

""This court will never bring justice," says Youk Chhang, 46. He's a kind of Cambodian Simon Wiesenthal. If he and his documentation center had not sought written documents on the mass murder, and if they hadn't preserved eyewitness testimony about the horrors, the tribunal would not have been established.

Pol Pot's minions murdered many members of Chhang's large extended family. They slit his older sister's belly open -- before her children's eyes -- after she was accused in the work camp of stealing rice. When one of her daughters wouldn't stop crying, an executioner handed over her mother's rice bowl and said, "If you keep this, your mother will one day return to you from heaven."

The child is now grown and has her own children in the United States. When they ask about the meaning of the bowl, she usually says: "Ask your uncle in Cambodia."

To this day, Youk Chhang has not yet managed to tell the story. But he won't keep it from the judges."

Feitletranir eru blogghöfundar.

Greinina í heild má finna hér.

Athugasemdir

[G. Tómas Gunnarsson, 7.1.2007 kl. 04:42]

Það kann að vera rétt að það sé einfaldast, en mér finnst það að mörgu leyti órökrétt, og allt of mikil viðurkenning í þá átt að stjórnarfarið hafi verið lýðræði.

[Þórir Hrafn Gunnarsson, 8.1.2007 kl. 05:39]

Þetta var opinbera nafnið á ríkinu. Hvað annað ætti eiginlega að kalla landið?

Kveðjur :)

[G. Tómas Gunnarsson, 8.1.2007 kl. 21:04]

"Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed By Members  and the Government of Khmer Rouge.", hefði mér þótt alveg ágætt, svona sem dæmi.

Það þótt einhver fjöldmorðingi lýsi því yfir að hann sé útsendari almættisins á jörðu, gerir það ekki að verkum að dómstólar þurfi að taka neitt tillit til þess, þeir dæma hann einfaldlega sem fjöldamorðingja, eða það þætti mér eðlilegast.