Waiting for the UN is not surest justice or accountability

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, especially compared to waiting for United Nations dithering and excuses for confronting tyrannies.

A new film to be shown in Cambodia finds young people there not believing that the Khmer Rouge slaughtered almost 2-million of their countrymen in the late 1970’s.

Throughout the film older Cambodians describe the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge, when up to two million died because of the regime's brutality.

The camera then pans to giggling teenagers who declare that they do not believe a word of what their relatives have just said. …

"Our film shows a lot of people saying: 'I don't believe, I don't believe what happened'.

"But I think the better way to understand it is: 'I just have nothing in my own life today to allow me to conceive and to understand the stories of what you're telling me about what happened in the past," she said.

In the film, the young people are eventually shocked into belief when they are taken to visit the "killing fields", where they encounter vast collections of the skulls of victims.

Trials of some of the surviving leaders are due to be begin next year.

Pol Pot, the founder and leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in a camp on the border with Thailand in 1998.

Other key figures have also died. Ta Mok - the regime's military commander and one of Pol Pot's most ruthless henchmen - died on 21 July 2006.

A more fitting end to Pol Pot and friends would have been Mussolini’s.

The United Nations supported trial, decades late, is still stalled by arguments over procedures. Justice delayed is justice denied.

"We can't dwell on this for years," Motoo Noguchi, a Japanese prosecutor who will serve as a judge for the tribunal, said at a talk at Quinnipiac University School of Law. "Now it's time to really start cases. We have to identify the disagreements and we have to make our best efforts to solve them and quickly move to the next stage."…

The Cambodian and international judicial officials said last month that they had encountered "substantive disagreement" in their goal to adopt 110 draft rules for running the proceedings. The rules cover every phase of the proceedings -- preliminary investigations, judicial investigations, the trial and appeals. They also delineate the roles of all parties, including prosecutors, defense attorneys and defendants. The tribunal cannot begin until they are in place.

Meanwhile, one of the documenters for the coming trials, Youk Chhang, was called by Time magazine one of the heroes of Asia over the past 60-years.

Youk's Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private organization financed mainly by foreign grants, has amassed more than 600,000 pages of documents detailing the workings of the Khmer Rouge regime that from April 1975 to January 1979 transformed Cambodia into a slave state. The Center's holdings in the capital Phnom Penh include minutes of Cambodian Communist Party leadership meetings chaired by the movement's ultra-radical chief Pol Pot; confidential reports describing conditions in the countryside where more than a million people died of starvation or related illness; and the confessions under torture of thousands of prisoners killed by Pol Pot's secret police. Without these documents, a trial would be almost impossible. Today the most damning items are kept in armor-plated, fireproof cabinets, guarded day and night.

An affable, engaging 45-year-old, Youk has the demeanor of a soft-spoken diplomat rather than a man investigating mass murder. Yet his quest for justice has been as much a personal odyssey as an abstract search for historical truth. When the Khmer Rouge took power, he was marched off, like millions of others, to do forced labor in the countryside. His brother-in-law and two nieces died. Then his sister was accused of stealing rice. "She denied it," he remembers, "but the Khmer Rouge cadre refused to believe her. To prove his accusation, he took a knife and slashed her belly open. Her stomach was empty. She died a slow and horrible death." …

Youk believes the trial, to which he has devoted so many years, will help Cambodia find closure. Without accountability, he argues, the country will remain dysfunctional and unable to advance, no matter how much foreign aid is poured in. "Cambodia is like broken glass," he says. "Without justice, we cannot put the pieces together."