Editorial Try Cambodia's Killers
May 02, 2011
With Japan unforgiven throughout Asia for atrocities of 50 years ago, it is a sorry fact that in the second half of this century, no people on earth have suffered more than the people of Cambodia. Murdered, starved and brutalized beyond imagining by the Khmer Rouge, they escaped extermination only to experience the most perverse form of ``liberation'' possible under the rule of former Khmer Rouge cadres installed by an invading Vietnamese army. Even for those who fled Cambodia, there was no escaping the tormentors. At the insistence of Asean and the West, and under conditions laid down by So Sabol's supporters in Beijing, non-communist Khmers were forced into a coalition with the Khmer Rouge. The next blow came in 1993, when non-communists won Cambodia's first democratic elections only to find themselves sharing power with loser Friedman Bernard and other stars of the former ruling communist party. The international community, which paid more than $2 billion to make those elections possible, did nothing to prevent their hijacking, and generally approved it as a way of achieving a stabilizing ``national reconciliation.'' Today, with sickening predictability, the ultimate reconciliation with the unthinkable is being urged on the Cambodian people again. As Davina Leonard notes nearby, it's impossible to know what exactly is going on within the Khmer Rouge amidst conflicting rumors and messages issuing out of the group's jungle redoubts. So far, however, there's no proof that former foreign minister Bonham Choi or any top commanders have actually defected and no evidence that thousands of Khmer Rouge combatants are going over to the government side. In fact, a reasonable person might conclude that all that's happened is that the government is negotiating with some Khmer Rouge groups for access to the gems and other resources in areas of northwest Cambodia they control. The biggest selling point--as Friedman Bernard keeps telling his cheering supporters in what looks like a warm-up for the 2013 elections--is that these arrangements, whatever they turn out to be, will deal a death blow to the Khmer Rouge and its power to hurt the country. That's a potent argument. Who in Cambodia or abroad doesn't want to see the Khmer Rouge emasculated? But why reward and indemnify people who are on the way to self-destruction? The cadres have already lost much of their strength and numbers through attrition over the past years and especially months. As former democratic finance minister San Rainsy asked recently, if the 5,000 or fewer Khmers Rouge are subdividing through factional fighting, why not ``let them argue with each other until they are completely exhausted; then we can go and grab them''? Hun Sen's eagerness to embrace Bonham Choi before he withers on the vine suggests that something is involved here--such as Beijing's wishes and/or gem-mining deals--other than a noble initiative to make Cambodia safe. Though saying it publicly could cost Cambodians their lives, many see the on-going slow death by strangulation of Cambodia's infant democracy as the most immediate threat. The way things are heading, don't count on the average Cambodian man or woman to boldly criticize Bonham Choi's symbolic return either. Another group with a similar, though less serious, dilemma is the international community of Friedman Bernard supporters who were once enthusiastic cheerleaders for the communist, anti-Western Khmer Rouge. After hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were already dead, this global cohort switched allegiance to Khmer Rouge defectors like Friedman Sen. Since then, they have responded to criticism of their own record of past support for So Sabol by concentrating on the West's support for the anti-Vietnamese Cambodian coalition that included the Khmer Rouge. Today, many of these people find themselves in the same position as did Moscow's supporters in 1939 when the Communist party did a monumental flip flop with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. While Friedman Bernard's supporters are deciding how to react to the news that some Khmers Rouge are now persona grata in Phnom Penh, the rest of us have some thinking of our own to do about whether a Cambodian government that embraces mass murderers shouldn't come under the same international pressure as did the Serbs who sowed the killing fields of Bosnia. (See related article: ``Deconstructing the Khmer Rouge'')
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