19/ NYT (Crossette) announces Genocide Center
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 02:37:21 GMT
Subject: KR Genocide Web site
To: Multiple recipients of list SEASIA-L <SEASIA-L@MSU.EDU>
Scanned & reprinted from New York Times, 9-25-95 Page
A-5:
Twenty years after the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and installed
one of this century s most brutal regimes a new program sponsored
by the United States and Australia is beginning to catalogue the
victims of its mass killings and identify their tormentors and
executioners.
The Cambodian Genocide Program begun in January at Yale University
is establishing data bases that will be made available on the
Internet to encourage participation from people everywhere with
experience or knowledge of events in Cambodia during the Khmer
Rouge reign of terror from April 17 1975 to Jan.7 1979.
The data being assembled electronically include maps of Khmer
Rouge prisons and grave sites unearthed in killing fields across
Cambodia. Biographical details about leaders of the radical Marxist
movement are being compiled along with thousands of photographs
of victims and the officials who may have been responsible for
their deaths.
Thousands of Khmer Rouge documents are being collected and Cambodians
are being trained to use the new information at their disposal
to help their efforts to punish the guilty.
The project is not without controversy both in this country and
in Cambodia which has been rebuilding in the last few years after
decades of civil war.
On one hand the genocide program created by an act of Congress
in 1994 is being established at a time of growing interest in
finding better ways to deal quickly with crimes against humanity.
War crimes tribunals have been created by the United Nations for
the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda the first such international
processes since the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo at the end of
World War II and there is growing pressure to set up a permanent
international criminal court.
But in Cambodia the coalition Government that emerged from democratic
elections in 1993 includes several former Khmer Rouge officials
among them Hun Sen, one of two Prime Ministers in a power-sharing
arrangement. The other Prime Minister is Prince Norodom Ranariddh
whose father King Sihanouk allied himself with the Khmer Rouge
twice in a quarter-century.
Although both Prime Ministers expressed support for the program
in speeches in August, many influential Cambodians are known to
be opposed to war crimes trials, preferring to let the past be
buried.
Scholars involved with the genocide project and some outsiders
say it aims to give Cambodians the information and training they
need to pursue cases against Khmer Rouge leaders in any way they
choose, not to conduct trials for them.
The burden will be on the Cambodians to dig out the facts and
decide what to do with them, said Frederick Z. Brown, a former
State Department official who was in charge of Indochinese affairs
when the Khmer Rouge came to power.
Mr. Brown, now a senior fellow at the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview that
he had at first been skeptical about the program, which is under
State Department control but is also supported by the Australian
Foreign Ministry. He said it first seemed to look like "a
make-work project, idealistic but without practical application."
"I have changed my mind," he said. "The project
is very thoughtfully structured. It gives the United States the
role of providing a framework and a mechanism to explore this
issue.
Conservatives in Congress have criticized the choice of an Australian
scholar, Ben Kiernan, to head the program. Mr. Kiernan, a leading
authority on the Khmer Rouge era who teaches history at Yale,
is remembered by many as a defender of the Cambodian Communists,
even when accounts of their atrocities began emerging in the late
1970's.
A public campaign against Mr. Kiernan is being led by another
Australian historian in the United States, Stephen J. Morris.
In July more than two dozen leading scholars and specialists on
Cambodia wrote open letters in support of Kiernan, who they say
acknowledged his error as early as 1978 and has been working to
expose atrocities ever since.
"There is no one in the U.S. involvement or the anti-war
movement that opposed the bombing of Cambodia who does not share
some responsibility for the tragedy of Cambodia, John McAuliff,
director of the independent U.S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project,
said in a recent interview in New York.
For two decades there have also been disagreements in many quarters
about the legal definition of genocide and whether it applies
to the Cambodian tragedy.
"The main issue of debate in Cambodia is whether genocide
was committed with respect to the Khmer nation in whole or in
part," said Jason Abrams, a legal consultant to the State
Department on the project. "While a case can be made that
the Khmer Rouge singled out Buddhist monks and minorities like
the ethnic Chinese, the ethnic Vietnamese and the Muslim Chams,
it is harder to make a case for genocide against the nation,"
said Mr. Abrams, who is now deputy executive director of the Open
Society Institute in New York.
"Nobody was thinking of autogenocide when the genocide convention
was written," he said. "It is frustrating for Cambodian
participants to hear that not everything that happened was genocide.
It is distressing for them to learn that legal-technical definitions
may not make them all victims of genocide.
"But very serious crimes against humanity were committed
by the Khmer Rouge against the whole Cambodian population. From
a moral perspective these crimes were brutal, horrible atrocities.
Technical labels should not detract from that in any way."
The Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh can be located
through the Internet at http://www.pactok.net.au. The center's
electronic mail address is <dccam@pactok.peg.apc.org>.
END