anlong veng district, Oddar Meanchey province – More than 10 years after the Khmer Rouge gave its last gasp here in this former mountain stronghold, a revolutionary song echoed again across Anlong Veng town Friday: “My dear child, you must be careful with your will. You must maintain your Red customs…. When you are happy, you must think of the blood we shed while fighting.”
But this time the song was being sung in jest, to peals of nostalgic laughter, as an icebreaker at an unusual community forum sponsored by the Center for Justice and Reconciliation, a local NGO.
The daylong event was held in a dusty clearing outside the house of the late Khmer Rouge military commander Ta Mok, one of the last rebel holdouts against government rule.
The victims’ forums that have proliferated around the country in recent years are often straightforward expositions of suffering and grief. This one was more complicated: Many of those in attendance on Friday were both victims and perpetrators; few were totally innocent or totally guilty.
Perhaps the most striking example of this snarled web was Im Chem, a former mid-level Khmer Rouge cadre whose name has been repeatedly floated as possibly one of the five new suspects forwarded by Khmer Rouge tribunal prosecutors to investigators last year.
As a district chief in Banteay Meanchey province during the Pol Pot regime, she oversaw the grisly construction of the Trapaing Thmar dam, a crime scene in the court’s second case.
Now 66 years old, Ms Chem serves as deputy commune chief in Anlong Veng’s Trapaing Tav, where she says she lives peacefully, enjoys the respect of her neighbors and even pays weekly visits to her local pagoda.
Ms Chem made a dramatic appearance at Friday’s forum, rising during a question-and-answer session to deliver a 14-minute monologue that touched on everything from the nature of justice to the excellence of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s leadership.
She also declared her support for the Khmer Rouge tribunal, but urged against further prosecutions there. The prospect of more arrests was terrifying to the former cadres in Anlong Veng, she said.
“We feel very fearful, we feel unsafe, because we don’t know when it will be our turn; whether after five [arrests] it will be another five, then 10,” she said.
Ms Chem, who is disconcertingly girlish—tiny, spry and often grinning—declined to discuss the construction of the Trapaing Thmar dam in detail, or to talk about how many laborers died there. Everyone in her district who was strong enough had to help build the waterworks, she said.
“I did not do anything guilty,” Ms Chem said. “I was in the [Khmer Rouge] due to the existence of civil war, but there were many leaders.”
During a mid-morning coffee break, she wolfed down a pile of the Khmer rice flour-and-coconut sweets known as noum korm, unwrapping them from their banana-leaf casings in quick succession.
Lars Olsen, a spokesman for the Khmer Rouge tribunal who addressed the Anlong Veng forum, said the makeup of his audience presented him with a unique challenge. Mr Olsen is a veteran of reconciliation forums, but this was his first time speaking to ex-cadres in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold.
“We’ve seen here today that there is a lot of concern and fear, which is due to their not knowing enough about the court,” he said. At forums in other parts of the country, victims often ask ECCC staff why the court can’t prosecute more cadres.
In Anlong Veng, Mr Olsen said, “we need to explain that it’s a limited group [that will be prosecuted], so don’t worry.”
In his speech Friday, Mr Olsen emphasized the court’s limited mandate, which allows for the prosecution of only “senior leaders and those most responsible” for crimes committed in Democratic Kampuchea.
“It is important to know that only a few people will be prosecuted by the Khmer Rouge tribunal,” he told the group. “No ordinary member of the CPK will be prosecuted, and no ordinary soldier of the Khmer Rouge will be prosecuted.”
“You don’t have to worry: No one will come to arrest you,” added Neou Kassie, head of outreach for the court’s Victim Support Section. “You are simple people and you have the right to be heard.”
Rightly or wrongly, their assurances seemed to satisfy Ms Chem.
After hearing from Mr Olsen and Mr Kassie, she repeated several times that she no longer feared being arrested and prosecuted by the tribunal since she considered herself just another cadre.
But many of the villagers at the forum still seemed dubious about the mission of the court, and conflicted about their role in the massive social experiment that killed so many between 1975 and 1979.
A former Khmer Rouge soldier said he was confused about just about everything.
“I myself joined the Khmer Rouge army when I was 17 years old, so I was in a war for over three decades. I’m also a victim. I lost my leg. So what kind of justice do I deserve?” asked the former soldier, who declined to be named.
Although he said he wanted to see the ECCC prosecute the regime’s leadership, he was also confused as to how former Khmer Rouge cadres could be condemned: “We were illiterate and following orders from them,” he said in an impassioned speech that drew applause. “There was only Khmer Rouge then.”
Near the end of the day, as villagers gathered for one final discussion, CJR staffers asked them for their thoughts on how to promote reconciliation.
“You should not remark when you see former Khmer Rouge in the street,” one man said. “We should not talk of red Khmer or white Khmer or blue Khmer,” another suggested. “Another five suspects should not be brought forward for trial,” said a third.
Villager Then Sophal asked a simple question.
“What is the meaning of the word ‘reconciliation?’ he asked, after apologizing for his ignorance. “I always hear this word, but I do not understand exactly what it means.”
A monk sitting in the front row rose to respond.
“It’s like how you need to apply medicine to an old wound, or it will always be causing new problems,” he explained. “How we reconnect our flesh to one another, this is reconciliation.”
