Wronged by the UN in the past, and having waited decades for the perpetrators of its national tragedy to be brought to account, Cambodia has already shown extraordinary patience for bringing the Khmer Rouge to justice, Prime Minister Hun Sen said on Wednesday.
The premier’s remarks were hardly the most conciliatory message for the UN negotiators who arrive today for discussions toward a trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders—discussions most observers predict will see limited progress at best.
“We have been waiting for 24 years to try those who inflicted genocide on us,” Hun Sen told the opening of the conference of the International Association of Francophone Mayors Wednesday morning at City Hall. “Justice will come to us eventually, but we have had to wait for decades.”
Not for the first time, the premier lashed out at the UN for recognizing the ousted Khmer Rouge government throughout Cambodia’s 1980s occupation by Vietnam. “When we defeated Pol Pot, the UN…punished us and supported Pol Pot, but today the UN comes to us to negotiate about a trial for Pol Pot,” he said.
Hun Sen may believe that Cambodia has been doing all the waiting, but the UN appears to believe quite the opposite. In January, the UN’s head negotiator, legal counsel Hans Corell, implied that Cambodia was the one dragging its feet.
“[The Cambodian government] would say, ‘well, it’s the United Nations that’s prolonging the process,’” Corell told UN Radio on Jan 6. “I don’t think that’s true, and I’ve kept a very good record of in whose court the ball has been, so to speak.”
Such public exchanges of subtle blame, observers say, epitomize a process that, after five and a half years, has gone sour—perhaps irretrievably so.
“There is a lot of finger-pointing by each side saying the other side has no will,” Youk Chhang, executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, said on Wednesday. “Each side should prove they have the will” instead of blaming the other.
Youk Chhang did not predict such an occurrence in the near future.
Corell’s team is set to arrive at Phnom Penh International Airport around 10 am today and give a news conference. However, sources close to the Cambodian side, which is headed by Minister of Cabinet Sok An, say the talks themselves won’t begin until Friday. The two sides are expected to work through the weekend, and the UN negotiators are scheduled to depart on Monday. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is required to report on the talks to the UN General Assembly by Tuesday.
Cambodia and the UN last met on the tribunal in New York in January. Those talks were characterized as “exploratory”—Corell said on Jan 9 that they were “to see whether we can find common ground which would make it possible for the secretary-general to send a delegation to Phnom Penh,” and “not a negotiating session.”
Sok An and Corell have since been tight-lipped, refusing even to say whether progress was made in the January meetings. But the very fact of today’s visit—Corell’s first to Cambodia since July 2000, although Sok An officially invited him in October 2001—indicates the two sides are ready and willing to get down to business, diplomats said this week.
“[The UN team] didn’t come all this way for nothing,” Australian Ambassador Louise Hand said on Wednesday.
But Hand and other diplomats came far short of predicting a breakthrough. “We urge both parties to be flexible in the interest of a UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal at the earliest possible time,” Hand said.
Similarly, a US Embassy official said that while Corell’s arrival was encouraging, “It’s taken a certain amount of effort to get both sides talking again, but they’ve got to move from just talking to making real progress.”
The official was referring to the nearly yearlong period between February 2002, when the UN announced it was pulling out of the tribunal negotiations, and December, when a General Assembly mandate forced the world body to return. In between came intense lobbying by many UN member nations.
Japan was especially active and co-sponsored the December resolution. Asked on Wednesday whether he is optimistic about the current talks, Japanese Ambassador Gotaro Ogawa said, “Not 100 percent.”
“The chances of a broad agreement are not excluded, but I’m not sure it’s possible in just a few days of discussions,” Ogawa said. “We hope the process continues, but there have been crises in the past…. There have been difficulties. We have been trying to persuade both sides to be flexible.”
Ogawa expressed hope that such flexibility can be achieved.
“The search for justice is never futile—it is necessary,” US-based Khmer Rouge historian Craig Etcheson wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. “And the search for justice in Cambodia will continue, despite the dim prospects for success in the current round of talks.”
But based on the stances the two sides have taken in the past, “it is hard to see how there could be enough common ground between the two sides for this round of talks to yield an agreement.”
