Book review: 'Getting away with genocide'

This was exactly the policy Hun Sen was to follow in 1994. Yet, the authors tell us, he and King Sihanouk were ready to do it in 1987. Sadly, opposition from international allies and backers put paid to that early possibility of a simple homegrown resolution to the civil war that began soon after the Vietnamese invasion in 1978.

As to the Khmer Rouge trials prospects now, the issues are mostly about logistics such as money and personnel. The cost - estimated at $50 million over three years - while a lot less than a full international trial in The Hague, is still well beyond Cambodia’s resources. I hope US aid will be forthcoming, if not this would throw a heavy burden on the other likely major international contributors: Japan, France, Australia, Sweden and the European Union.

I hope Australia will provide a legal expert and, as this book rightly stresses, a culturally sensitive judge. He or she could do no better than to read this book as a background introduction to the task.

Issues of how far to carry criminal accountability down the Khmer Rouge command chain, and over what period of time to indict Khmer Rouge crimes, have already been well defined in a formal judicial sense, by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Trials Law and the associated Cambodian Agreement signed with the UN. Formally, the trial will be limited to the central political leadership, likely to be no more than ten people, and the period in question will be confined to the Khmer Rouge government, 1975-78.

But these two questions will remain relevant in a contextual sense. Arguments to be canvassed in the trial of prison commander Duch will neatly address the accountability of many Khmer Rouge middle-rankers. Henry Kissinger will not appear in the dock, but his culpability for the US carpet bombings of “the Ho Chi Minh trail” that destroyed rural civil society in Cambodia and thereby created the conditions that brought the Khmer Rouge to power, will certainly be raised in the court by defence lawyers.

And there will inevitably be discussion of the Khmer Rouge biographies of some people in the present Cambodian government and parliament. About Hun Sen himself, I believe there can be no doubt: after he abandoned his minor Khmer Rouge post (deputy regimental commander) in Eastern Cambodia and escaped to Vietnam in 1977, he became the Khmer Rouge’s most determined and effective political enemy.

In the end, it was Hun Sen - not the UN, not the US, not China, not Thailand, not Vietnam, not the Cambodian Royal Family, not Funcinpec, not Sam Rainsy - who destroyed the Khmer Rouge through a patient step-by-step strategy, combining military force and material incentives to persuade its soldiers to lay down their arms.

Hun Sen gets scant international recognition for this. I believe history will be kinder to his peace-building achievements. Through all these years since 1978 to the most recent election in 2003, Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party have tried to defend their country’s integrity and sovereignty against powerful coalitions of people, who wanted nothing so much as they wanted regime change in Cambodia.

It seems to me remarkable that Hun Sen managed to maintain a non-provocative, balanced and effective foreign policy in these years, that has steadily normalised Cambodia’s situation while others were seeking to destabilise it.

As the United States and China have changed, so has Cambodia. September 11, 2001 and the War on Terror gave a little welcome breathing space to Cambodia’s sovereignty: Cambodia beneficially went off the screen in Washington.

Paradoxically, the new more liberal and market-oriented China under Jiang Jemin has become a good friend to Cambodia. The country that had helped the Khmer Rouge flood Cambodia with lethal 50-cent landmines in the 1980s war, and had insisted on Khmer Rouge participation in any political settlement, is now a leading partner in Cambodia’s trade and economic development, and a powerful de facto regional guarantor of Cambodia’s sovereignty.

Japan, France and Australia have remained staunch and generous friends to Cambodia for many years. Alexander Downer’s Cambodia diplomacy has for the most part been deft and humanitarian in spirit.

Australia is now well placed to contribute to what will be an historically important international trial of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders: a trial, which will have much to teach us all. My thanks to Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis for this important and very readable book.