Fairytale, 2

So... The International Tribunal. Officially called the ECCC - Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia, this court has been years in the making. The international community and many Cambodian citizens have been trying to arrest, charge, and try KR officials since the regime fell in 1979. The head honcho, Pol Pot, died before any legal action could be taken.

Initially the public was supposed to apply for passes/clearance to visit the court, so we went on Tuesday after we taught English over the lunch hour, with no expectation of actually getting in to the building or compound. As we arrived the trial chamber was going on a 20 or 30 minute break, and Ajaan John asked if we could go in when the court restarted - AND THEY SAID YES! We were so excited. And a mite uncomfortable, because we were dressed for Cambodian heat and bumming around... not actually sitting in the trial chamber. I definitely went to the ECCC in a peasant skirt and beater-style tank top... :/ Jenna had to borrow Catherine's scarf to get in, because they wouldn't allow in shorts. Maybe we should have dreamed a little bigger.

All embarrassment aside, this was an amazing experience. We were witnessing the first day of trial proceedings in the first case to make it all the way to trial at the ECCC. Whoa.

(Before each case actually makes it to trial, there is a pre-trial period where the judges, defense, prosecution, and civil party attorneys attempt to hash out all of the nitty gritty rules and procedures for the actual trial. Some things are the same as trial - the defense likes to question the detention of the accused in both chambers, and the civil party attorneys don't really get to do anything ever being two examples - but the pre-trial is where Cambodian and international law get smushed together and a procedure and rules are agreed upon, and trial is where things really get adversarial and guilt needs to be proven and sentences handed down. Of the five cases currently active at the ECCC, four are in the pre-trial stage and one - the one we saw - has proceeded to trial chambers.)

The case before the trial chamber currently is prosecuting Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch (pronounced Doy-ik, we think) the man who ran Tuol Sleng/S-21 Prison during the Khmer Rouge. On Tuesday we missed the first Prosecution and Defense opening statements (they each gave 2) and we just missed Duch addressing the court, coming in as the second Defense attorney gave his opening statement. After the opening statements finished, the trial for the day ended with discussion of some logistical problems that had crept up along with some civil party attorney discontent being expressed due to their lack of opening statement.

We decided to go back to take in a full day of court in small groups. I was drawn for the second day of Duch's trial on Wednesday. We arrived at the ECCC at about 8:45 on Wednesday morning excited to hear the outcome of some of the previous day's debates, since the Justices wanted the time to confer, and to see what would happen next. In summary, the Court denied the Civil Parties' request for opening statements and requested that the Defense put forth the challenges they had alluded to the day before in their first opening statement. At first they didn't want to and tried to write everything off as a misunderstanding, but when asked a second time, the attorneys finally spit out their request to have the court release Duch to house arrest, since he had been in jail for 10 years - 2 years without being charged with anything, 7.5 in the custody of the Cambodian Military, and the final 2.5 in the custody of the ECCC (the .5s are approximate). There is apparently a Cambodian statute that says people charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes or related charges cannot be held for longer than three years, that supplied the basis of the Defense's request. The Prosecution countered, but didn't really put forward overly convincing arguments (at least, not as convincing as the defense was, in my view). One of the Civil Party attorneys made the best argument for retaining custody of Duch. She said that the ECCC has until July before their three years of custody are up, so this is a non-issue that should maybe be discussed in July, if ever. She is one smart lawyer lady. And she had badass hair. The justices decided to break for lunch and conferencing.

After lunch, the Justices came back and said they were gonna take the weekend to discuss release, but that they had decided the next order of business should be to read into the court record the "agreed upon facts" from the indictment. Basically, what happened was the pre-trial chamber came up with this indictment, listing the crimes Duch committed. The Prosecution then broke the indictment down into individual pieces of factual evidence and submitted these to both the court and to the Defense. The Defense was then supposed to go through the facts and designate whether they "agreed" with a fact, "agreed in part", "disagreed" or "did not contest" the fact. The facts that are agreed to or not contested are then considered not up for debate or discussion during the trial; that part of the indictment is fact, true. The Justices, on the recommendation of the Civil Parties, decided that it would be best for everyone's understanding of the case and proceedings if the agreed or not contested facts be read aloud. In the first of three parts, there were some 240 agreed or not contested facts that the prosecutor read aloud in the trial chamber. They ranged from the location of S-21 and M-13 (another prison Duch ran for a time), to the number of prisoners held and killed at S-21, to the methods of torture and the genesis of torture training manuals (:Duch. He produced three volumes of torture techniques and rules of interrogation for the prison... oy). I started the reading trying to write down each fact. About 60 in I switched to writing numbers to keep track of the total and jotting down the facts I found particularly compelling. At 200, I quit writing all together and just marked tallies. I have a full page and a half or two pages of notes that are almost entirely number sequences. I felt a little dazed by the time we left the courtroom, especially when I remembered there were still 100 or so facts to be read from the second section of the indictment (the defense had chosen to not respond to the third part, since it spoke about Duch's character or personality or something, and they felt it resembled self-incrimination, so they didn't look at those facts).

The next day Nathan, Patricia and Catherine went to the court, while the rest of us bummed and taught English. Thursday was part of the pre-trial chamber proceedings for Ieng Sary, the foreign minister for the KR. The man who tricked the entire world to allowing them to hold and keep their UN seat while committing crimes against humanity, if not genocide, even after they had been forced from power. He makes my blood boil. On the docket for Thursday was an appeal put forward by the Defense, requesting that Ieng Sary be released from jail due to poor health, if not cancelling his trial completely, since he was suffering from "near fatal old age" or something like that. The appeal was (obviously) shot down, but according to N, P, and C, the whole lot of that court (minus perhaps the Prosecutor) made themselves look like a complete joke before the justices gave their decision. The attorney's arguing skills were apparently far below those of Duch's trial chamber. Sary also liked to make the justices angry by moving to sit with his attorneys, without permission, instead of his assigned place in the middle of the room, which is just a hilarious image in my head, especially since he's too feeble to "run across the border to Thailand" (a direct quote from the defense) due to the fact that he's suffering "terminal old age" (a summary of the defense). Ridiculous.

I need to peace out for the day, before I spend all of my baht on internet. Yeah, that's right! We're back in Thailand! Woo!

Oh - and here are some links if you are looking for more info on the ECCC and the trials:
ECCC Website
Phnom Penh Post - Enlish-language daily newspaper
and... Supposedly the Cambodia Daily has a website... somewhere on the web. But I can't find it. It's another English-language newspaper and I had lunch with three of their reporters on Wednesday.

"I don't care for your fairytale."

- Sara Barellis, "Fairytale"

I've been searching for the proper words to convey the Kingdom of Cambodia, its present and its past as Democratic Kampuchea, and mostly just failing at finding any that seem to successfully capture what I have witnessed here.

Our second or third day in Phnom Penh, we visited Tuol Sleng, formerly known as S-21, a Khmer Rouge prison. They estimate that up to 20,000 people came through Tuol Sleng between 1975 and 1979 and that no more than 14 are lived past the end of the KR's rule. (The lowest estimate of prisoners is the 12,000-some they have records for, and is the number being used in the international tribunal I will tell about later. The lowest estimate of those who survived: 7. Everyone else was killed.) Tuol Sleng is now a "genocide museum" and a crumbling one at that.

14 S-21 inmates, political prisoners, were killed as the KR left the facility just ahead of the Vietnamese army. When the Vietnamese arrived they found these 14 people dead in their cells in the A building of the prison. While these rooms have been cleaned, they have all of the items in them - bed, manacles, sometimes a broom or bed pan, that were there when the prison was vacated. Each of these 14 rooms also has a photo of the individual killed in the room - a photo of their corpse as it was found, and - if they could find it - a photo of the individual from when they entered Tuol Sleng or from before the KR takeover. They are now buried in the courtyard.

The second building - B - was filled with communal cells, similar to those we saw at the Hanoi Hilton. In these cells, prisoners are all shackled or manacled (or sometimes both) to the same pole in the middle of the room. They share sleeping space, bathroom space, dining space. Guards usually keep them from talking. Along with showing one or two of these communal cell rooms, this building also held huge displays of the photos taken of each prisoner when they entered S-21, and showed the chair they sat on for these pictures. It reminded me of the chair you sit in at the eye doctor's... except it held your neck in the correct place, rather than your forehead, and looked like a torture device. They also had paintings of the most common torture techniques used by the KR, and had some of the implements in various corners of the rooms. In one room there was also a display of skulls, bones and clothing recovered from the S-21 Killing Fields - Choung Ek, which I will again, tell more about later.

Building C had the individual cells. One sign told about living conditions in these cells. Prisoners were not able to talk to each other, leave their cells, have exercise or yard time, may or may not have been able to relieve themselves in a pail, and showers consisted of a guard spraying down the cell with a hose once a week. The sign continued that the purpose of this "shower" was not to allow the prisoner to bathe, but rather to clean the cell, which tended to stink too much if this procedure was not performed. Some of the individual cells were made of brick, some of wood. Tuol Sleng at one point had been a high school, so these walls separating cells had been added later by the KR. As a result, some prisoners had no light or ventilation in their cells, except for the small amount able to filter in from the six inches or so left between the walls and the ceiling.  The floor above the cells had two museum exhibits.  One told the history of the Khmer Rouge, from Pre-Takeover to the body counts as of 2005.  The second had some stories of how various KR underlings went from leading a village or small group or a province to being held in Tuol Sleng.  These stories were all told by surviving relatives and the "biographies" they were forced to write as part of their confessions and torture in the prison. They had such high ideals; thought they were fighting for something good and noble.  I can only imagine the horror and disappointment they must have felt. 

The last building - D - had three floors.  The top floor was a viewing room for a documentary about S-21.  To be honest, I was too busy trying to not pass out from heat and stuffiness to remember much of the movie. The bottom floor had a photo exhibit put together by the museum and a Dutch (? - Western European anyway) journalist who visited Cambodia during the KR - one of the few Westerners allowed into the country after the takeover.  He said he put together this exhibit as a way to show what he and his colleagues had seen, what they had wanted to see, and what he now believed about what they were shown.  This group of journalists became western members of the Khmer Rouge's "propaganda machine" after this visit.  The one interviewed for this project said they were all Marxists and members of the local Socialist party.  They went into the visit with the idea that the KR represented a more perfect Maoist revolution.  And that was what they saw.  Everything that should have raised questions - where are the "new people", how much of this is staged, why are so many children working in factories, etc. - became a short-term imperfection that the KR planned to correct once the economy rebounded. The exhibit was bookended with comments from the journalist, which expressed his deep sorrow and disillusionment that have entered his life as a result of this visit and the truth of the KR.  I didn't visit the second floor.  I had had enough prison. 

The next week we all took a day or two to visit the International Tribunal that is currently prosecuting or conducting pre-trial chambers for five of the former KR leaders.  The first two days (the two I went to) were the beginning of the trial for the man who ran the S-21 prison - Duch.  Being at the tribunal was fascinating.  There was so much procedural hoopla that went on.  

... I'm going to need to finish this another day.  The hotel here in Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat is located!! Stoked!) seems to be wanting to shut down the internet and lobby for the night. 

To be continued...

Today I watched the Superbowl, surrounded by foreigners, served by Thais.

Some days, being here is so disconcerting. I go about my day, and minus the heat, could almost forget that I am not at home, or even on my side of the planet. Then something, anything, jolts me, and I remember that I am rich, privileged, and spending my time wasting money on ideas and traveling halfway around the world, just because I can. Oh. Yeah. There's reality, welcoming me back via smack in the face. And we can sit around and tell ourselves that tourism is a viable and necessary part of the economy, but this has only grown to be because there are people who have such flourishing excesses as to make it a possibility.

Political scientists call this guilt I'm feeling "the white man's burden." Other travelers refer to it as culture shock. I'm just sitting here wondering what to do about it and how to reconcile it, in awe of the knowledge that I haven't even seen anything actually horrible yet (and probably won't during this entire trip).

I spent my weekend learning how to cook Thai food and (consequently) stuffing myself full of more food than I could ever want to eat in one sitting. It seems we find ourselves at a local bar almost every night of the week, blowing 3-5 meals worth of baht on a round of cocktails. And when we're not at the bar, we're at the market again eating more and buying more stuff than we really need or can use.

Then, we get up the next morning and go to Thai culture class, or Human Rights class, or to an NGO visit, and hear about people dying of AIDS for lack of retro-virals, or even simple anti-biotics to cure an opportunistic infection. About people being killed or chased out of their homeland by their own government. About how they have no rights or protections when they resettle afterward. We come back from class or the visit and read about people massacred by their government for being educated, wearing glasses, living in a city, playing an instrument, or writing a poem. And above all we hear about how neighboring countries and, more often, Western countries (who, honestly, are the ones with the resources) fail to care and fail to act. And some days it makes me a little sick.

I don't know if Asian culture has it completely right with the community over the individual (versus Western culture that places the individual over the community), but I feel like, at some point, you have to at least consider the disparity and do something to try to rectify it, at least partially. Like the Japanese idea that the CEO can't make so much more than the lowest paid employee. People shouldn't need to turn to child prostitution as a way to provide for their family. People shouldn't need to spend just as much money on water per day as they do on food, just because their government can't afford proper sewage treatment facilities. Someone's country of birth shouldn't so wholly determine if their basic needs are met. Should it?

Universal Human Rights?

I promise there is a reason my posts have been so random and lack-luster the past few days. Actually there's two. First is that I've been hella tired. I think I'm on the verge of getting some stomach bug, but cross your fingers that I can bite that bullet.

And second, I've been working on a paper that was due this evening. Granted it was a little paper, and probably not worth all the time or energy I spent on it, but I found that my views on the topic had changed since the last time I had articulated them, so I kept starting over, trying to properly express what I have come to believe. I'm posting the paper below. Please feel free to comment or give me feedback; this is a topic I care about, so I'm very open to hearing other ideas.


The Universality of Human Rights

In order to discuss the universality of human rights, I feel that it is important to give at least a rudimentary idea of what is supposed to be understood by the term “human rights.” At the most basic and, arguably, most important sense, human rights refer to what is needed for survival and to ensure that people retain there inherent dignity. As societies continue to grow and develop, however, the range of human rights broadens and begins to include many rights, ideas, concepts beyond what is needed in order for people to live and even thrive. While I believe that some human rights - namely those which ensure a basic standard of living - are universal, others I feel need to be viewed and evaluated within cultural or societal context and be allowed to develop naturally.

My opinion regarding the universality of human rights is formed both by my Catholic upbringing and also by my studies in college. The Catholic Church’s places great importance on social justice, with the dignity of the human person being the first of the Catholic Social Teachings. Because of this belief and teaching I feel that access to clean water, food, clothing, shelter, and health care are rights that should be universal and unquestioned. Without any one of these rights, a person’s sense of dignity is damaged and their ability to not only thrive but even survive day to day is lessened. Any other human rights are secondary, and need to be seen as second tier goals by the international groups working to promote human rights. This assertion comes from a pragmatism that the study of international politics has bequeathed to me.

When fighting battles in the arena of interstate politics, progress is only ploddingly made. Too many independent cultures, beliefs, peoples and societies are involved to allow fast development. Instead of recognizing this, and acknowledging the pace at which our own societies developed over centuries, the western countries in control of international organizations alternately request and force non-western countries to “liberalize” and “democratize” at lightning speeds. This tactic does not serve any of the interests involved. Rather than jump-starting economic development or gaining political rights for citizens of poorer countries, these policies more often tend to foster anti-western sentiments and keep the poorest individuals in these countries living in poverty. This is where the academic ideals of all the rights we enjoy in western society being universal fails. Rights such as women’s equality, democratic elections, protesting, and other higher level freedoms need to be adopted and instituted when individual societies are ready for them and request them of their own governments. These rights need to be instituted from the bottom up and not the top down.

There are countless examples of countries where western powers and the UN setup elections in a country and the people actively elect a dictator. Then we ask that the country liberalize and allow political opposition, when the electorate chose the dictator because they promised food, water and heath care. Obviously, the citizens in that country have more pressing needs than the right to protest, or equal education for all citizens. Once those basic universal rights have been gained, then people are more willing to look for increased freedoms and demand them of their government. That is the time for the international community to step back in and help set up systems of education, grow a civil society that holds the government accountable, work towards gender equality.