After the genocide
Gentle persuasion in Cambodia

by Andrés Alsina

Rome.- The question is enormous, but what is most valuable and courageous is that the answer is “yes”. How do you establish an organization for the defense of human rights in a country that barely a quarter of a century ago underwent a genocide in which between a quarter and one third of its population died? “We were lucky” ,Thida C. Khus begins by saying.

She is short by European standards, but probably of normal height in Cambodia. She looks you straight in the eye, and the things she says in her gentle voice are demonstrations of her enormous stature.

“Yes, we were lucky. We believe that we were very fortunate to have a peace agreement (in September 1991), as well as the concern of many international organizations, and later the elections in May 1993.”

These were the steps towards normalization that the international community felt obliged to take after the Khmer Rouge regime and its leader Pol Pot killed between 1.7 and 2.2 million people out of a total of between 6 and 7 million Cambodians. This was possible because of the political instability provoked by the United States as part of its aggression against Vietnam.

In 1965, Washington started bombing Cambodia, and in 1970 Prince Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown by a CIA organized coup d’état. During the next decade, China and United States support for the Khmer Rouge forced the United Nations to recognize it as the country’s legitimate government. Ten years later, people like Thida C. Khus started picking up the pieces and reconstructing what was possible.

“We were lucky that non-governmental organizations, other organizations, activists and local groups had sponsorship at that time (in 1993) to take forward the monitoring of the human rights situation and to start educating government and police officials.”

She does not like to exaggerate, but she is not reluctant to use realistic language. It must be because the reality is so terrible. Sometimes she admits to using strong language, but what she describes is much worse. “In all events, the task is gigantic. We are facing the challenge of disseminating information on the very existence of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights.” Officials do not even know it exists.

What can be done about the genocide carried out from 1975 on, with the excuse of a mass movement of the population to the country.? “We have not yet been able to face our past. We are unable to handle that situation. Today we can only aspire to prevention, so that the people’s rights are protected.” The 2000 World Almanac (*note: is this right? Or is it the Guide?) says that “in spite of international efforts to reconstruct Cambodian society, the impunity of state officials involved in serious violations of human rights does not cease to be a scourge of national life. Amnesty International denounced the killing of hundreds of political opponents and the existence of an inoperative, weak and corrupt legal system.”

Thida C. Khus does not contradict this. “We have not even been able to begin to address the issue of economic rights.” And there is a word that she uses over and over again: “gently”, because this defines her whole strategy for achieving change. “Now, we are moving gently into daily life, passing through political life and towards social and economic rights. We are doing it gently, now that the government is more used to the idea and is in a better position to accept the concept of human rights. Well, everyone accepted it, but no one really knew what it was. In fact, they treated the people with brutality and extra-judicial assassinations were perpetrated.”

Who are these heroes who confront and educate the government in this way every day? She considers that there are perhaps 2 or 3,000 activists in NGOs in Cambodia; this reflects how imprecise and precarious everything is in the country. They are not lawyers, almost certainly because, after the genocide, no lawyers were left. They are simply people, many of them teachers. Those who join them are former government officials who abandon the administration or who take leave when they get to know these people who try to change things gently. Thida C. Khus herself is a social worker, and her NGO, Silaka, has fifteen people. It is not possible to work alone in human rights, because it is not the voice of civil society that has to be constructed; it is a country that has to be constructed. So they also work in social development, and she works specifically in training organizations, including the human rights area.

Working hours are long, sometimes with no rest day, which is less than God had. She does not complain. “Work is being done.” At present, an assessment of the situation of prisoners is being undertaken. There are 90 prisons in the country with some 400 prisoners in each. This does not include political prisoners, who are housed in military prisons, where activists have no access. What most concerns them, however, is not the prisoners’ condition, but that they do not even know how many of them there are, and “the problem we have is to prevent the government and the military from killing them; no one is prosecuted for this.”

Having said this, work is getting done. “We started with a situation where nothing was known and today the situation is being challenged and protests are being lodged in the courts, demanding due process and respect for the law.” This has some difficulties and cannot always be achieved because “justice is not independent from the government.”

Dealing with this situation every day and achieving progress makes a frank dialogue with the government obligatory, even if this is done “gently.” Thus, the NGOs’ relationship with the government is one of “frank hatred, because they do not like us telling them things, because this is what obliges them to change. But while we work with the international community, we can count on pressure from the international community.” She says this in such a way that it is evident that without this backing they could well meet with disaster. In this difficult relationship with the government, the government turns to them for advice and, in practice, to make decisions on the long drawn out land disputes that occupy the minds of everyone in Cambodia. There is no rule of law and there are no land title deeds. Some farmers have had the land in their families for generations, but high government or military officials or the rich have taken it away from them. “So we are called in to mediate and to document the situation.” The way she tells it, it would seem that these NGOs are the only thing existing between the forces of repression and the void. They cannot even establish general principles for these cases. “They have to be resolved one by one.”

If this is the case with the present, it is understandable that dealing with the immediate past, with a genocide which left the country with only perpetrators and survivors, is beyond the material possibility of the NGOs. They are at present waiting for the results of negotiations between the government and Washington on the setting up of an international tribunal. The formality is a resolution they hope will be approved by the United Nations General Assembly. NGOs worked on the preparation, gathering two million Cambodian signatures. “With these, we affirm that we want to know what happened and that we want a fair trial. And that we do not have complete confidence in the Cambodian courts” for this trial, so “we want international organizations to participate in these tribunals.”

This movement started in 1999, and at this point, a political agreement is anxiously awaited in 2001. “It is important to know the truth, to know what really happened and who are truly responsible. Will reconciliation be possible? Have we any choice? We can only look ahead.”