Global Policy Forum

By Alan Sipress

Chance to Bear Witness Against Khmer Rouge Hinges on Stalled Tribunal

Bou Meng long ago disappeared from Phnom Penh, home to the Khmer Rouge's notorious Tuol Sleng torture camp, and found quiet, spiritually consoling work in a southern province, adorning the village pagoda with portraits of Buddha.

Then, last month, one of the monks at the temple summoned him, Bou Meng recounted. The monk showed him a year-old magazine. It reported that one of only seven people to have survived Tuol Sleng in the 1970s had died, a diminutive painter named Bou Meng. "Is that you?" the monk asked.

Bou Meng, whose paintbrush once spared him from death but could not save his wife or children, immediately set off for Phnom Penh to declare he was still breathing and, moreover, determined to bear witness. "I want to tell the truth. I want to go to trial and say how I was tortured and that I'm still alive," he said.

Bou Meng's hopes turn on the outcome of sputtering negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations over establishing a special tribunal to try former Khmer Rouge leaders for atrocities. Under the radical communist group's rule between 1975 and 1979, about 1.7 million people were executed, starved or worked to death.

Five years of discussions about the shape and scope of a tribunal broke off in early 2002, but the two sides resumed talks last month in New York. Cambodian officials say they are eager to host another round here in the coming weeks. Negotiators, however, have so far offered little sign they can resolve their fundamental disagreement over who would control the legal proceedings. Cambodian officials have insisted the trials be governed by domestic law requiring a majority of Cambodian judges; the United Nations is demanding authority to ensure the tribunal meets international standards.

The standoff has left some Cambodians exasperated, fearing that time is running out to try the aging Khmer Rouge leadership and begin answering the question of how Cambodians could have turned so savagely on their own.

"The tribunal will not resolve everything. It will not answer many questions posed by the victims," said Youk Chhang, whose Documentation Center of Cambodia archives the genocide's history. "But it will serve as a foundation and a resource for the victims to judge their own cases."

Bou Meng has not followed the negotiations and said he does not know whom to blame for the delay. But at 71, after years of silence, the soft-spoken artist says the time has come to reveal his scars, literally. He tugs up the back of his loose-fitting shirt, exposing discolored patches that he says were left by his tormentors' bamboo rods and whips of electrical wire.

"I'm not a legal expert. I'm a witness, just a small eyewitness," said Bou Meng, who has begun providing testimony to the documentation center. "They tortured not only me but a lot of Cambodian people. I predict they cannot escape from the net of the law. The guilty must be punished."

Bou Meng's brown eyes are still lively. But his forehead is furrowed, and the furrows sink deeper when he revisits the past. Wrinkles bracket the corners of his mouth, and all his teeth are missing except two, the rest battered out of him by his jailers.

Bou Meng's sudden reappearance last month from the small, impoverished province of Svay Rieng represents the second time he has cheated death. As young man, he painted cinema billboards in the port of Sihanoukville. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, he was put to work completing portraits of Marx and Lenin.

Then, in late 1977, the Khmer Rouge arrested Bou Meng, suspecting he was an American agent. They dispatched him and his family to Tuol Sleng, a former suburban high school comprising three-story buildings arrayed around what been the grassy schoolyard and encircled by barbed wire. About 17,000 Tuol Sleng inmates were ultimately taken to a separate extermination camp or tortured to death and buried on the site, including nearly all those who entered the compound with Bou Meng.

Ask him about his ordeal and Bou Meng fishes inside his satchel for his pencil drawings. He shuffles through the papers, producing a picture that depicts him lying face down on a cot in an interrogation cell as a soldier beats him with a stick.

Ask about his wife and he finds a drawing of her sitting with her arms bound behind her as a Khmer Rouge officer takes her picture with a camera mounted on a tripod. Bou Meng said that was the last time he ever saw her.

About five months after Bou Meng was interned, he recalled, a Khmer Rouge guard asked the prisoners if anyone could draw a picture. He raised his hand. The guard handed him a small photograph of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, known as Brother No. 1, and ordered him to copy it.

"He said if you draw the picture and it doesn't look exactly like Brother One, you must be killed," Bou Meng recounted. He said he made sure every hair on Pol Pot's head was sketched exactly in place. And when he was finished, 10 Khmer Rouge officers were called to judge his work. They mistakenly concurred that Bou Meng's drawing was the original.

Having passed the test, he was next asked how long it would take him to paint four large canvasses of Pol Pot. He told them he needed three months for each, a total of 12 months. "It seems in my memory like magic made me say that," he said, still marveling at the miracle.

For exactly a year later, just as he was completing the final portrait and perhaps ending his reprieve, the Khmer Rouge was forced to evacuate Tuol Sleng as the Vietnamese army swept through Phnom Penh. In those final hours, the jailers tortured some of the remaining prisoners to death, but Bou Meng escaped amid the mayhem.

As he tells the tale, he again flips through his pencil sketches. This time he finds one that shows him at the easel with a half-painted portrait of Pol Pot. Observing him at work is the seated figure of Kaing Khek Iev, the camp commander widely known as Duch.

Today, Duch and military chief Ta Mok are the only two former Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodian custody. Pol Pot died in 1998, and other Khmer Rouge officials live freely in Cambodia, including the former number two official, Nuon Chea.

Several diplomats and human rights activists in Phnom Penh said they doubt the Cambodian government will ever agree to try the authors of the genocide, because some current officials have ties to the Khmer Rouge government. Other diplomats suggest the United Nations has been too uncompromising in its demand that the Cambodian government cede authority over the tribunal.

A U.N. legal counsel, Hans Corell, said in an interview that the United Nations is eager to resume talks but unsure when a team might be sent to Phnom Penh. He said the United Nations is waiting for Prime Minister Hun Sen to respond to a letter from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan requesting some "clarifications" about the issues up for negotiation.

However, Sean Visoth, a member of the Cambodian negotiating team, said he does not think a return letter from Phnom Penh is a precondition for the next round of talks. "Both sides are well aware of the other's position," he said. "From the Cambodian side, we are just waiting for U.N. negotiators to come to Cambodia and resume negotiations as soon as possible."

Human rights activists warn that death, in turn, may ultimately cheat Cambodians of the justice they seek. "I think we have little chance of getting to the goal of establishing a tribunal," said Chun Sath, secretary general of the ADHOC human rights group in Phnom Penh. "If it takes five or 10 years more, those responsible for the massacre will be dead or too old to go to court."

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