Global Policy Forum

By Elizabeth Becker

During their first year in power a quarter of a century ago, senior Khmer Rouge leaders ordered the arrest and execution of thousands of Cambodians who they were convinced would undermine their brutal revolution, and demanded detailed secret reports to show that the orders had been carried out. In one such report, discreetly copied to Nuon Chea, the second in command in the regime, a Khmer Rouge prison guard gave an itemized account of the steps taken to torture Man San, one of the thousands of Cambodians killed at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh.

"In the evening, we tortured him with about 20 to 30 wire lashes," wrote the prison underling identified as Comrade Pon in a report dated Sept. 25, 1976. Mr. Pon wrote that the victim was then subjected to further beatings with a rattan whip. He was then told that his family had been arrested and would be tortured if he did not confess to betraying the revolution. "Do you realize that your wife and child are here?" he was asked. "Do you know the state of their health?"

The report continued, "At about nearly 10 p.m. we were about to use our bare hands when he confessed." Then the victim was executed. His wife and child were also killed.

This report, along with 1,000 other newly discovered telegrams and documents sent to senior Khmer Rouge leaders, provide the first concrete evidence of their direct involvement in the killings of nearly one million Cambodians and the death of another million from disease and starvation during the Khmer Rouge regime, from 1975 to 1979. Even though there had been plentiful proof of the crimes themselves, including numerous mass graves, millions of pages of documents and haunting photographs and confessions from the torture chambers, the newly disclosed documents open a window on the leaders' direct responsibility, often covered in minute detail, in the chain of command that led to the massacres.

The documents are contained in a report by the War Crimes Research Office of the American University College of Law. The report, to be released on Monday, presents the evidence against seven of the most senior living Khmer Rouge leaders, including Mr. Nuon Chea, the second- highest figure in that government; Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state.

Unlike some other former leaders accused of crimes against humanity, these three men still live comfortably in their own country, safe so far from arrest or prosecution. Pol Pot, the mastermind of the Khmer Rouge revolution, died on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1998. Despite the growing evidence against them, the greatest obstacle to their arrest and trial has been the reluctance of the current Cambodian government, under Prime Minister Hun Sen, to agree with the United Nations on how to set up a tribunal. China has proved a powerful ally for Mr. Hun Sen in his negotiations with the United Nations.

These new documents add to the pressure from Cambodians as well as from the United Nations and influential foreign nations to bring these men to justice. "This report will be a template for any prosecutor, a starting point for an investigation," said Ralph Zacklin, the assistant secretary general for legal affairs at the United Nations, who has been part of the negotiations with Cambodia to set up a tribunal. "It definitely will focus a lot of attention on the Cambodian trials and presumably it will energize member states to keep pushing this forward."

In an era when Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader blamed for starting four Balkan wars, has been handed over to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes, when other countries that were once part of Yugoslavia as well as Rwanda and Sierra Leone are cooperating with international tribunals, Cambodia has become the odd country out.

For David J. Scheffer, the former American ambassador at large for war crimes who negotiated with Cambodia for a tribunal, the report marks "a big leap forward" in establishing the specific case against Khmer Rouge leaders. "This is extremely important to reconstruct the paper trail all the way to the top and establish the command authority of the leaders," Mr. Scheffer said. "We're reaching a very important moment."

The Hun Sen government has resisted three years of attempts by the United Nations to establish a tribunal. Last week Parliament approved legislation to set up a tribunal, but it will take months to establish. And Mr. Hun Sen has yet to sign an agreement with the United Nations to ensure that the tribunal would adhere to minimum international standards.

The report, by Stephen Heder, a Cambodia scholar, and Brian D. Tittemore, a legal expert, was written out of frustration — concerned that without a tribunal there would never be a legal document establishing responsibility for the Cambodian killings, said Diane Orentlicher of American University, who led the project. "We knew the efforts to create a legitimate tribunal were running up against resistance," she said.

These latest documents were discovered in old government archives by Youk Chhang, executive director of the Cambodian Documentation Center in Phnom Penh, a nonprofit research organization that is the main repository of the evidence against the Khmer Rouge. "I found many filed in the wrong dossiers at government buildings," Mr. Youk Chhang said in an interview. "This is the first specific indictment of the leaders and I know the people of Cambodia will be surprised by all that we have found."

Mr. Hun Sen was recently quoted as telling the United Nations to "stay calm and shut up," threatening to end negotiations for a tribunal. Mr. Hun Sen and nearly every major figure in the current Government were aligned with the Khmer Rouge earlier in their careers, and the current leaders' reluctance to reopen questions about the regime has undermined the negotiations.

But major aid donors to Cambodia, who contribute half the national budget, warned Mr. Hun Sen last month that they were frustrated by the slow progress toward a tribunal.

The Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975, and attempted the most radical and brutal revolution in modern history. They forced Cambodians to leave their homes in cities and villages and sent them by foot to dirt- poor collective farms, hunting out people they considered class enemies and ordering them executed. To hide their role in these and subsequent crimes, the leaders had mid-level officials write the voluminous records chronicling a bureaucracy of death, a collection of documents that experts consider as detailed as those kept by the Nazis during the Holocaust. These new telegrams and other documents show that the senior Khmer Rouge officials received copies of these chilling reports. Indeed, prosecutors preparing the case against Mr. Milosevic at The Hague are searching for documents, communications intercepts or memorandums to prove his direct command role in the war crimes committed in the name of his dream of a "Greater Serbia."

The Cambodian documents show that the leaders were kept abreast of the huge purges as well as individual executions. In one example, several senior Khmer Rouge leaders waited anxiously in Phnom Penh, the capital, for news from the north, where they had ordered the purge of dozens of fellow revolutionaries. Finally, on April 10, 1978, they were handed telegrams, transmitted over a shortwave radio, confirming that officials from the northern zone had captured and killed most of the dozens of Cambodians whom they had marked as turncoats. Northern officials reported that after combing the forest, they were able to "capture and smash all such bandits one after the other." Unfortunately, one report continued, "a number of soldiers, police and civil servants fled after we had swept approximately twenty of them cleanly away."

Many executions took place in the countryside, in the killing fields made famous by the 1984 movie of that title. In desolate jungle clearings, low-ranking Khmer Rouge officials killed Cambodians in the dead of night and hastily buried the bodies in mass graves.

In the newly uncovered telegrams, often entitled "Respectfully Presented to Beloved and Missed Brother," these provincial officials dutifully recounted to their superiors in Phnom Penh that they, like the city prison guards, had followed orders to "smash enemies" and "burn the homes of ordinary people." In one April 1978 telegram sent by shortwave radio to Mr. Nuon Chea and Mr. Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister, a provincial leader reported that he had carried out orders to kill Khmer Rouge officials in eastern Cambodia because they had failed to protect their livestock.

"They have been purged," wrote the official, named Vi, who said he had also "silenced a number of elements, some of whom have been flushed out, isolated and cleaned up."