27 November 2008: The KR tribunal’s unique mandate for moral reparations is little understood, and victims are likely to be disappointed.
(Photo: A torture chamber at the former S-21 Khmer Rouge detention center in Phnom Penh. 10 December 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)
By Isabelle Roughol
Officials from non-governmental organizations, the government, the Khmer Rouge tribunal and survivors of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea gathered Wednesday for the start of a two-day forum on reparations for the victims of the regime.
Alternatively crying and shouting, survivors unleashed a litany of personal tragedies and demands on NGO and tribunal representatives, highlighting both the potential and the limitations of the Khmer Rouge tribunal’s mandate on reparations for crimes committed by the regime.
“It is a thin red line to walk, on the one hand to manage the expectations, and on the other hand to use this opportunity,” said Christoph Sperfeldt, a junior adviser at the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, one of the conference’s organizers.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’s internal rules allow the court to order moral and collective reparations for victims of the Khmer Rouge regime if and when it convicts defendants, a mandate that Sperfeldt said is a first for an international court.
“At least the provision is an unprecedented potential. It remains to be seen what the court will do with it,” Sperfeldt said.
Defendants who are found guilty should pay reparations by tracking and seizing their assets, but if that doesn’t suffice, funding should come from the government and international donors, which makes it a controversial political issue, he added.
Under current ECCC rules, reparations would not go to individual victims, but that did not stop survivors present at the conference on Wednesday from asking for such.
“My wife was killed by the criminals at Tuol Sleng. I want compensation, $50,000 for the life of my wife,” said a man in the audience who was greeted with applause by other participants.
“This money is not the same as the life of my wife, but I am emotionally sick; I am emotionally suffering, I cannot forget it,” he said.
Beyond financial necessity, individual demands for compensation seemed for many on Wednesday to be an acknowledgement of their individual loss and continued suffering.
“I’d be delighted if just $1 comes from the defendants at the ECCC; it would reflect that the culprits were found,” said Chum Mey, another survivor who said he was tortured in S-21 prison, and whose wife and four children were killed during the regime.
Silke Studzinsky, co-lawyer for civil parties at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, also took the side of those calling for individual reparations, saying even though ECCC internal rules did not permit them, the Cambodian procedural code does.
“I was very happy…that [the victims] expressed their interest in individual financial reparations and that now for the first time, the court is confronted with this position,” Studzinsky said, adding that reparations should differ from normal spending duties of the government.
Experiences in Germany, and in Iraq and Kuwait after the first Gulf War showed individual reparations were possible, she added.
But reparations ordered by the ECCC would most likely take the form of development projects, such as schools and hospitals, or symbolic projects such as Khmer Rouge victim memorials, conference speakers said.
“It’s clear from our outreach activities that Cambodians have a poor understanding of the kind of reparations that can be awarded by the court,” said Sarah Thomas, a legal fellow at DC-Cam, adding that most people her organization met had asked at first for financial compensation.
Court officials were quick to discourage individual claims, though Kong Srim, president of the ECCC Supreme Court Chamber, said he would bring the issue up at the tribunal’s next plenary meeting in January, and that the court’s victims’ unit would consider them also.
“If you think of one million people who filed complaints for $5 each, then it amounts to $5 million. And what happens if they ask for more?” Ministry of Justice Undersecretary of State Bun Honn said.
It would be impossible to investigate the individual cases of the estimated 1.7 million victims of Democratic Kampuchea, then put a dollar value on their suffering and then find the funds to pay individual reparations, he added.
(Additional reporting by Rann Reuy)
