Cambodia
is work in progress
in creating norms of international
justice
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
August 24, 2004
LONDON - "The moral arm of the
universe is long", Martin Luther King once said in one of
his memorable speeches. "It bends towards justice". But
it is doubtful if the people of Cambodia, the site of the
original "Killing Fields", feel that this is likely. Yet
their understandable cynicism may about to be confounded.
Cambodia‚" National Assembly is poised to approve a
government decision to ratify a treaty, over a decade in
the making, that will empower a special court to try
surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the communist
movement that was seized with a mission to refashion the
social and economic structure of their country by the
sword and the bullet.
Cambodia incarnates
the worst horrors of being caught in the crossfires of
war. It was heavily bombed in secret by the Nixon
administration.
Then when the
Vietnamese invaded in 1979 Washington had the audacity to
line up world opinion behind recognition of the defeated
Khmer Rouge regime. The incongruous sight of the Khmer
Rouge flag flying outside UN headquarters in New York was
the most revolting testament to mass murder
imaginable.
Finally, by the
diligence of exiles and the UN, a kind of incipient
democracy was created in Cambodia and gradually the
government has come round to some sort of public trial of
a small cadre of the Khmer Rouge‚" top leaders. Most
of the judges will be Cambodian, but there will be one
UN-appointed judge and one UN- appointed prosecutor. No
conviction or acquittal is possible without their
acquiescence.
This is the least
intrusive of all international set ups in an era that has
seen in quick succession the creation of UN war crimes
tribunals for ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone plus
the establishment of a permanent International Criminal
Court to deal with future war crimes.
It would seem,
despite the hostility of the Bush Administration (and
also the governments of Russia, China and India) to the
ICC, that the overall world tide is flowing in the
direction Martin Luther King said was
inevitable.
But there is an
influential number of people who see it otherwise. In a
recent issue of Harvard University‚" quarterly,
International Security, Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri
argue that "justice does not lead, it follows". In other
words the human rights activists who have fought for
these courts have it backwards. First, the authors say,
you need a peaceful political order and then one can
start to worry about justice Only with a government that
is at peace with its electorate and can govern without
challenge can it be the right time to introduce norms and
laws that will prevent future atrocities.
Thus for them, the
Yugoslavian and Rwandan courts have been
counterproductive, keeping chauvinistic feelings among
the Serbs and Hutus inflamed. Although they do not spell
it out, presumably they think the slow, tortoise like,
approach of the Cambodian government has been the right
one.
There is some truth
on the authors‚" side. The Milosevic trial has been
allowed to continue too long for it to produce quick
therapy for a country still seized by the sanctity of its
cause. The boil has not been lanced. Indeed one can go
further and say it is difficult at the moment to argue
that these courts have had a measurable deterrent effect
on new would-be war criminals. They still seem to thrive,
as events in the Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, Guatemala,
and, on a smaller scale, in Assam suggest. Don‚"the
leaders of these ongoing atrocities read the writing on
the international wall? Obviously not.
But the argument
misses two important points. We do not in civilized
countries have criminal justice systems that are capable
of deterring all criminals. Deterrence only works at the
margins. We seek justice in the courts partly to punish,
partly to uphold a standard and partly in the hope that
those punished will reflect on their crimes and resolve
to put their past behind them.
It is the same in
the international arena. We can hope that some villains
and governments may be deterred but we should not count
on it. Politicians like Pol Pot and Milosevic who decide
on ethnic cleansing have all calculated the odds and
decided, albeit mistakenly, that they will win
through.
Nevertheless, a
standard is defined. In contemporary history it reaches
back to the Nuremberg trial. Now it is being
reinvigorated by the international courts. Over time,
over generations, new standards of justice do develop.
That is why black people are no longer lynched in America
and South Africa, why democracy has spread so rapidly in
the last twenty years and why, according to the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute, the number of
violent conflicts in the world has fallen steadily each
year of the last decade. Martin Luther King was
right.
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Här kan
du läsa om - och köpa - Jonathan Powers bok
på svenska
"Som
Droppen Urholkar
Stenen"
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|