After 19 years, hundreds of millions of dollars and just two successful convictions, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh is approaching its end. The only case now ongoing for atrocities committed in Cambodia by Pol Pot’s brutal regime is an appeal by Khieu Samphan, who was convicted in 2018. The country’s youthful population is anxious to move on from a national identity characterized by a genocide it does not remember, while an aging political elite is keen to limit chains of accountability before they edge too close to home.
Cambodia’s National Assembly, where the ruling party has every seat, has voted unanimously to wind up the court’s activities by the end of this year. But despite the difficulties that dogged its progress—from funding to political obstruction to the death of defendants before verdicts could be reached or charges laid—the court forced the horrors of the Khmer Rouge out into the open and will have a profound effect on future fights for justice around the world. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, known informally as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, was set up in 2003 by the Cambodian government and the United Nations but was designed to have judicial and political independence from both. Its purpose was to identify and prosecute those responsible for atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, the ultra-Maoist political party led by Pol Pot, whose rebel forces seized control of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Allegations included mass murder, torture, forced marriages, and the genocide of Cambodia’s Cham and ethnic Vietnamese minorities. “What would ‘justice’ look like when we are talking about two million people killed, millions of families ripped apart, and an entire culture whiplashed to within inches of its very existence?” asked Etcheson. “My expectation would be that there is no kind of justice which would satisfy everyone in the wake of such catastrophic crimes.” Yet many have tried.
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