Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for honoring me with an invitation to this important conference. I would like to share with you today some reflections about our work for truth, justice and national reconciliation in Cambodia, work we have been doing at the Documentation Center for Cambodia (DC-Cam) since 1995.

On Saturday, March 9, 2002 at the Toul Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh, I organized a film screening for the United Nations Special Representative for Human Rights in Cambodia, Prof. Peter Leuprecht. The film we showed, a work by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Phan titled “Bophanna,” is about a couple who were tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge because they married without permission from the Angkar. After the screening I asked Professor Leuprecht’s staff – some twenty or twenty-five international human rights workers: “What is the most important human right?”

As usual in Cambodia, many ideas were expressed, ranging from the right to free speech and the right of association, to the right to gather freely for peaceful purposes and the right to a free press as the most important human right for a democratizing country. I told the group that all of these rights are meaningless if you are dead. The most important right is the right to life. All other rights can be enjoyed if and only if this most basic right is guaranteed. And it is this fundamental right, which was so massively violated by Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime – also known as the Khmer Rouge regime. Some thirty to forty percent of the Cambodian people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in less than four years. No other government in history has taken away the right to life from such a high proportion of its people. For this reason, I believe we can say that the Khmer Rouge regime was the worst violator of human rights in the history of mankind.

Even so, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge such as Khieu Samphan, Noun Chea, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith remain free men and women today, unpunished more than a quarter of a century after they committed these unprecedented atrocities. Comrade (female) Ieng Thirith denies that the regime in which she served as a senior official carried out genocidal atrocities. In fact, she has denied these facts in person, right here in Sweden. In 1980, she told a reporter in Stockholm, “I admit, as I told you, that there were excesses, but those excesses had been ordered from Hanoi.” Her husband, Khmer Rouge deputy premier and minister of Foreign Affairs comrade Ieng Sary, attempted to spread these same lies, telling a reporter that, “We weren't aware of life at the grassroots, that is the way murders are able to happen. But the murderers were Vietnamese agents. That's as plain as day.” In truth, what is really as plain as day is that these two criminals played a major part in ordering and executing the murder of millions of innocent Cambodians.

Their on-going impunity sends a message to the Cambodian people that our most fundamental rights do not matter. That most fundamental right was violated again and again and again, at least 2 million times, and yet the violators remain untouched. They remain free and powerful, while the masses of the Cambodian people continue to live lives of poverty and desperation. This is the condition of my country, Cambodia, today.
We at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) have spent the last seven years working to change this unacceptable situation. We have extensively documented the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime. So far we have carefully mapped 19,440 mass graves, 167 extermination centers (prison) and 77 genocide memorials. We have collected more than 600,000 pages of Khmer Rouge documents, which we are translating, cataloguing, and entering into a computer database. We have assembled dossiers on 18,000 Khmer Rouge cadres, and we are tracing the chain of command of Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) all the way from the (Angkar) Chairman himself down to the chiefs of districts, communes and villages.

When we began, it was not clear how the Khmer Rouge carried out their evil design. Now we can prove much more regarding the who, what, when and where.We have found that there were many more victims than scholars previously believed, with more than two million killed. Even so, all of this work in assembling the evidence is but one part of the puzzle.We have also been working for the last seven years to catalyze a process that would cause responsible authorities to marshal this evidence and bring it to bear in a court of law against the perpetrators.

We have been working with legal experts in the Cambodian government, the United Nations and other interested nations around the world in Europe and North America to design an institutional framework for genocide justice in Cambodia. At the same time, we have also been working with – and sometimes against – political authorities from around the world to get them to do the right thing and take the hard decisions that are required to end the culture of impunity in Cambodia.

Though we have come a very long way and accomplished a great deal, we have not yet achieved this goal.We have as yet been unable to persuade the Cambodian government and the international community that the crimes against humanity should be prosecuted in an acceptable manner, in a manner which would help Cambodia to heal itself and to move forward.

The goal of genocide justice in Cambodia may or may not ever be achieved. So the Documentation Center of Cambodia has a second goal, no less important than promoting justice, and that is ensuring memory. Memory, like justice, is a critical foundation for establishing the rule of law and genuine national reconciliation in Cambodia. Beyond our efforts to document the facts of the Cambodian genocide, one of the ways we seek to promote memory is through our monthly magazine, “Searching for the truth”. Now in its third year of publication, “The Truth” brings the findings of our research and documentation to people in villages all over the country and abroad. We distribute it free of charge at the commune level each month. This and our other projects aimed at sustaining memory are crucial, but it is not enough. For the Cambodian people to be released from the chains that bind us to our past, we need justice.

The United Nations has tried to bring justice to Cambodia, spending more than four and a half years in negotiations with the Cambodian government on the establishment of a criminal tribunal for the Khmer Rouge leadership. In early 1999, the United Nations experts proposed establishing an ad hoc international tribunal for the Khmer Rouge, modeled on the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY); the Cambodian government flatly rejected this proposal on the grounds that it violated Cambodian sovereignty.

Undaunted, the United Nations and Cambodia then tried to agree on an unprecedented new model of international justice, a “mixed” tribunal designed to take into account the Cambodian government’s stated concerns about sovereignty.

But, as I am sure all of you know, on February 8 of this year, the United Nations announced that it would not continue the negotiating process. The United Nations says that the law adopted by the Cambodian government last year (August 10, 2001) cannot guarantee international standards of justice for the tribunal. In the face of widespread pressure from the international community, United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan has held firm to his decision.

As recently as March 13, the Secretary- General declared that those in the international community who wish to see a change in the United Nations decision on the tribunal need to lobby Prime Minister Samdech Hun Sen and, in the Secretary-General’s words, persuade him to “change his position and attitude.”

The United Nations always talks about justice, about achieving international standards of justice in Cambodia. They are right about the importance of this matter.
The Cambodian government always talks about reconciliation, the need to preserve the peace and heal the wounds of war in Cambodia. They, too, are right about that being crucially important. But it seems to me that nobody really talks about the truth, and the truth is that justice and reconciliation are indivisible. We cannot have one without the other. We have trusted the United Nations and the Cambodian government too much, believing that they would bring us justice and reconciliation. Now the Cambodian people are being held hostage on this issue. Both the United Nations and the Cambodian government are abrogating their responsibility to us, the victims, and also to the perpetrators. They are failing us. They are failing the truth.

The on-going impunity of the Khmer Rouge leadership continues to haunt the Cambodian people every day. Every family was robbed of the most precious things, things that can never be replaced.

My family was no exception.

During the Khmer Rouge regime, my brother in-law (Ong Suntharak) ate very little of his family’s meagre rations, saving the few precious grains of rice to feed his three young children. One day he was caught stealing garbage from a trash pile, in an attempt to get a few additional morsels of nourishment for his family. He was savagely beaten by the Khmer Rouge cadre for this so-called “crime.” He lay on his bed for many days, too battered to eat, until finally he died. My sister (Titsoryé) did not report the death of her husband to the Khmer Rouge for almost a week, so that she could continue to collect his tiny food ration to feed her babies. His body stayed there on his bed, with his daughters clinging to it.

My niece (Theavin) became very ill with some kind of tumor, but of course, there was no modern medical care during the Khmer Rouge regime. In fact, there was practically no medical care at all. So my niece simply had to suffer in pain, unable to walk, crying every day on her bed, until one day she cried no more. Her sister (Theavy) remembers that this was during the rainy season, and at that time there was a big flood. My niece’s body, on top of her bed, just floated away, and that was the last time anyone ever saw her.
Soon thereafter, my sister’s baby boy died of starvation. My sister had been so hungry that she could not produce milk to nurse him. In 1977, she was accused of stealing rice from the communal kitchen. She denied having committed this crime, but the Khmer Rouge cadre refused to believe her. To prove his accusation, he took a knife and slashed her belly open. Her stomach was empty. And then she died a slow, horrible death.
The most fundamental right – the right to life – of my niece, my sister, her husband and her baby boy were stolen away by the Khmer Rouge. This story from my family makes me very sad every time I tell it, not only because it is so personal, but also because it is such a common story. Every family in Cambodia suffered similar crimes under the Khmer Rouge.

We refuse to accept a world where people who do these kinds of things remain unpunished. God may forgive the killers, but here on earth, until there is justice, until the truth is told about these crimes, our people cannot reconcile with one another. We want to live in the present, not in the past, but the past is still with us. We need to have closure. If nothing is done, we will be setting a very bad precedent for Cambodia, and a very bad precedent for the world in this new century. And so, in closing, I appeal to you, the members of this esteemed conference, to help the Cambodian people to find the truth, to find justice, and to achieve reconciliation. We have been denied truth, justice and reconciliation for so very long. That is just not right.

At the very minimum, even if the United Nations refuses to resume negotiations with the Cambodian government, they should assign the United Nations Center for Human Rights in Phnom Penh to communicate directly with the Cambodian people, and explain to them whether or not they share the Cambodian people’s aspirations for genocide justice - and if they do share these aspirations, what they intend to do about it.
The Cambodian government has this same obligation to explain their policy to the Cambodian people, and because of the personal and family experiences of the members of the government, they know very well the suffering of the people and the confusion of the victims and perpetrators who continue to be denied justice. The government, too, must act for genocide justice.

So must we all.

Thank you.