Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016)

Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest best known for his opposition to the Vietnam War, has passed away in New York City just days short of his 95th birthday. He is regarded as one of the most influential American Jesuits of his time both for his protests against war and nuclear weapons and for his writings, which included a body of poetry as well as works on theology, spirituality, and social protest.

In 1967, Berrigan, his brother Philip, and two others--"the Baltimore Four"--were arrested for pouring blood on draft records in protest against the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he joined a tax protest against the war. Then, on May 17 of that same year, he participated--with "the Catonsville Nine"--in the destruction of draft records using homemade napalm outside the offices of the Catonsville, Maryland draft board. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison but escaped and spent four months as a fugitive--in order to draw more attention to his protests against the war--before being captured at the home of theologian and activist William Stringfellow. Berrigan was released from prison in 1972.

In 1980, Berrigan turned to anti-nuclear protests at a General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six others--"the Plowshares Eight"--hammered the nosecone of a nuclear missile (symbolically beating swords into plowshares) and poured blood on files. The group was charged with a wide range of crimes, but after ten years of trials and appeals, all were sentenced to time served. The 1980 protest was the beginning of the Plowshares Movement, with which Berrigan was active throughout the remainder of his life.

Even after he had turned 80, Berrigan continued to protest war and injustice. He protested the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo. He also participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Verdicts in the ECCC

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) on Thursday convicted two Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, of crimes against humanity for their roles in the Cambodian genocide from 1973 to 1979. Because of the court's decision to try the charges against the two men, both in their 80s, in segments, the verdicts were more limited than they might otherwise have been. Hearings on additional charges, including genocide, are in progress and may yet produce additional convictions, assuming the defendants live long enough.

Nuon Chea, known within the Khmer Rouge as "Brother Number Two," was second in command to Pol Pot, who died of natural causes in 1998. As the party's chief ideologist, Nuon Chea was responsible for the development of a radical plan under which people were moved out of the cities and into the countryside in order to turn Cambodia into an agrarian society that could restart its social development at "Year Zero."

Khieu Samphan served as president of Cambodia from April 1976 to January 1979. Educated in Paris, like Pol Pot, he represented the Khmer Rouge to the world until the Vietnamese army removed the genocidal regime from power.

Although still on trial, both Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan have been sentenced to life in prison.

Master of Confessions

Two months ago, the appeals process ended in the case of Kaing Guek Eav, the only person to have been convicted thus far in Cambodia's special genocide tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Comrade Duch, to use the defendant's more familiar nom de guerre, was the top Khmer Rouge official at S-21, the infamous makeshift prison in Phnom Penh, where, between 1975 and early 1979, over 12,000 people were held and tortured before being transported to their executions in the killing fields outside of the city. The sentence handed down by the mixed Cambodian/international tribunal in 2010 had been 30 years in prison; the appellate division changed the term to life imprisonment for the 69-year-old Duch.

Four others who bear even more responsibility for the slaughter in Cambodia, people much older and more feeble than Duch, have been indicted by the ECCC, but it is entirely possible that Duch will be the only person the court ever convicts. Of the four remaining indictees, one died on March 14, 2013, and another had her case dismissed in November 2011 when she was deemed unfit for trial due to the advance of Alzheimer's disease. The two remaining named defendants, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, are 87 and 82, respectively. (There are two additional cases under investigation involving a total of five possible defendants, but their identities remain confidential at this point.)

During his trial, Duch confessed and apologized to his victims' families, many of whom crowded the visitors' galleries when he testified. At one point Duch said, "I sincerely regret to giving in to others' ideas and concepts and to accepting the criminal tasks I was asked to do. When I think about it, I am first angry at the steering committee of the party, who used all sorts of tricks to lead the country to a total and absolute tragedy. I am also angry at myself for agreeing on others' conceptions and for blindly respecting their criminal orders." Duch later angered those to whom he had apologized by asking the court to release him on the grounds that his case did not fall within the competence of the ECCC. He was not, his lawyer argued, a "senior leader" of the Khmer Rouge nor was he one of those "most responsible" for the crimes committed by the regime. The court rejected the claim.

French journalist Thierry Cruvellier has just published a book--The Master of Confessions--about the Duch trial. Farah Stockman, who met Cruvellier while both were covering the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, writes about Cruvellier, his book, and genocide trials here. She notes that Cruvellier is "the world's most dedicated genocide trial junkie," having covered trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the ECCC. Everywhere, she says, Cruvellier asked these questions: "Who is this expensive international justice for? The peasant farmers who give their testimonies, only to return home to poverty and meals less delicious than what the killers eat in UN jails? Was it for the 'international community,' which needed absolution for its failure to stop the killings? Or for killers to get one last shot at forgiveness?"

Stockman concludes that, perhaps, the trials are for history--to help us understand how and why genocide occurs so we can prevent it in the future. Maybe. But trials are a slow and cumbersome way to build knowledge. I would venture to say that the trials are simply for the sake of justice. Certainly not perfect justice: too many killers--in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere--escape prosecution for us to speak of justice except in the highly qualified way that humans must always speak of justice. But, justice nonetheless--as an ideal, perhaps. So that even if Kaing Guek Eav is the only person ever convicted of crimes connected to the Cambodian genocide, we can still affirm that what happened was heinously offensive and that the victims deserve  recognition.

In what kind of world would we not at least attempt to do justice?

Update: George Packer of the New Yorker has a thoughtful review of Cruvellier's book here.

Victims of Wars Long Ago

Next Sunday will mark the 99^th anniversary of Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, an event that prompted, in quick succession, Russian mobilization for war, the German invasion of Belgium, and French and British declarations of war against Germany. Preparations for the Great War were years in the making; nonetheless, its onset somehow seemed improvised, spontaneous, even accidental.

The last veterans of World War I have all died--the last one on February 4, 2012--but the weapons of that war survive in large numbers in the fields of Belgium and western France. From time to time, they are unearthed and claim new victims. A recent story in the Telegraph describes the work of Dirk Vanparys, a member of the Belgian army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company. On a recent, all-too-normal day, Vanparys and his team collected 73 unexploded shells and 57 grenades and fuses that had been found by farmers. Many of the shells that are recovered on a regular basis contain mustard gas, chlorine gas, or phosgene--agents that killed and disabled hundreds of thousands of troops along the Western Front during the many spasms of chemical warfare in World War I. Four months ago, seven people were hospitalized after a German shell containing gas exploded as a trench was being dug to lay cable south of Ypres.

Weapons used in World War I will continue to kill and maim completely innocent people for years to come. In 2012, Belgian and French authorities collected 185 tons of munitions left from World War I; the total collected in 2011 was 274 tons. Such totals are possible because nearly one and a half billion shells were fired during the war.

In preparation for the Battle of the Somme, an assault by British troops on German trenches that began on July 1, 1916, British artillery fired 1.5 million shells over five days. Tunnels dug under the German lines were packed with explosives—as much as thirty tons of explosives in a single mine—and set off as the assault began. The final artillery barrage—224,221 shells in a span of 65 minutes—created a rumble that, Adam Hochschild writes, “could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London,” almost 200 miles away. In spite of this extraordinary effort to “soften” German defenses, the first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the British Army over 57,000 casualties, including almost 20,000 killed.

A story posted yesterday by the McClatchy News Service describes another unending war. Forty years after the end of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War (or, to the Vietnamese, the American War), there are still cases of children being born with severe birth defects caused by Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used by the United States in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that Agent Orange has affected 3,000,000 people in Vietnam, including 150,000 children born with birth defects since the fall of Saigon in 1975.  While the United States has, since 1991, extended disability benefits for any of fifteen diseases linked to Agent Orange to U.S. military personnel who served in Vietnam, it has provided little assistance to the Vietnamese and has avoided acknowledging any responsibility for health problems caused by the use of the chemical. There is a U.S.-funded effort underway to clean up chemical contamination near the Da Nang International Airport, which was used by the U.S. Air Force during the war, but this site is just one of many Agent Orange “hot spots” in Vietnam.

There is some evidence that humankind is getting better at calculating the costs of war and that, as a result, we have become more successful at avoiding it than we have been in the past. What World War I is teaching us now, and what the Vietnam War seems destined to echo, is this: the costs of a war should be calculated out to a century (or more) beyond its conclusion.

Ieng Sary (1925-2013)

Brother Number 3, Ieng Sary, has died in Phnom Penh at age 87 while standing trial for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed as part of the Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979. His case in the mixed UN-Cambodian tribunal called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), designated Case 002, will continue with his co-defendants, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. Ieng's wife, Ieng Thirith, was also a co-defendant in the case before her dismissal due to advancing dementia.

Ieng was a co-founder of the Khmer Rouge along with his brother-in-law (and Brother Number 1), Pol Pot. He served as foreign minister during the Communists' genocidal rule in Cambodia, a period in which approximately 1.7 million people died from executions, starvation, and forced labor as the Khmer Rouge attempted to return Cambodia to "Year Zero." Ieng persuaded many educated Cambodians who had left the country to return to help rebuild it; most were subsequently imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

Ieng's death before the conclusion of his trial has highlighted one of the most significant problems with the ECCC. The long delay in its creation coupled with its very slow pace of operation has severely limited its ability to prosecute those who were most responsible for the destruction of Cambodia in the 1970s. Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998, well before the tribunal began its operations in 2006.

To date, the ECCC has spent $175.3 million and has completed one trial, that of Kaing Guek Eav ("Comrade Duch"), who was in charge of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Two other cases--Case 003 against Meas Mut and Sou Met and Case 004 against Im Chaem (a Buddhist monk now)--are ready for trial but are mired in political controversy. The government of Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia as prime minister since 1985, has numerous links to the Khmer Rouge terror that it prefers not to have revisited through trial testimony. Hun Sen has said that he will block future indictments.

Clinton Confronts a Legacy of the Vietnam War

Secretary of State Clinton is in Phnom Penh where she attended the just-concluded annual foreign ministers' meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).  Earlier in the week, she became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos since John Foster Dulles visited in 1955.  In the interim, there was the Vietnam War.

Like Cambodia, Laos was a sideshow in the Vietnam War.  But that hardly means it was ignored.  In fact, on a per capita basis, there is no country in the world that has been bombed as much as Laos.  Because the Ho Chi Minh Trail passed through Laos and the Viet Cong used Laotian territory both as a refugee and as a source of supplies, the United States extended its massive bombing campaign to Laos.  According to testimony by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Scot Marciel before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2010, the United States dropped 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War--more than were dropped on Germany and Japan, combined, during World War II.  Many of the bombs were cluster munitions with failure rates as high as 30 percent.

Even now, an estimated 300 people per year die when unexploded ordnance (UXO) explodes--because they stepped on unexploded submunitions from a cluster bomb, because they were trying to recover the valuable scrap metal from unexploded bombs, because they stepped on landmines--in short, because they were going about the normal activities of daily life in Laos.

Secretary Clinton met a survivor during a stop at an artificial limb center in Laos.  Phongsavath Sonilya, who lost both forearms and his vision when a cluster bomb exploded three years ago, had a message for the secretary of state.  The nineteen-year-old suggested that more needs to be done to halt the use of cluster munitions like the ones that contaminate many places where the United States has made war:  Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

There is a Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international agreement that prohibits the use, manufacture, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster bombs.  It was adopted in May 2008 and entered into force on August 1, 2010.  Seventy-four states have ratified the CCM, binding themselves to eliminate this particular weapon and to aid those countries, like Laos, that have suffered so much from its use.  The United States is not a party to the CCM.  No one could make a better case for why the United States should ratify the agreement than Phongsavath Sonilya did when he met Secretary Clinton.

Deportations

On December 2, 1980, eight months after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, four American women were raped and murdered in El Salvador.  Three were nuns; the fourth was a lay missionary.  This brutal act was part of an escalating war being waged by the right-wing Salvadoran government against the Salvadoran people and the Catholic Church.

In 1993, a UN-sponsored truth commission issued a report entitled From Madness to Hope:  The 12-Year War in El Salvador:  Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador.  Among its many conclusions regarding various atrocities committed during El Salvador's decade-long civil war was this one:  General (then Colonel) Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova had deliberately covered up facts during earlier investigations to obscure the truth about the murders.  Gen. Vides was head of El Salvador's National Guard when the murders occurred; he later became minister of defense.  The murders, it should be noted, were committed by members of the National Guard.

On Wednesday, in an immigration court in Florida, Judge James Grim ruled that there are valid grounds to begin deportation proceedings against Gen. Vides under a 2004 law that bars those who have committed human rights violations from entering or remaining in the United States.  The case for Gen. Vides' deportation was brought by the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the urging of the Center for Justice and Accountability.  This is the first time a high-ranking military officer from another country has been subjected to deportation proceedings as a result of responsibility for human rights abuses.

Deportation seems just under the circumstances.

Deportation doesn't seem so just, however, in this next case.

Kosal Khiev was born in 1980 in a refugee camp on the Thai- Cambodian border.  His parents, both Khmer (Cambodian), had fled the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, which, between 1975 and 1979, murdered approximately 1.7 million Cambodians.  In 1981, the family gained the sponsorship of a church in North Carolina and came to the United States seeking political asylum.  After a short stay in North Carolina, the family moved to the projects of Santa Ana, California.

As a teenager, Kosal joined a gang.  In this respect, he was like far too many immigrant children growing up poor in an American city.  At 16, he and other gang members were involved in a shootout at a party.  Tried as an adult for attempted murder, Kosal was sentenced to 16 years in prison.  He served 14 years, during which he discovered spoken word poetry as a means of expressing--and reforming--himself.  Upon his release from prison (never having become a U.S. citizen in spite of having lived virtually his entire life in North Carolina and California), he was deported to Cambodia, a place he had never been before.

In Phnom Penh, Kosal is artist-in-residence with Studio Revolt, the producer of this short film called "My Asian Americana" about Khmer Exiled Americans:

The message that Kosal and others convey in this film is simple:  "I'm an exiled American.  I can't go home."

 

For more about Kosal Khiev, see his website is here--or listen to this Australian radio documentary about him here.

And if you'd like to give the makers of this film a chance to take their message to the White House, you can go here to vote for "My Asian Americana" in the "What's Your Story" Video Challenge being sponsored by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Justice for Comrade Duch

Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Comrade Duch, had his conviction upheld and his sentence increased by the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) earlier this week.  The ECCC was established as a mixed Cambodian-international tribunal to try those responsible for the Cambodian genocide of 1975-79.  In less than four years, the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot killed approximately 1.7 million Cambodians, or roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population.  Duch was head of a prison--S21--in Phnom Penh called Tuol Sleng.  Nearly all of the approximately 15,000 people who passed through Tuol Sleng were killed.

 Tuol Sleng (S21)

Duch was convicted of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in July 2010 in the first trial conducted in the ECCC.  He appealed the verdict in March 2011, claiming that, as a junior official in the Khmer Rouge, he was merely following orders on pain of death.  His argument was rejected by the court, which increased his sentence from 35 years to life in prison.  Judge Kong Srim called Duch's crimes "among the worst in recorded history."

"Baseball Brings Smiles to Their Faces"

Today's Los Angeles Times brings the story of a Cambodian genocide survivor who is working to ensure that baseball will take root in his homeland.

Joe Cook, who was born Joeurt Puk in Cambodia just five years before the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, has raised over $300,000--much of it his own money--to take a sport he came to love as a young refugee in the United States back to his home. The Times' Kevin Baxter writes:

Cook . . . has spent the last five years trying to turn the former killing fields of his homeland into fields of dreams for a generation that has known little more than war, poverty and despair.

Along the way he's lost his life savings, his car and nearly his marriage. And, Cook insists, some people in Cambodia would like to see him dead.

"I want to walk away from this. I do. But these kids," he said, pointing to a photo of three shoeless children in torn clothes toting bats and gloves through a rice paddy, "baseball brings smiles to their faces."

In December, thanks to Cook, Cambodia fielded a national baseball team for the first time in the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand. It was a milestone as inauspicious as it was historic: Cambodia's first four hitters struck out without even touching the ball, and it took four games for the team to get its first hit.

But, as Cook noted, "winning is nothing. The biggest deal is we showed up."

Read the whole story here.

More Protests in Burma

On the sixth day of anti-government marches in Burma, an estimated 100,000 protestors took to the streets of the capital, Yangon. The government's religious affairs minister today warned of a possible crackdown against the Buddhist monks leading the protests.

In 1988, as many as 3,000 students were killed in the crackdown on th anti-government protests that led to the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi. However, some observers believe that international attention combined with restraints imposed by China will make a repeat of the 1988 crackdown unlikely.

The March of the Monks

On August 26, 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi assumed the leadership of Burma's fledgling movement for democracy at a rally at Yangon's Shwedagon pagoda. The Burmese military crushed the movement and since then has kept Burma's only Nobel laureate under house arrest with only intermittent periods of freedom.

Today in Yangon, 500 Buddhist monks marched past Suu Kyi's home while another 1,000 monks assembled at Shwedagon pagoda and an estimated 10,000 people (including 4,000 monks) marched in the city of Mandalay to protest Burma's repressive military dictatorship. It was the fifth consecutive day of protests by monks against the regime.

Earlier this week, in a move designed to shame the government, monks began refusing the alms that are distributed by the military. Monks have reportedly been marching with their begging bowls held upside down to demonstrate their rejection of the regime.

Meanwhile, the Burmese military has responded by arresting pro-democracy leaders and using hired thugs to beat up marchers. While the monks involved in the protests are clearly supported by the populace (90 percent of which is Buddhist), thus far only a few non-clergy have been willing to march with them. The government clearly is capable of bringing great force to bear against the protests, although killing monks would risk enraging their silent supporters.

The recent protests were prompted by a fuel price hike imposed by the government in August. Bus fares have doubled in the cities creating great hardship in a country with a per capita income of $175 per year.

The First ECCC Indictment

In Phnom Penh on Tuesday, Khang Khek Ieu--"Comrade Duch"--was indicted by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. The former commandant of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, where 14,000 people were tortured before being sent to their deaths in the killing fields near Phnom Penh between 1975 and 1979, was charged with crimes against humanity.

Duch's indictment was the first of five expected to come from the Introductory Submission presented by the Co-Prosecutors on July 18. Of the five who are believed to have been named in the Introductory Submission, Duch is the only one in custody and the only one to have confessed to crimes. His indictment, consequently, is less likely to present political problems or enforcement challenges for the tribunal than those yet to come.

For the ECCC's press release concerning the indicment, go here (.pdf). And for an excellent commentary in the Independent, see this brief essay.

Cambodia's Deadly Legacy

Cambodia, considered by some Americans at the time to be a sideshow of the Vietnam War, experienced almost uninterrupted warfare for over three decades beginning in the late 1960s. As a consequence, Cambodia today has one of the highest concentrations of explosive remnants of war (ERW)--land mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO)--of any country in the world.

In spite of the Cambodian government's desire to hide the problem in order to avoid negatively affecting tourism, the consequences of the ERW problem are visible everywhere. At roughly 1 in 250, Cambodia is believed to have more amputees per capita than any country in the world. According to the 2006 Landmine Monitor Report published by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, in 2005 there were 875 casualties (resulting in 168 deaths and 173 amputations) from landmines and UXO in Cambodia. Among those killed were 22 people involved in demining operations.

Musicians--all victims of landmines--near Angkor Wat (June 28, 2007).

In spite of persistent efforts by a variety of NGOs, there are believed to be 4 to 6 million landmines and other explosive remnants of war still to be cleared in Cambodia, most in areas near the Thai border. Tourists are safe in Cambodia, but many impoverished Cambodians, who must farm what little land they have available to them or starve, are not.

Entrance Exams

On July 2, in the Thai Hoc Courtyard of the Temple of Literature (Van Mieu) in Hanoi, I witnessed an interesting ritual. A small but persistent stream of Vietnamese teenagers filed past the 82 tablets mounted on the backs of carved tortoises. Most touched each tortoise on the head; some left small offerings of money. The stone tablets (or steles) honor scholars who earned doctorates between the 15th and 18th centuries at Vietnam's oldest university, which was established by the emperor Ly Nhan Tong in 1076. Today's students were there to seek inspiration--or at least good luck--from the students of earlier generations in advance of Vietnam's highly competitive university entrance exams. Looking for an additional edge, many students (and some of their parents as well) moved from the tortoise stelae to the nearby Temple of Confucius to offer prayers for good exam results.

This year, 1.8 million Vietnamese students sat for the exams that determine who will get the 300,000 spots in the entering classes of Vietnam's 300 universities. In Hanoi, commercial traffic was restricted on roads near the examination sites in order to relieve the congestion created by students appearing for their exams.

According to a recent story in Time, Vietnam's impressive economic growth is already being imperiled by a shortage of skilled workers. There is, quite simply, not enough educational opportunity to meet the demands of the many young people who are eager to improve their ability to compete in the global economy. Nor is the system of higher education in Vietnam adequate to meet the demands of the nation's rapidly developing economy.

One foreign university--the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology--has established a presence in Vietnam. If Vietnamese authorities can be convinced that such arrangements do not unduly threaten the communist orthodoxy that prevails in their universities, there may be room for many more foreign universities to help Vietnam bridge the gap between higher education needs and opportunities. And unless something is done to increase Vietnamese teenagers' odds of getting into a university, the venerable tortoises in Hanoi's Temple of Literature will be in danger of being rubbed into dust.

Town and Country in Vietnam

Most of my brief stay in Vietnam was spent in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), although one day included a trip by car about 90 kilometers beyond Ho Chi Minh City. In both cities, I was impressed by the level of development and the amount of foreign investment.

Gross domestic product continues to grow at an impressive rate (8.6 percent in 2006), fed in part by Vietnam's membership in the ASEAN Free Trade Area and, since January 2007, the World Trade Organization. While Asian trading partners including Singapore, South Korea, China, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan provide most of the the direct foreign investment, American businesses are moving in as well. Some of the high-rise hotels that have sprouted up in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City bear familiar names. Today the term "Hanoi Hilton" can refer either to the Hoa Lo Prison Museum or to an actual Hilton hotel located near the Opera House. And KFC, complete with the smiling figure of Colonel Sanders (who, as Adrian Cronauer--played by Robin Williams--noted in Good Morning, Vietnam, looks a lot like Ho Chi Minh), now has several locations in both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Even more exciting to at least one American I know who lives in Vietnam is the recent arrival of Pizza Hut.

As with most other countries that have experienced rapid economic development, costs and benefits are not being evenly distributed. The traditional mainstay of the Vietnamese economy, the agricultural sector, is rapidly declining in importance. Farmers are being squeezed economically; in fact, signs of Vietnam's modernization largely disappear once one leaves the cities behind. To make the situation even worse for those in the agricultural sector, corrupt officials in provincial governments have reportedly conspired with developers to force farmers to sell land at a fraction of its value.

Over the course of the past month, peaceful protests by farmers upset by land seizures and government corruption in the provinces have been taking place in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Last Wednesday, police in Ho Chi Minh City reportedly moved in to break up the protest involving 800 to 1,000 people there. Human Rights Watch weighed in with a statement on Friday.

Vietnamese authorities are aware that violations of international human rights are not good for business. The initial impulse is to hide human rights violations by keeping reporters at bay when protests occur, but if that fails perhaps the next impulse will be to correct the human rights violations themselves. At least we can hope so.

Developments in the ECCC

The Co-Prosecutors for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) have recommended the indictment of five Khmer Rouge leaders for their role in the Cambodian genocide between April 17, 1975, and January 6, 1979. This recommendation (called the "Introductory Submission"), together with over 1,000 documents (including 350 witness statements) supporting the charges, will now be considered by the Co-Investigating Judges in the mixed United Nations-Cambodian court established by an agreement reached between the UN and Cambodia in June 2003.

While the Co-Prosecutors are prohibited from releasing the names of those against whom indictments are being sought or the details of the charges, the statement released in Phnom Penh yesterday [.pdf] indicates the nature of the crimes being alleged:

Pursuant to their preliminary investigations, the Co-Prosecutors have identified and submitted for investigation twenty-five distinct factual situations of murder, torture, forcible transfer, unlawful detention, forced labor and religious, political and ethnic persecution as evidence of the crimes committed in the execution of this common criminal plan.

The factual allegations in this Introductory Submission constitute crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, homicide, torture and religious persecution. The Co-Prosecutors, therefore, have requested the Co-Investigating Judges to charge those responsible for these crimes.

The top leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, died in 1998 having never been indicted or imprisoned for his role in the genocide that is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of approximately two million people. The military leader of the Khmer Rouge, Ta Mok, died last year, also without ever having faced charges.

Khieu Samphan, who served as head of state for Democratic Kampuchea and was one of the leading intellectuals in the Khmer Rouge (he earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Paris in 1959), is among those expected to be indicted. Khieu is 76 years old.

Nuon Chea, known has "Brother Number Two" during the brief reign of the Khmer Rouge, has stated that he expects to be indicted, but he also has maintained his innocence. Nuon Chea is now 82 and living in northwest Cambodia, the region to which many members of the Khmer Rouge retreated after being driven out of Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese military in January 1979.

Ieng Sary, another Khmer Rouge leader facing a possible indictment, served as foreign minister in the government of Democratic Kampuchea. He was related by marriage to Pol Pot and was third in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy when the government of Democratic Kampuchea was established. Ieng Sary is in his late seventies and was reportedly hospitalized in Bangkok for heart problmems late last year.

The only person among those expected to be indicted who has admitted responsibility for his actions in the Khmer Rouge regime is the former commandant of S-21 (the infamous Tuol Sleng prison) Khang Khek Ieu (better known as Brother Duch). Duch is also the only major suspect who is currently in custody, although not as a consequence of charges brought by the ECCC.

Of approximately 14,000 prisoners who passed through Tuol Sleng between 1975 and 1979, only twelve are known to have survived. Most were tortured and later executed at the most notorious of Cambodia's "killing fields," Choeung Ek.

Like other Khmer Rouge leaders, Duch disappeared into the countryside after the Vietnamese invasion in 1975-1976. In 1998, journalist Nic Dunlop discovered Duch working in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border. Duch had been converted to Christianity in 1996 by a Khmer-American missionary and had begun doing humanitarian work along the border. After his identity was discovered, Duch turned himself in to authorities and has been imprisoned awaiting trial in a Cambodian national court in Phnom Penh ever since.

Unlike Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, and Ieng Sary, who were granted pardons in the late 1990s by the government of Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen (himself a former member of the Khmer Rouge), Duch was never pardoned. (Although the ECCC may have to consider arguments related to the pardons if Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, or Ieng Sary is indicted, it is expected that pardons granted by Cambodia's government will not be considered binding on the ECCC given its emphasis on internationally defined crimes.)

Who might the fifth person named in the Introductory Submission be? Some speculation has focused on Meas Muth, son-in-law of the late Ta Mok and himself a military commander in the Khmer Rouge. Meas Muth, however, joined the Cambodian military after his defection from the Khmer Rouge, which means his prosecution might present significant political problems.

For more on this story, see Seth Mydans' report in the New York Times or Ker Munthit's report for the Associated Press.

Tuol Sleng

Vietnam and Cambodia

I have been back from a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia for almost a week now. Jet lag is no longer a reasonable excuse for not blogging; now I have to face up to the fact that it has simply been difficult to know exactly where to dive into the effort to describe and interpret what I saw.

Perhaps the best place to begin would be simply to note that the trip took me and a friend--I traveled with the Vietnam country director for the English Language Institute, a non-profit that provides English teachers for schools and universities throughout Asia--to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, and Hanoi, in that order. While in Ho Chi Minh City, we spent a day with a car and driver going to the Cu Chi tunnels and the Cao Dai temple in Tay Ninh. We had an opportunity to see some of the Cambodian countryside on the five-hour drive from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap and on excursions from Siem Reap to the ancient temples of Angkor and to Lake Tonle Sap.

Before commenting on what we observed on the trip, I want to begin by showing some of what we saw. Below is a brief slide show (Flash required) depicting Choeung Ek, one of Cambodia's "killing fields."

Please check back for additional slide shows and, when the muse finally permits, some comments on Vietnam and Cambodia.

Choeung Ek

Visa Advice

In preparation for an upcoming trip to Vietnam (about which I plan to write more later), I came across this bit of advice: "If you think that getting arrested may be a part of your itinerary, try to get your visa issued on a separate piece of paper from your passport."

It was intended to be a joke . . . I think.