Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 76, January 2020, 102071
Political Geography

Left justified: The early campaign for an international law response to Khmer Rouge crimes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102071Get rights and content

Abstract

In April 1979, a mission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers made a solidarity visit to Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of Khmer Rouge rule of the country. One of the mission members, John H. E. Fried, a former advisor to the United States' military trials at Nuremberg, was moved to subsequently advocate for United Nations recognition of the then ostracised Cambodian state. The crisis of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the political justifications made by early visitors there, illuminate late Cold War cultures of progressive international law scholarship and activism through their constitutive affects and material practices. While legal investigation of Khmer Rouge crimes is now largely understood through the frame of ‘transitional justice’, this paper rejects such a framing. It argues instead for attention to Cambodia's early experiences, in which left legal activism – calling for Nuremberg's lessons to be applied to the violence perpetrated in Vietnam and Cambodia – played an important role. For scholars interested in post-1979 Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum historical visitor books, recently digitised, promise insight into the multiple actors, motivations and understandings of international ‘early responders’ to evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes.

Introduction

In April 1979, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL)1 sent an eight-member solidarity mission to a devastated Cambodia.2 This paper traces one of the mission members – a jurist and scholar – to better understand the mission's subsequent report and an early campaign for an international law response to Cambodia's situation. A critical geopolitics of justice approach (Hughes, 2015; Jeffrey, 2011) foregrounds the international solidarities and late Cold War geopolitics that made certain legal analyses and political actions possible, and others less so. Such an approach also attends to the affective qualities and materiality of the connections made between actors and justice processes in Cambodia and actors and processes elsewhere. In this case, relations were particularly dense in and between the cities of Phnom Penh and New York, not least because this early campaign for justice worked towards effecting change for Cambodians via the 1979 and 1980 sessions of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) held in New York.

This solidarity mission and early campaign is absent from contemporary accounts of ‘transitional justice’ in Cambodia, as if nothing of consequence was said or done about the alleged crimes of the Khmer Rouge until 1999, when a UN Group of Experts reported on the potential for trials of the regime's former leaders. As Alexander Hinton argues, a dehistoricising and depoliticising transitional justice imaginary obscures key events and dynamics of contemporary relevance (Hinton, 2018, p. 38). I argue here that the forgetting of what Hinton terms the ‘first transition’ of Cambodia after 1979 – to the socialist People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) – may in part be explained by the non-recognition or illegality of this state internationally. Even at the time, key actors found themselves aghast at Cambodia's isolation and invisibility. United Nations (UN) Senior Advisor Sir Robert Jackson, a veteran of European post-war reconstruction and coordinator of aid to the Thailand-Cambodia border in the 1980s, noted the ‘extraordinary phenomenon’ of what he termed ‘the “Forget Kampuchea” syndrome’ (Jackson in Mysliwiec, 1988, iii; see also Amer, 1990). It is necessary to understand the early campaigns that sought recognition and assistance for Cambodia after 1979, how they drew on forms of law and internationalism forged in post-war Europe, why they failed and how they remain relevant to contemporary justice processes.

The second aim of this paper is to bring to light a new source: a set of historical visitor books kept by the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, located in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The museum was visited by the 1979 IADL mission, and mission members contributed comments at the museum to the first of its visitor books. Recently digitised, these books now provide significant insight into the early museum and its geopolitical role: how the new Cambodian state reconnected diplomatically with other states and discursively with wider inter-state processes in the early years after 1979.

I first saw the comment of IADL mission member John H. E. Fried in the year 2000. I glanced at it only briefly, one hundred and twenty-five pages into a photocopy marathon of some fifteen-hundred pages. Copying the six historical visitor books of the Tuol Sleng Museum was busywork I'd set for myself during my doctoral fieldwork. With no funding to put towards the translation of comments, and faced with such an ‘abundant archive’ (Hodder, 2017), I hardly scratched at the source for my thesis. Much later, Fried's comment struck me as being of unusual provenance: put to paper in Cambodia, written in French, he signed as a ‘retired professor of Political Science (City University New York) and former Legal Advisor to the Nuremberg Military Trials’. Three distinct places and times were gathered up in the comment: the moment of writing in Phnom Penh, a past academic career in New York City, and an even more distant role in Nuremberg. Here were two academic disciplines, Politics and Law, and two responses to very different kinds of violence: a legal trial focussed on Nazi aggression, and a museum of Khmer Rouge crimes. Most surprisingly, the date on the comment was 29 April 1979, only three months after the end of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. What was an American academic doing in Cambodia at that time? During the chaotic rebuilding of Cambodia after Khmer Rouge rule, hadn't the country remained closed off to most visitors, aside from a few journalists and advisors from Vietnam and the Eastern bloc?

The title of this paper – left justified – refers most immediately to the page formatting convention of aligning sentences and paragraphs to the left-hand margin. Fried handwrote his comment in the visitor book left-justified. He also typed left-justified, as did his secretary, to produce the hundreds of pages of draft essays, letters and reports that now make up his archives.3 Marginalia, found extensively on these pages, both supports and interrupts justification, as will be explored below. The second and related meaning of my title refers to the ways in which the Tuol Sleng Museum visitor books were integral to a shared political-affective practice of visitors, one that aligned them as a group and sought to align others to a left ‘margin’, position or line. Many comments offered an explicit legitimisation of the new Cambodian socialist state, a leftist justification. Here hides an archaic legal definition of ‘justify’: ‘to offer a defence that [an] act was lawful’ (OED). Justification in 1979 Cambodia wasn't only a matter of style, it was the difference between life and death – a kind of living death – for the new state.

Section snippets

Uncertainty, solidarity and biography

For southeast Asian states, the 1970s were geopolitically choppy waters. Soon after the end of the Second Indochina War (with Vietnam's defeat of the United States) came the unsettling Third Indochina War, a series of conflicts involving five different ‘red’ regimes (Evans & Rowley, 1990). One of these conflicts – arguably its ‘immediate catalyst’ (Evans & Rowley, 1990, p. 301) – was Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, which was then under Khmer Rouge rule and known as Democratic Kampuchea (DK).

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and its visitor books

Soon after January 1979, journalists, jurists, delegates and diplomats were able to gain visas to travel to the new state of the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Early visitors were carefully guided to a small number of locations (Benzaquen-Gautier, 2016, 112). One such location was a school-turned-interrogation centre, known as S-21. S-21 had been the apex of the santebal (security system) overseen by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the leadership group of the Khmer

Approaching visitor books

Visitor books generally give little information about visitors themselves. This is considered a problem for using them in research on museum visitors. But visitor books can provide insight into visitors' own meaning-making if subjected to a critical reading which takes into account the context for such inscriptions, the voices that the museum allows or inhibits, what forms of address are used, and how visitors position themselves in relation to difficult histories (Conley, 2019; Macdonald, 2005

John H. E. Fried

Fried wrote in French at Tuol Sleng Museum on 29 April 1979:

The dreadful experience of this visit to the prison of the Pol Pot regime – the proof of unimaginable systematic or methodical sadism, and the masses of the clothes of the victims – is comparable to the extermination camps of the Nazis ‘in miniature’ (P124, see Fig. 1).

It is no large stretch to imagine that this opinion was informed by both professional and personal experience. Fried, along with his psychoanalyst wife, Edrita,

‘Forty-eight hours in and around Phnom Penh’: the IADL report

A group of lawyers, some of whom had participated in the Nuremberg trials, founded the IADL in Paris in 1946. The IADL was one of the original non-government organisations to be accredited with consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council. Rene Cassin, a drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was the organisation's first President, and Joë Nordmann, a lawyer and former member of the French resistance, was also a founding figure.12

The IADL report

A thirteen-page report of the IADL mission was submitted by the Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the thirty-fourth session of the UNGA in October 1979.14 The IADL report gave a legal analysis of: ‘frontier incidents’ between China and

The World Church Centre Forum

Back in 1980, a year after his Cambodia visit, Fried was invited to publicly share his views. The ‘Kampuchea Credentials: Legal Views’ Forum was convened by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) for 15 September 1980 – the day before the opening of the thirty-fifth UNGA session – at the World Church Centre in UN Plaza, New York. Earlier in 1980, a paper on ‘the credentials question’ had been commissioned by the AFSC, and prepared by the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights

‘Punishing the Poor’26

While Vietnam didn't directly refer to the IADL report on the UNGA floor in September 1979, its findings were implicit in a claim made there by Phan Hien, who stated that

the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, which rose up to overthrow [the Pol Pot regime] and to save the Kampuchean people, represents revolutionary legality. Hence it is fully in keeping with international law and the United Nations Charter for Vietnam to lend its support to this just struggle (A/34/PV.13, p.

Conclusion

In the decade after 1979, hundreds of journalists, activists and delegates travelled to Cambodia to bear witness to the crimes of S-21 at Tuol Sleng Museum. One important subset of ‘early responders’ were jurists who visited with an eye to legal exposure and reckoning. Contemporary ‘transitional justice’ prescriptions for Cambodia generally overlook the visits and analyses of these jurists, but many such reports and opinions have stood the test of time. The benefits of critically examining

Declarations of interest

None.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (DE160100501). For their advice on points of language, law and history, as well as general encouragement, my sincere thanks to Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, Roger Clark, Howard de Nike, Wolf Dressler, Hurst Hannum, David Hawk, Helen Jarvis, Naz Modirzadeh, Anne Laure Porée, John Quigley, Greg Stanton, Carolin Wahnbaeck and Till Wahnbaeck. Tom Grindrod gave unparalleled research assistance: heartfelt thanks. Elliott Child, Rob Conkie,

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