If Sok Chear had her way, she would slice the elderly man into ribbons and pour
salt into his wounds. She would beat him up and torture him and give him
electric shocks to make him talk.
For Ly Monysar, "Only killing them will make me feel calm. I want them to
suffer the way I suffered. I say this from the heart."
Sok Chear, an office worker, and Ly Monysar, a security guard, are two of the
millions of Cambodians who suffered for four years in the late 1970s under the
brutal Communist Khmer Rouge, who caused the deaths of 1.7 million people.
Today, three decades later, five aging former Khmer Rouge leaders have been
arrested and are awaiting trial. And Sok Chear and Ly Monysar have an
innovative role to play in the tribunal, where the first case is expected to
get under way this autumn.
They are two of hundreds of people who have applied to the court to be
recognized officially as victims of the Khmer Rouge and to bring parallel civil
cases against them.
They will have the chance, not to beat and torture them but to seek symbolic
reparations - a monument, perhaps, or a museum or a trauma center.
It is a controversial experiment in this unusual hybrid tribunal, which is
administered jointly by the United Nations and the Cambodian government,
cobbling together elements of both local and international law..
"For the first time in history the internal rules of a tribunal will give
victims of crimes the possibility to participate as parties," said Gabriela
González Rivas, deputy head of the tribunal's victims unit.
Victims have been included in other comparable tribunals like the International
Court of Justice, but their role has been more limited.
As civil parties, the victims here will have standing comparable to those of
the accused, including the rights to participate in the investigation, to be
represented by a lawyer, to call witnesses and to question the accused at
trial, according to a court statement.
"Participation in these types of proceedings is a tool of empowerment," Rivas
said. "People can tell their story, feel that what happened to them is a
consideration, a recognizing that what happened to them shouldn't
have happened."
The inclusion of victims is part of the evolution and refining of the
mechanisms of international justice, said Diane Orentlicher, special counsel of
the Open Society Justice Initiative, in an interview by telephone from New York.
"There has been a growing recognition, after 15 years of international and
hybrid courts like this one, not to exclude victims from the justice that is
being dispensed on their behalf," she said. "This is one of the frontier issues
in ongoing efforts to improve ways in which war crimes trials are carried out."
The Cambodia tribunal has been criticized for compromising international
standards of justice with its awkward admixture of Cambodian law and its
vulnerability to manipulation by the country's strongman, Prime Minister
Hun Sen.
The participation of victims is drawing more criticism, partly from people
concerned for the rights of the accused and the preservation of the presumption
of innocence.
Victor Koppe, a defense attorney for one of the Khmer Rouge leaders, called the
presumption of innocence "the most fundamental issue" in a case whose
defendants have already found a place in history books as the perpetrators of
the killings.
"The question is whether or not everything in this tribunal is
institutionalized in such a way that only guilty verdicts can come," he said.
Other critics say the court is being distracted by social agendas from its core
task of seeking justice for crimes against humanity.
"I would put this under the category of therapeutic legalism," said Peter
Maguire, a specialist in international justice and author of "Facing Death
in Cambodia."
"The task of an international criminal court is to convict the guilty and
exonerate the innocent," he said. "To ask more of it than that is asking way
too much of any criminal trial."
For many people, though, these related benefits are the main purpose of the
trials in a country that has never fully come to grips with its tormented past.
The trials will offer a catharsis and a measure of healing, they say, and will
set a base line for an end to impunity in this still raw and sometimes
lawless country.
"This is an invention of the 1990s where people freighted the trials with all
this baggage," said Maguire. "How do you measure closure, how do you measure
truth, how do you measure reconciliation? These are not empirical categories."
These added elements can also encumber an already tortuously slow process, the
critics say.
Almost two years of the tribunal's budgeted three-year mandate have passed
since it was set up in August 2006, after nearly a decade of contentious
negotiation between the United Nations and the Cambodian government.
Nearly a year has passed since the first of the five defendants was charged in
the case. A new budget has been submitted, and most analysts are confident that
more money will be found from international donors to extend the life of the
tribunal. But as Maguire put it, this court needs to get hustling.
So far, Rivas said, her office is processing about 1,300 applications to
participate from people who say they are victims. About half of them seek to be
civil parties, while the other half offer evidence that could be submitted to
prosecutors. Most names have been channeled through a documentation center or
through human rights groups.
Ten people have been accepted so far as civil parties, she said.
As the number grows, it is likely that they will be combined into class actions
representing religious or ethnic groups, victims of particular crimes or
other parties.
Theary Seng, 37, a Cambodian-born American lawyer who lost her parents to the
Khmer Rouge, is organizing two groups of orphans - including Sok Chear and Ly
Monysar - to bring civil cases.
In February, Seng became the first - and so far the only - victim to address
the court, standing face to face with a man she blames for the deaths of
her parents.
Though her words were addressed to the court, she said, her eyes were locked
directly with those of the defendant, Nuon Chea, 81, the most senior of the
five imprisoned leaders - the man Sok Chear said she wanted to flay.
In a short statement, Theary Seng contrasted the legal protections that Nuon
Chea is receiving with the arbitrary arrest and abuse she said she and her
younger brother suffered as children under the Khmer Rouge.
Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge ideologue, was sometimes known as Brother No. 2 to
Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, who died in 1998.
"He was stoic, stoic," said Theary Seng, recalling the confrontation. "He's
completely stoic. Eighty percent of the time I was addressing him in my
statement. He didn't break the stare."
Nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population died between 1975 and 1979 from
execution, torture, starvation and overwork in the mass labor brigades the
Khmer Rouge created.
Today, though, most of the survivors are as stoic as their victimizers. When
asked about the tribunal, most simply say they want to know who caused their
suffering and why.
But the approach of the court sessions has aroused the feelings of many people,
and those who have applied to be counted as victims are among those with the
strongest emotions.
Sok Chear, 32, who said she was raped and brutalized as a girl by the Khmer
Rouge, remains inconsolable over the loss of her father, an engineer, who
disappeared into the hands of the black-clothed cadre and never returned.
"We were always waiting for him to come home, but he never came," she said. "We
were always waiting and waiting. Even now, I still look around. Maybe my father
is still alive."
Tears still come when she talks about him.
"He gave me rice to eat, and I want to repay him," she said, "even one plate of
rice, my gift to him, even one plate for him to eat from his daughter."
Ly Monysar, 41, is a broken man, poor and sick and bitter, his voice quavering
as he tells of the loss of his entire family when he was a boy of 9.
He sustains himself with fantasies of revenge every bit as chilling as the
calculated brutality of men like Nuon Chea.
"I want to kill all those people who did this to me," he said.
"And if I can't, I'll come back in the next life and find them. I'll create my
own genocidal regime and take my revenge on them all."
==================================================================================
London calling
After one of the most impressive modern games, the Olympic flag has been handed
to London, marking the start of the four-year countdown.
The British capital took centre stage with an eight-minute presentation to the
world during Beijing's closing ceremony on Sunday.
The five-ringed flag was handed from Beijing's mayor to the president of the
International Olympic Committee, and then on to London's mayor who waved it
four times, signalling the official start of the London Olympiad.
Topping Beijing
It is not just the athletes who will be competing in Britain in 2012. Rania
Wannous from Visit London, the city's official tourism organisation, says the
UK wants to show the world it can host a better party than China.
"Each Olympic games is unique, what we are committed to is really delivering an
amazing and best-ever games. London showed the world we were ready, we were
energised and we couldn't wait for our own games," she said.
But the British press has not been so positive.The Independent newspaper
suggested that Britain's "collective toes were starting to curl in anticipatory
embarrassment" while the Telegraph claimed that nothing could top the Beijing
games.
Boxing gold medalist James Degale [GALLO/GETTY]
Nevertheless, the organisers are not being put off.
Construction of the main stadium on an "island" in east London started in May,
three months ahead of schedule.
They needed to start digging early to avoid any repeat of the Wembley fiasco.
In 2007, the national football stadium in north London finally opened - a year
late - turning what was designed as a symbol of national pride into a source of
national embarrassment.
The Olympic organisers are aware that any delays in the 2012 facilities would
be an embarrassment on an international scale.
But there is already criticism of the stadium's design. It is not impressing
the British media in the way that Beijing's Bird's Nest wowed the world. The
Guardian newspaper called it "plain and practical", while The Times described
it as "deflated architecture at an inflated price".
The organisers insist they are not just designing the building for a fortnight
in 2012. Once the global spotlight moves away from the Olympic stadium at the
end of the games, it will be transformed from an 80,000-capacity arena into a
25,000-seater local venue for community sports.
Changing London
Politicians and business leaders have made it clear that London is going to be
a very different city in four years. A number of projects intended to change
the lives of people living there are set to be completed in 2012.
A controversial east-west rail link has been forced through. The 30-year-old
idea had been written off, because of the cost of digging a new route under
London, but the Olympics changed that.
Large parts of Heathrow Airport are being rebuilt, despite the objections of
local residents who do not want any further expansion at the site.
New London underground trains and lines will be unveiled. And a plan to put
tens of thousands of free-to-use bicycles on the city's streets is under way.
Ideas which could have stayed on the drawing board are coming to life faster
than most Londoners are accustomed to.
But the competition with Beijing to host the best Olympics ever does not come
cheap. The estimated cost of the 2012 games has tripled since London was named
as the host city in 2005.
This has not gone down well with the British press. "London could end up worse
off after [the] Olympics," read The Telegraph. "Don't waste public money on
sport," urgedThe Times.
A large part of the cost of the games is being paid by Londoners. That has led
some taxpayers to threaten not to pay the extra $40 a year.
Mark Wallace from campaign group, the Taxpayers' Alliance, understands their
anger: "People are looking forward to it, but they're also concerned that if
there are more budget problems, it's going to hit all of us in the pocket. And
it might look quite bad internationally.
"The Olympics mustn't be used as an excuse just to splash as much cash as
politicians want on everything. It's got to be done sensibly and we've got to
realise that the money comes out of people's pockets."
Team GB
But the International Olympic Committee has made it clear that it does not want
corners to be cut. The games are for the athletes, it says, not for the host
city.
And the bar has been set high for the British athletes. They have a target of
propelling Team GB into fourth place in the medals table, something unthinkable
even a few months ago.
After finishing fourth in Beijing, Team GB have high expectations for London
[GALLO/GETTY] The bitter memory of Atlanta in 1996, when Britain picked up just
one gold, was overcome in style in Beijing. The UK's Olympians leapt into
fourth place, with their best showing in nearly a century.
Earlier this year, the British Olympic Association was ridiculed when it said
it wanted Britain to finish fourth in the 2012 games.
Until Beijing, Team GB had not managed to score better than tenth place since
1980.
Matthew Crawcour from UK Sport hinted that Britain could go for third in 2012:
"A new benchmark has been set and nobody likes to stand still, so our job is to
look at how we move things on."
Much of this year's success is being attributed to increased funding.
One-quarter of the amount spent on National Lottery tickets goes to charity.
A large percentage of that is given to Britain's Olympic hopefuls. The better a
sport does, the more Lottery cash it gets.
The hope is that the impact of that spending will trickle down to the rest of
the country. A survey by online researchers Opinium has found that the
excitement of the Beijing games has already inspired one in 20 people to get
into sport.
"It's great to have a new set of role models out there, and role models are
important because they're the ones that bring people into sport," Crawcour said.
"Even if they don't make it, if they don't become [Olympic champions like]
Chris Hoy or Rebecca Adlington, the great thing is, it's a healthy way to go
and if we're becoming a healthier nation then that's positive."
Cash boost
The games are also expected to bring new jobs to the capital.. A huge global
advertising campaign designed to attract visitors to the Olympic city has
already started.
It is estimated that tourists traveling to Britain because of the games will
give the country a $10 billion cash boost.
The games will be hosted in east London, the poorest part of the city, which
lives in the shadow of the financial district – one of the world's wealthiest
square miles. The Olympics will bring jobs and visitors to this traditionally
deprived area.
It will also bring much needed housing. The Olympic village where the athletes
stay will be converted into affordable homes for Londoners after the games. The
first residents will move in by Christmas 2012.
With less than half of Beijing's Olympics budget allocated for the games,
London knows that 2012 will never be as big and bold as 2008. So it is trying
to impress the world in a different way.
London won its Olympic bid by convincing the world that the games would have a
lasting legacy – an impact on Londoners outside the stadia.
"I witnessed the power of the [2000 Sydney] games to really transform a city
and I think we're going to see that even bigger and better in 2012 in London,"
says Wannous..
And once the Olympic flame is extinguished in London, that is how organisers
hope the success of the games will be remembered.
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