Youk Chhang
By John Kerry

"Cambodia is like broken glass," says Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. "Without justice, we cannot put the pieces together." Putting the pieces together is the mission of the man who made himself the keeper of Cambodia's darkest memories.

Standing up to powerful forces that feared reopening the past, Chhang has documented the three years, eight months and 20 days of cruelty that claimed the lives of 1.7 million Cambodians under Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge. Six hundred thousand pages of documents, maps of 20,000 mass graves and 4,000 transcribed interviews with former Khmer Rouge soldiers are testimony to Chhang's conviction that there is no future without making peace with the past. They will provide the evidence at a long-delayed tribunal on the genocide, which it is hoped will finally start this year.

Confronting painful history is never easy. But for Chhang, 46, it is personal. Under Pol Pot, his sister was accused of stealing rice. A soldier slashed open her stomach to prove her guilt. Her stomach was empty. She died a slow and horrible death. This is one of the unspeakable acts that have gone not only unpunished but unexplained.

The tribunal will allow the world to hear the architects of these crimes speak about why they inflicted such suffering. In pain revisited, there will be a chance for a nation's healing -- and in Youk Chhang, a hero confronting the past's villains.

The first questions were answered often over the course of the following week or two, as the results of Chhang's tireless activities to document that terrible period in Cambodian history finally made it into mainstream press here in the west. But Chhang's quiet heroism, and his direct connection to those outside Cambodia who were to become part of his quest to make the truth about that those terrible years part of the official history books, was also documented in articles such as this one that was published in the Christian Science Monitor in July of 2006:

The man who tracked Cambodia's war crimes

Youk Chhang has come a long way since the day he stood outside the Texas A&M campus in College Station waving a cardboard sign that read "Stop the Cambodian Killing." Back then - it was 1987 -- if Chhang could convince just three people to listen to what he had to say about the crimes of the former Khmer Rouge regime, he was having a good day.

"They felt sorry for me," Chhang says, from behind his desk in Phnom Penh. "They said 'look at this skinny Cambodian refugee.' But I felt in my gut I had to do something."

His life's work has come to fruition with the swearing in this month of 17 Cambodian and 10 international judges to form the Khmer Rouge tribunal. As the investigative phase gets under way, the judges are expected to begin indicting the surviving leaders - one of whom died Friday - for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians during the 1975-1979 Pol Pot regime.

Much of the investigative work will rely upon documents compiled by Chhang, who went from protesting outside universities to studying genocide documentation inside their gates. The Cambodian-American heads the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DCC) in Phnom Penh, an internationally funded nongovernmental organization that has spent years compiling evidence on the Khmer Rouge's internal workings.

Chhang's work with the DCC has been of inestimable value. As Time magazine's Asian edition noted previously in its 2005 "60 Years of Asian Heroes" edition, "For more than a decade, Youk Chhang has been Cambodia's conscience. If today there is a real possibility of bringing at least some of the former Khmer Rouge leaders before the international tribunal that will begin hearings next year, he, more than anyone, is responsible." It has not been a simple process getting to this point, though. As writer Tom Fawthrop pointed out in this recent piece for The Guardian UK's website,

It has taken decades to set up an international tribunal investigating Khmer Rouge war crimes and the process remains fraught.

The Khmer Rouge nightmare that terrorised Cambodia during the 1970s ended nearly 30 years ago. In Rwanda and Sierra Leone, the wheels of justice turned quickly, with tribunals investigating events that kicked off within a few years of the mass killing.

For Cambodians, it has been an agonisingly long wait for justice. Since the Khmer Rouge tribunal was finally established in Phnom Penh in 2006, they have been kept waiting again, with legal squabbles over rules of evidence delaying the indictment stage, when some senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge would be formally charged under international law with crimes against humanity and genocide.

This hybrid tribunal, with international and Cambodian judges sitting together as co-prosecutors, was also adopted by the Sierra Leone tribunal. A special UN mission is in charge of legal assistance to the tribunal.

So there's no question that Youk Chhang is a hero, someone who has worked for many years against long odds to bring justice to millions of murdered Cambodians who cannot speak up for themselves. After decades of struggle, his efforts are finally bearing fruit in the form of long-delayed official tribunals investigating the causes and creators of such terrible systemic genocide against innocent civilians. The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but turn they do; and thanks to the tireless advocacy of Youk Chhang, they are finally turning in Cambodia after all these years.

But how does John Kerry fit into this picture? As veteran JK blogger ProSense pointed out in a typically well-researched post to Democratic Underground, it was "Senator John Kerry who brokered the U.N.'s Cambodian-genocide tribunal. ... Senator Kerry entered the negotiations at a time when there were concerns about the country’s corrupt legal system, the talks were on the verge of collapse and a judicial power struggle over who would lead the trial was ongoing. Senator Kerry stepped in to offer a compromise, establishing a framework for the tribunal, known as The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)."

We strongly recommend reading ProSense's exhaustively-detailed report on what she refers to as the Kerry-Brokered Cambodia Tribunal, not just for the information about Youk Chhang and the Khmer Rouge tribunal itself but for the entire panoply of historical events surrounding it. JK did have a key role to play in that process, as one of the many sources she cited noted while laying out a timeline for the events in Cambodia:

In 1997, at the suggestion of the U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary General to Cambodia, Thomas Hammarberg, the co-Prime Ministers of Cambodia requested assistance from the U.N. in establishing a tribunal. David Scheffer went to Cambodia to design a proposal acceptable to the Cambodian government. The U.N. appointed a Commission of Experts which in 1999 recommended establishment of an international tribunal outside Cambodia.

Years of negotiations followed. The U.N. Office of Legal Affairs tried to impose a U.N.- run tribunal. Cambodia insisted that the tribunal be majority Cambodian, under Cambodian law. At the suggestion of U.S. Senator John Kerry, who went to Cambodia, agreement was reached in 2001 on a mixed tribunal with a Cambodian majority, but requiring super-majority agreement by international judges for all decisions. Administration would be shared by Cambodian and U.N. officials, prosecutors, and investigating judges. The maximum penalty would be life in prison. The Cambodian National Assembly passed a law to establish the tribunal on those terms.

Yes, Youk Chhang is a genuine hero, both for the Cambodian people and for the world community at large. He deserves all our gratitude for standing up on behalf of those who can no longer stand up for themselves. And JK deserves our gratitude as well for being part of the process that will finally help to finally put their souls at peace, and for making sure that heroes like Youk Chhang get the recognition they deserve.