Secretary Clinton: The past must be confronted

Hillary Clinton met sex slavery victims during her visit to Cambodia.

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
Tuesday, Nov 2, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Cambodia yesterday and urged its government to proceed with more prosecutions of surviving Khmer Rouge officials. This is how The New York Times described her visit:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited a former Khmer Rouge torture house in Cambodia on Monday and urged the nation to proceed with trials of the former regime's surviving leaders in order to "confront its past."

The commandant of that prison, Kaing Guek Eav, was sentenced to 19 years in prison last July in the first part of a United Nations-backed trial of leading figures of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979.

A second trial involving the four most senior surviving leaders has been expected to follow, after they were formally indicted in September. But Prime Minister Hun Sen, who once said that Cambodia should "dig a hole and bury the past," has said that he would not allow any additional prosecutions beyond those four.

Mrs. Clinton repeated an argument that has been used by proponents of the trials, saying that "a country that is able to confront its past is a country that can overcome it."

"Countries that are held prisoner to their past can never break those chains and build the kind of future that their children deserve," she said. "Although I am well aware the work of the tribunal is painful, it is necessary to ensure a lasting peace."

Obviously, few regimes can compete with the Khmer Rouge in terms of the breadth and depth of its crimes, but I trust that everyone sees how irrelevant that is to the point. Previously, Secretary Clinton instructed Kenya to proceed with war crimes trials of its former officials, while President Obama demanded that Indonesia continue investigating past human rights abuses on the ground that "we can't go forward without looking backwards." In other news yesterday: George W. Bush threw out the first pitch at the World Series baseball game while the Texas crowd cheered and chanted: "USA. USA."