Associated Press.. President Nixon conferring with Henry A. Kissinger in New York in 1972.
PHNOM
PENH — Theary Seng was taking aim with precision and anger. The
41-year-old U.S.-trained lawyer and a regular on Cambodia’s crowded
protest circuit was about to throw a dart at a poster of former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger is one of 13 politicians and senior Khmer Rouge leaders in a dart game created by Poetic Justice, a nongovernmental organization run by Theary Seng that highlights deficiencies of the special U.N.-backed tribunal judging the Khmer Rouge’s crimes. Each player gets five throws. A bull’s-eye is worth seven points. The highest score wins.
Last
Sunday afternoon, Theary Seng and three members of her staff were
playing on Phnom Penh’s riverfront opposite the storied Foreign
Correspondents’ Club. On this occasion — the fourth time the game has
been staged in public — the point was to draw attention to the narrow
scope of the Khmer Rouge tribunal ahead of President Barack Obama’s
visit for a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations.
Earlier this year, Duch, the warden of the Khmer Rouge’s
most secretive detention center, was sentenced to life for the torture
and execution of almost 13,000 people. But only three of Pol Pot’s
closest colleagues are currently on trial for the deaths of up to two
million people between 1975 and 1979. Another two cases are mired at the investigation stage, some say because of interference by the Cambodian government.
Theary
Seng, who survived the Khmer Rouge as a young child but lost both her
parents, says the tribunal’s mandate should be expanded. She was a civil
party to the proceedings but pulled out because of what she says are
the tribunal’s shortcomings.
One of those shortcomings is the
failure to hold responsible those who ordered the carpet bombings of
Cambodia in the early 1970s, even though, Theary Seng argues, the
destruction they wrought helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power. In those
years Washington entertained an uneasy, opportunistic alliance with Lon
Nol, the general who seized power after ousting Prince Norodom Sihanouk in a 1970 coup and was in turn ousted by the Khmer Rouge in 1975.
The
U.S. bombing campaign, Theary Seng said while setting up the targets
for the dart game, “had the direct consequence of killing half a million
people and the indirect consequence of creating the conditions that
gave us the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger is legally and morally responsible.”
But with the scope of the special Khmer Rouge court limited to crimes
committed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, no earlier action by
the United States will be considered.
Today, the opposition leader Sam Rainsy and other critics argue
that the United States’ current relations with the government of Prime
Minister Hun Sen also have the hallmarks of political expedience:
Washington’s “pivot” policy in Southeast Asia is pushing the White House closer to unsavory regimes with dubious human rights records.
This
point wasn’t lost on the crowds gathered around Theary Seng or on the
300-odd tourists who filled the restaurants nearby. And it certainly
wasn’t lost on the 20 police officers and 10 senior district officials
in plain clothes who moved in as she began explaining the rules of the
game through a microphone.
The security officers leapt for the
foam-backed posters of Nixon, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong. Spoiling for a
confrontation, they destroyed the targets while yelling at the crowd:
“You are obstructing public order!” “We are security!” “We can do
anything!”
Punches were traded. Theary Seng was pushed and shoved.
“Obviously, they’re a bit sensitive with Obama coming to town. But what
can you say: They’re control freaks,” she said. “It’s an authoritarian
regime that wants a picture-perfect image for the summit, and this does
not accord with reality.”
The ASEAN summit meeting
that Hun Sen is hosting this week is the largest gathering of regional
and world leaders ever assembled in Cambodia, and Obama’s visit is the
first by a sitting U.S. president. Obama’s highly anticipated arrival
has prompted a litany of complaints and a slew of protests.
Eight people living under the flight path near Phnom Penh’s international airport were briefly detained
Friday for painting “S O S” alongside pictures of Obama on the rooftops
of their houses. They had been ordered to vacate their homes to create a
security zone ahead of the president’s arrival. Protests by underpaid
garment workers and villagers evicted from their land occur almost
daily.
When Hun Sen and his minders step back to look at how
Cambodia handled its year as chair of ASEAN, one hopes they will also
take a hard look at themselves. If Hun Sen is as serious as he seems to
be about quelling dissent ahead of elections next year, his government
would do better to examine why so many Cambodians are demonstrating
rather than rough up a 40-something woman for playing a game of darts.
Luke Hunt is a journalist based in Southeast Asia.
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