Khmer Rouge Trials Need US Support

from UNA-USA

It isn’t just on big budget items that the United States sometimes short-changes the United Nations and people around the world who need its help. Here in Cambodia, long-overdue trials for the last surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge—trials that the US pushed a dubious UN into agreeing to co-sponsor—are running out of money, while Washington withholds support.

Americans must not know this. Otherwise it would be hard to explain why there is no outrage at the US government’s failure to support a tribunal that has recently imprisoned the last surviving zealots who led the catastrophic Communist experiment in remaking Cambodian society from 1975 to 1979. About 1.7 million people perished from large-scale executions, hard labor, illness and starvation.

Hollywood made a movie about this. It was called The Killing Fields. American tourists still go to see skulls piled high in the most famous of mass burial grounds, at Choeung Ek, near Phnom Penh. But there are hundreds of other mass graves scattered around a still wounded country.

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