One day after new evidence emerged that Cambodian Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot is alive and under the control of his former guerrilla comrades, Secretary of State Madeline Albright demanded anew Tuesday that he be turned over to an international tribunal.
Responding to dramatic television footage supposedly showing the ailing Khmer Rouge leader, Albright pressed the U.S. view that Pol Pot must stand trial for his role in the slaying of more than 1 million Cambodians during his despotic rule of the Southeast Asian country from 1975 to 1979.
In Phnom Penh and at Cambodian stores and cafes in Chicago’s Uptown area, Cambodians were buzzing about the videotape.
Residents in the Cambodian capital stared at pictures from the show trial, certain the white-haired, feeble man was the butcher responsible for the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge against their compatriots.
The video shows a man the Khmer Rouge say is Pol Pot being condemned to a life sentence for murder and other crimes in a jungle trial.
“That’s him! That’s him!” voices sputtered from the crowd as they saw the ailing revolutionary. “I hate him. I wish they would kill him.”
ABC News purchased the footage of the trial from Nate Thayer, an American journalist for the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine who was allowed into the Khmer Rouge’s northern Cambodian redoubt of Anglong Ven to witness it.
“People were surprised to see him so old and using a cane,” said one Cambodian after seeing the video.
Others expressed guarded satisfaction, but were wary that this could be yet another political game by the Khmer Rouge in the wake of a recent coup in Cambodia.
In contrast to Albright’s comments, many Cambodians said they want Pol Pot brought before a court in Phnom Penh first, before being handed over to an international tribunal.
Merchants and customers in Chicago debated whether the trial in the jungle was a hoax. Many said they do not believe justice was served.
At Pailin Gifts, 1114 W. Argyle Street, a mother and daughter had differing views. Store owner Sarah Bin Mien, 54, called the trial legitimate while her daughter, Dary Mien, a free-lance photographer, saw it as just a ploy by the apparently powerless Khmer Rouge.
The Mien family escaped Pol Pot’s infamous “killing fields” by fleeing on foot into Thailand. They arrived in America in 1981.
Sarah Bin Mien, who said she has a sister and other family members living in Phnom Penh, said she fears retribution from the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian leader Hun Sen’s regime for speaking about the trial.
“I worry a lot, a lot about them everyday,” she said.
Kompha Seth, executive director of the Cambodian Association of Illinois, said others in the Cambodian community in Chicago fear reprisals against relatives still in their homeland. “The government is collecting a list of who is criticizing them. People are still afraid,” Seth said.
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He believes the Khmer Rouge should hand over Pol Pot to an international tribunal.
Seth said Cambodians locally received news from family members in Cambodia that the trial was a hoax, and he called the trial a plot by the Khmer Rouge and Hun Sen to divert attention from the recent coup.
Chantha Kanol, 38, owner of Khmer Food, a grocery store on West Leland Avenue, said the life sentence given Pol Pot by the Khmer Rouge isn’t harsh enough for killing millions of his own people. She said she wants to see Pol Pot killed.
“I watched him last night on TV. I just feel like mad and want to cry,” she said.
The Khmer Rouge killed her father because he was a government official, she said. A few years later, she said, they killed her younger brother by burying him in dirt and letting him starve to death.
Elaine Mean, another Chicagoan who survived the ordeal, said she does not trust the Khmer Rouge but does not feel any animosity toward Pol Pot.
“It’s hard to believe that it is him. In some ways, it’s kind of sad to see an elderly person suffering. I can’t picture him being cruel. I pity him,” Mean said.
As a child, Mean, a Northeastern Illinois University student, was separated from her mother while her mother worked in a Khmer Rouge labor camp. Without food or care, Mean said she was “reduce to skin and bone.”
“I wasn’t expected to live,” she recalled with tears in her eyes as she sat at Phnom Penh Restaurant, 5027 N. Broadway, where she is a waitress.
“Have you ever seen the movie `The Killing Fields?’ Well it (was) 10 times worst than that,” she said.
A Phnom Penh motorcycle taxi driver, Ke Chandara, 35, expressed surprise that anyone–even the Khmer Rouge– could apprehend and try Pol Pot, a nightmarish figure of almost magical stature to most Cambodians.
Ke Chandara, who said his father’s fingernails were torn out by the Khmer Rouge, agreed with others that the trial and punishment were not legitimate and that Pol Pot should be tried by a United Nations tribunal.
“There’s no nation on earth that killed its people in such a cruel way as Pol Pot,” Ke Chandara said.
While many Cambodians and some journalists who saw the footage were convinced that the man shown is Pol Pot, Albright reserved judgment. “I haven’t seen the footage, and I think we don’t know,” she said. Albright made her comments on the last leg of a weeklong trip to Asia.
She arrived in Singapore Tuesday and met with Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and other officials.
Since reports first surfaced last month that a Khmer Rouge faction turned against Pol Pot and was willing to turn him over to the Cambodian government, there has been intense renewed interest in trying him for crimes against humanity.
No permanent international forum exists for trying people suspected of war crimes, and the United Nations is reluctant to set up a tribunal to try only one individual when the responsibility for the genocide in Cambodia went well beyond Pol Pot.
Consequently, the State Department has been exploring whether Pol Pot could be tried under domestic laws of other countries that criminalize genocide. Canada has concluded it cannot conduct the trial under its own statutes. Discussions also have been held with the Netherlands.
“We are trying, I think, to explore different ways of making sure that whatever trial there is, it be one that is appropriate and legal and recognized and valid in terms of the international community, but it is complicated,” Albright said.
One of the principal complications is getting access to the defendant. The video purportedly shows Pol Pot being sentenced to life in prison, and it also reportedly shows the presiding officer denying that he would be turned over to an international tribunal.
State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the U.S. would wait until it’s clear that a trial could be conducted before announcing its intentions. “We are not looking hour by hour for a way to try him. We don’t know if it’s him. We do feel that Pol Pot should end up in the dock.”