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NOVEMBER 26, 1999 VOL. 25 NO. 47
Seeking Justice
Hun Sen on this overarching need of his country
Hun Sen has seen worse days - but he has also seen better ones. Cambodia's 47-year-old prime minister is used to coming under physical and ideological attack, but lately his family has been the target of a much more personal assault. It follows the murder of Piseth Pilika, 34, a cultural icon and film star. Her unsolved murder in July has prompted a nationwide outpouring of grief and outrage, and filled more Cambodian newsprint than even the unlamented death of Pol Pot last year.
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The tale has been diligently aired by the opposition Sam Rainsy Party. Critics note that Rainsy's sister-in- law works as an archivist at the French magazine though this has little bearing on the story's validity.
From the outset, few expected a proper investigation of the Pilika case. In fact, the vast majority of killings and other crimes in Cambodia, political and otherwise, go unsolved - even when photographs of public lynchings are regularly published in newspapers. The grenade attack on a Sam Rainsy demonstration which killed at least 16 people outside the National Assembly in early 1997 is still unsolved, as are the murders of some 100 people in the wake of political violence a few months later which ousted Prince Norodom Ranariddh as first prime minister. Nobody is safe. Even the new U.S. ambassador, Kent Wiedemann, was robbed at gunpoint of his mobile telephone during an evening stroll with his wife. Now, with richly ironic timing, the Piseth Pilika controversy has brought the issue of justice in Cambodia right to Hun Sen's own private doorstep. (At least he can draw comfort that his daughter, married earlier this year, is expecting a baby in January - the first grandchild for Hun Sen and Bun Rany.)
The Pilika case has overshadowed the drawn-out international effort to set up a tribunal for the Khmer Rouge, and the role played by the U.N. The 1991 Paris Peace Agreement paved the way for the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia to create a climate whereby elections could occur. Since then, the U.N. has maintained offices in Phnom Penh, and has called for a special court to try detained Khmer Rouge bigwigs. But the U.N. and Hun Sen disagree on the composition and structure of the tribunal. Playing mediator, the U.S. has suggested that the majority of the judges be Cambodian but that any ruling also require the approval of U.N.-appointed ones. So if there were three Cambodian and two U.N. judges, then the ruling would require a "super majority" of four.
These and other questions are set to take on much greater significance next month when a draft law on the tribunal for the Khmer Rouge is sent for parliamentary approval. But when justice so nimbly eludes the living, what chance do 1.7 million dead Cambodians have?
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