Quiet Cambodian village may hold genocide clues

By Chris Fontaine

KOH PHAL, Cambodia (AP): The village of Koh Phal presents a picture-postcard image -- smiling peasants, frisky children, tropical lushness.

It could also be Exhibit A in a genocide trial.

Like all too many Cambodian villages, this one on an island in the Mekong river has a dark and fearful past, of massacres and mass graves that are still vivid in the memories of its people.

Cambodia can never recover what it lost to the murderous Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for killing some 1.7 million of their people when they held power in the late 1970s.

Koh Phal, however, may at least have the satisfaction of playing a part in getting justice for the victims, if the Khmer Rouge is ever put on trial.

The Cambodian government and the United Nations have agreed on a formula for the trial, but no date has been set. It must be approved by the parliament, and there are concerns that some former Khmer Rouge, now part of the government, are trying to delay the process.

Kol Phal, 110 kilometers (70 miles) northeast of Phnom Penh, the capital, is one of several villages in eastern Cambodia that for centuries have been home to the Chams, a tiny Muslim minority.

Remnants of an empire once based in central Vietnam, the Cham had coexisted tranquilly with the Buddhist Khmer majority that dominates culture, society and politics. The Cham are 2 percent of the population of 11 million.

The Khmer Rouge had been friendly to the Cham during the civil war against the U.S.-backed regime in Phnom Penh. But soon after seizing power in April 1975, it served notice that religious worship had no place under the new communist regime.

Koh Phal's former village chief, Res Tort, remembers being summoned by the Khmer Rouge to a meeting at a local mosque in September 1975.

A blunt order was given, he recalled; the Cham must abandon their traditions, stop praying toward Mecca, cut their traditionally long hair, intermarry with Khmers and even eat pork, a grievous Muslim sin.

He said that when Koh Phal refused, the unarmed villagers were surrounded and shelled for three straight days. People who tried to escape were gunned down.

Dozens were slaughtered in one of several incidents now referred to in history books as "Cham uprisings."

"Because the Koh Phal villagers resisted giving up their religious and cultural practices, they became 'reactionary' by the Khmer Rouge constitution, unclean in terms of 'social morale,' unwanted nationals 'to be smashed,"' says a recent report on the village by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a non-governmental organization that investigates Khmer Rouge atrocities.

"People were terrified, stuck out in the open with no place to hide," Res Tort recalled. About 1,000 of the village's 1,600 people disappeared, he said.

He said he fled to Vietnam. Other villagers say they were split up and marched to labor camps.

Ses Sos, a Cham fisherman ordered to catch food for nearby farming collectives, remembers seeing large boats laden with people arrive almost every evening on Koh Phal's shore during the Khmer Rouge's four-year rule.

The passengers -- Cham, ethnic Chinese and Khmers -- were all dropped off at the island but no one ever returned.

"There were thousands of them," Ses Sos recalls. "I heard screaming and crying at about 9 or 10 o'clock at night. They were the cries of children and adults."

Only after Vietnam invaded and ousted the Khmer Rouge was Ses Sos able to confirm the truth -- Koh Phal had become a killing field.

"I fell in a grave when I was walking through the village," he says. "I realized, 'Oh! People were executed here!' We found 49 mass graves and we just ran away. There was no flesh left, only bones and skulls. We saw everything."

But was it genocide?

Proving genocide -- acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group -- is harder than simply proving that the Khmer Rouge killed hundreds of thousands of people, notes genocide researcher Craig Etcheson.

The Documentation Center says the "smashing" of Koh Phal was ordered by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. But Etcheson says: "There is nothing in the archival record containing, say, Pol Pot telling his subordinates to go out there and commit genocide against the Chams." Pol Pot died in 1998.

The graves themselves are gone from Koh Phal. In the early 1980s, government soldiers dug them up and took the bones to Phnom Penh. The pits silted up from Mekong flooding, and became a wasteland of weeds and mosquitoes.

The difficulty of proving genocide is reflected in the limited number of convictions in UN courts -- all of Rwandans -- since the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was ratified in 1951.

A team of UN-hired experts who visited Cambodia in late 1998 determined there was enough evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities to warrant creating a genocide tribunal, but noted that convictions of a lesser charge, crimes against humanity, may be easier to prove.