Ford Talk discusses history of Cambodian genocide

Adam Glanzman/Daily

Michigan Daily | April 21, 2014 

In the last Ford School Policy Talk of the academic year, Margo Picken, a Towsley Foundation Policymaker in Residence, and John Ciorciari, a Public Policy assistant professor, discussed the controversy surrounding the United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge Trials in Cambodia.

Public Policy Prof. Susan Waltz moderated the discussion, which was held in the Annenberg Auditorium an attracted a crowd of public policy undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and community members.

According to Ciorciari, from 1975 to 1979, as many as 2.5 million people out of a population of 7 million died from starvation, over-work, disease, torture and execution in the Cambodian Genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime.

The Cambodian government and the United Nations agreed on an international hybrid tribunal in 2003 to look back at the crimes and try those most responsible for violations of international law and the Cambodian Genocide.

“We’re talking about a time of intense human suffering as the Khmer Rouge, an ultra leftist organization born out of the cauldron of the Vietnam War, took power and sought to return Cambodia to what it called ‘year zero,’ which was a new, blank slate free from foreign influence and from the influence of the military in Cambodia and return the country to some soft of ultra-Maoist agrarian model,” Ciorciari said. 

Ciorciari discussed the successes of these trials, while Picken brought up the failures that have occurred in the eight years since they began.

Ciorciari said the Khmer Rouge Trials have been effective in their credibility, due process and implementation of very basic elements of fair trial. He added that the trials also benefit the Cambodian students who study them, and the general public who are allowed to watch to learn more about the trials’ proceedings.

However, transconditions in Cambodia make it difficult for many to view the trials, said Picken, who served as the United Nations’ director of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia from 2001 to 2007. Also, in the eight years since the trials began, only one person has been imprisoned.

Cambodia also faces issues such as mass poverty and dangerous working conditions in the growing textile industry. Opponents to the trials argue that the money spent on the trials and the time and energy of the Cambodian government and United Nations would be better spent solving these current-day problems.

Rackham student Brock Redpath said he attended the event because of his interest in the Khmer Rouge Trials and its impact on students.

“Some of the precedents that are set abroad can have ramifications on us at later times,” Redpath said.

Though the trials have directly impacted those who involved in the genocide in Cambodia, Ciorciari said its effects reaches University students as well.

“As for students here at Michigan, it has affected a number of them directly because they’re gone to Cambodia to work on them for internships or after they graduate, and they become a part of this solution which has to be multi-faceted,” Ciorciari said.