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UMW prof seeks justice in Cambodia

March 24, 2007 12:35 am

By MICHAEL ZITZ

Twenty-seven years ago, upon hearing horrifying tales of genocide in Cambodia, Gregory H. Stanton made it his mission in life to bring the infamous Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.

Now, the University of Mary Washington professor has seen his years of effort rewarded with the recent establishment of a tribunal that is expected to put about 10 former leaders of the Communist regime on trial early next year.

The Khmer Rouge is believed to have killed about 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million citizens from 1975-79 before being driven out of power by a Vietnamese invasion.

Although the protracted effort to establish the tribunal allowed infamous leader Pol Pot to die in 1998 without being brought to justice, Stanton said he's not frustrated.

"There are so many Khmer Rouge leaders still alive--a number still in their 70s and quite capable of being put on trial," said Stanton, who spent two weeks in Cambodia earlier this month helping the tribunal navigate the difficult process of setting up rules.

In addition to being the James Farmer Professor in Human Rights at UMW, Stanton is also the president and founder of the Washington-based group Genocide Watch. He is also director of the Cambodian Genocide Project and founder and chairman of the International Campaign to End Genocide.

The 60-year-old McLean resident has family connections to suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband, slavery abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton. His personal efforts on behalf of human rights began in the 1960s as a voting-rights worker in Mississippi.

Stanton served as Church World Service/CARE field director in Cambodia in 1980, where he heard the details of atrocities and saw mass graves firsthand.

The former law professor at Washington and Lee and American universities and the University of Swaziland was so determined to see the Khmer Rouge brought to justice he joined the U.S. State Department to push for a tribunal.

Early efforts to bring Khmer Rouge to justice bogged down in "Cold War" tensions between the United States and Soviet Union, he said. Until the Soviet Union dissolved, Stanton said, the U.S. State Department viewed going after the Khmer Rouge as indirect support of the communist government in Vietnam.

Vietnamese leaders supported Cambodian politicians opposed to the Khmer Rouge. U.S. officials, he said, saw Vietnam as a proxy for the Soviets.

In order to effect change in American foreign policy, he joined the State Department from 1992-1999, becoming part of a group of diplomatic officers pressing for justice in Cambodia and working to fund a tribunal.

"We overcame a lot of resistance within," he said proudly.

Stanton said the group--which called itself "The Pol Pot Posse"--gained supporters in David J. Scheffer, ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, and Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. He also found an ally in noted Cambodian genocide scholar Ben Kiernan.

Stanton wrote the State Department options paper that outlined measures to bring the Khmer Rouge to trial.

In recent years, he has been legal adviser to the task force that created the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. He drafted its rules of procedure and evidence, which he expects to clear the final hurdle to formal adoption by May.

He said there are three reasons the tribunal's work will be important.

For one, it will result in adding the first-ever reference to the genocide in Cambodian secondary-school history books through "an organized presentation of the facts and who's responsible."

"The final stage of every genocide is denial," Stanton said.

Second, it will bring closure to the survivors of those killed.

"It's important for relatives of the victims to know why this happened," Stanton said. "They want to understand it."

Finally, he said, for the first time, "communist leaders who have always gotten away with mass murder," killing over 100 million people around the world, are facing a day of reckoning.

"I think it's about time the most murderous ideology in history was put on trial," he said. "Many people think Naziism was the worst. Not even close. Communism has been far more deadly."