 Welcome to the US Institute of Peace, which is the National Bipartisan Institute dedicated to preventing, mitigating, and resolving violent conflict worldwide. My name is Andrew Wells-Dong. I'm a senior expert in the Asia Center at USIP, and I'm pleased to be moderating today's panel discussion about justice and accountability for Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia. This event is connected with an exhibit that USIP and the Seven Foundation are hosting this summer, entitled Imagine Reflections on Peace Building. And that exhibit is just outside of the auditorium here and features photographs and stories from six countries around the world that have suffered and survived violent conflict. One of those countries is Cambodia. And so today's event aims to tell more of the story behind the photographs and the exhibit and tell stories of Cambodia's history and present in which the Khmer Rouge have, at least to an extent, be held accountable for the atrocities committed during their rule from 1975 to 79. The exhibit asks the question, why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it's so easy to imagine? And I think that question applies well to Cambodia, which, although the Khmer Rouge period has been over, continues to deal with the effects of the Indochina War, the US involvement, the Vietnamese occupation after that, and then the post-settlement political debates among Cambodian parties, which are going on to this day. So, excuse me. We'll hear today from three panelists who will give more perspective on each of these periods. We'll hear about the period leading up to 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power and the context that enabled that to happen. We'll hear about the documentation of the atrocities both during and after that period, which Cambodian citizens have led with international support. And we'll hear about an effort, again, led by Cambodians and with international participation to hold Khmer Rouge leaders accountable, namely the tribunal called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC, that was set up in 2001 and has tried nine accused cases up to now with some mixed results, but it happened. And it's a model of a hybrid international tribunal that we will discuss more about. So those are some of the topics that we hope to cover today. We'll have three presentations followed by questions and answers from our small in-person audience and online. So it's my pleasure to introduce first Elizabeth Becker, who is an author and journalist who's covered Cambodia since the 1970s. She's the author of When the War is Over and most recently a book about the experiences of women journalists during the Indochina War. Called You Don't Belong Here. Thank you. Our second speaker who will join us online from Phnom Penh is Lee Sokien. He's the director of the An Long Vang Peace Center of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, An Long Vang being the town where the Khmer Rouge leaders lived after the conflict until they were reintegrated into society. And our third speaker is Susanna Sakuto, who is the director of the War Crimes Program at the Washington College of Law at American University. And she was an advisor to the prosecution office of the ECCC from 2004 to 16. So thanks for our three panelists and I look forward to a productive discussion. Elizabeth. Thank you Andrew and thank you USIP for putting this on. The war ended in 79 and you can't talk about the victims more today than you did right then. I'm charged with going through the history and as usual I could go for three hours instead of 15 minutes so I'm gonna try to make a very complex story a little more comprehensible. I warn you that when you were asking about obstacles, the chief obstacles were governments, governments. And governments that said they were looking for peace, governments that wanted democracy and when it was time to make a decision, the decisions went the other way so prepare yourself. You mentioned the United States, China, Soviet Union, Vietnam, everybody had a complex role and the story is a little long. I'm gonna start in 1953 when Cambodia was lucky enough to be the only country to win independence from France without a war and keeping their country whole. So the first Indochina war ended with this independence for all three but Vietnam was divided, Laos was divided not Cambodia. The winner of the first democratic election was Prince Nordam Sienuk and he was smart enough to say, we can't get eaten up by this second Indochina war which was American fueled so he made Cambodia neutral. This was very smart. Of course it was not welcomed by either side and he had to make some deals. His deal with the communist world supporting the Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh was that in exchange for their refusal to support a Cambodian and communist insurgency, he would allow them to use the eastern border of Cambodia for what became known as Ho Chi Minh Trail and their Deepwater Sea Port Sienukville. So that was his deal with the communists with the American side to placate them. He agreed to be mum whenever the South Vietnamese went in to fight on the eastern border and when the United States in 1969 had their intensive bombing campaign. So he was trying to keep a balance. It was messy, it wasn't perfect but it kept the country out of the war and I wanna remind you that it was completely surrounded by belligerents to the west was Thailand with their air bases for the US, north was Laos and to the east of course was Vietnam. The turning point was 1970 when Prince Sienuk was overthrown. Now in theory it was a democracy but it was a democracy where Prince Sienuk just happens to keep winning the elections and obviously it was a one-party rule. So Democrats naively hope that this would mean democracy and stay out of the war. No, within days Cambodia was pushed into the war. The new leaders led by Lon Nall, a general immediately went on the American side declared war against Vietnam and Cambodia was pulled into the Vietnam War. This is really important. The Khmer Rouge came out of the Vietnam War not out of a civil war per se. So from 1970 to the end of 1972 the Cambodian government under Lon Nall was fighting Vietnamese, the Vietnamese communists. Now 1970 in May the US invaded Cambodia in support of this new Cambodian government to push the communists Vietnamese out of the country back to North Vietnam. The opposite happened. The Vietnamese took over vast amounts of Cambodia and the Lon Nall government was struggling. The United States underwrote this entire war and it was to the dismay of the American public. 1968 President Richard Nixon won election because he promised peace and instead in 1970 expanded the Vietnam War to Cambodia. So for those two years, 70, 71 and 72, actually three years, Cambodia was fighting Vietnam. Where were the communist Cambodians? The Khmer Rouge we're gonna be talking about. They were behind the Vietnamese lines forcing, using the Vietnamese communist army as a shield while they built up their own forces took over more and more of Cambodian territory and Prince Sihanouk was in Beijing an exiled leader supporting them. So it was a huge flip from being an insignificant communist insurgency in Cambodia with no territory at most 5,000 troops. They suddenly became a growing army supported by the Vietnamese and the Chinese who had previously not supported them materially because they wanted to keep Cambodia neutral. This is one of those points where you say, ooh, I wish President Nixon had not gone into Cambodia. Anyway, so this is where they were when the United States understood that it was time they were losing the war in Vietnam and they made a peace accord in 1973. That peace accord meant the United States would withdraw from Vietnam and the North Vietnamese would withdraw from Cambodia. That was enough, there were many aspects to it but for this purpose this is important. So North Vietnamese, the Vietnamese communists leave Cambodia. This is when the beginning of 1973 when it does become a civil war. Now think about that. The Khmer Rouge are relatively fresh, La Nile government is not. The United States can only use air power against the Khmer Rouge because of the peace accords and the Senate's refusal to continue supporting a war. Remember the United States had been fully in the war since 65. So fed up and that's when I come into the country. I was a reporter there and I arrived at the beginning of 1973 just as it was becoming a civil war and I was fresh out of graduate school and I saw what was becoming one of the worst bombing campaigns of the whole war. In July, the United States dropped 51,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. Now there were no industrial targets. This is countryside wide and it looked like indiscriminate bombing of rural Cambodia although the United States Air Force would say they were doing it for this, that and the other but what happened was that the rural countryside was utterly devastated. People flooded into Phnom Penh. The United States was supporting the war 100% without doing any kinds of regulations to prevent the utter corruption and to the point where they were giving food aid to the government for the people flooding into Cambodia and instead it was sold on the black market. I could go on about the whole thing. It is horrible to watch and 50 years later it still is an incredible impression on me but I wanna show you some photographs of that period please. That's me. I don't know if you can see it but that's the leader Lon Nall and with the lay on and this is the Khmer Republic. These are journalists in the field. This is me talking to Yingshuri at the United Nations. Now these are not in right order. Anyway, I'm gonna go past this for now. Oops, that's it. That's all I have. That was the PowerPoint. Oh, okay. Well, we're gonna go back. Okay. So by April 75, the war was over. Didn't take very long. The Khmer Rouge had won. This is amazing. And this is when the horrors begin and you're gonna hear more about this in terms of what happened in the countryside and getting rid of the old society. And the one thing I wanna make a point of historically is I can't underline how incompetent these people were. They had no governing experience. They were full of themselves because they won a radical revolution faster than any other revolution better than the Vietnamese but in the Chinese they were just, it's impossible to tell you how arrogant they were. And it was a very, so they had, there were no breaks, rapid destruction of the country. It got to the point where it was so bad that they started, they recognized their failures and they started the purges, the purges to blame people for their own failures to the point where they had to look to a foreign problem and they decided on Vietnam and Vietnam would be the country they could blame. And now I'm gonna just, I was back to Democratic, this is Democratic Campuchia. I visited it at the end of 1978 when the war with Vietnam was just starting. These are some of the pictures. These are the, okay I'll just, might as well leave it with my photo of Pol Pot. I was shocked, there were no temples, there were no markets, they had completely gotten rid of the old society. Everybody was in rural labor camps. No markets, nothing, you were in a labor camp and that was it. Then on the last day of my visit, I met Pol Pot who didn't wanna be interviewed, I was with two others. He would only warn that Vietnam, Communist Vietnam who was the reason why he was in power because they fought. He decided Communist Vietnam was the reason for all their failures and he wanted NATO to help. Instead Vietnam did invade and I'm just gonna go a few minutes over because this is very important. Vietnam did invade and throughout Pol Pot in the Khmer Rouge, January 1979. They expected the world to applaud. They, of course they made the big mistake of lying saying that they hadn't done it, that some Cambodian like Hun Sen had fled the Khmer Rouge and led the force, but they had, they believed that because they got rid of what the United States and Europe had already decided was grossly human rights abuses. But in fact, geopolitics were against them. The United States went from condemning the Pol Pot to supporting a coalition that included him that lasted for another 10 years. That's a huge obstacle. The United States, Europe, ASEAN worked with China to keep the Khmer Rouge going to fight the Vietnamese because they decided the Vietnamese were worse than the Khmer Rouge. And in fact, the Khmer Rouge kept their seat at the UN until through all of that. So that's another instance of a government standing in the way. The Vietnamese made the first attempt to bring justice with a trial of in abstention of the DK regime. Now, of course it was one-sided. Of course it was propaganda, but it was the first time we all saw the documents and we saw a tool slang. It was the first time we saw any of this, but it was condemned and the push continued. Eventually, the Vietnamese were withdrew and they said, essentially, negotiations, fine. You want Cambodia? Here it is. Now, how long do you think it's gonna take for the Khmer Rouge to take it over? Suddenly, there were peace talks. Suddenly, in fact, Richard Solomon was part of it, one of the people. And the chief countries that I would say are responsible for a lot of that war were the ones who determined outcome. That's the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the United States, then Soviet Union, Russia, China, Great Britain, and France. So peace accords, peace, peaceful untalk, peacekeeping mission, democratic elections. And this is the last bit where the governments fall apart. The elections, 98%, over 90% of the eligible voters cast ballots. There was a clear winner, Prince Nordam Roderit, son of Senuk. He won 45% of the vote and 58 seats in the parliament. Hoon Sen, who had been the prime minister under the Vietnamese and thought he would win naturally, he'd been the leader of the country for almost 10 years, he came in second with 38% of the vote and 51 seats. Roderit refused to accept the results. Sounds familiar, unfortunately. And he is one of his senior leaders threatened to coup d'etat, a secessionist movement. So what did the UN do? They caved. They created a dual prime ministership, giving Hoon Sen equality with Roderit. Within a few years, 1997, Hoon Sen had gotten rid of Prince Roderit in a coup and he's been leader ever since and whenever he's been threatened with an opposition party that might win an election, he's had a coup. So I'm gonna end there a few minutes late and just say, you'll hear from the others how much this is. These kinds of behaviors kept seeding more and more problems and I'm just thinking of a peace activist, Khmer American named Thierry Singh, who was imprisoned for simply going about the business of trying to improve peace in the country and which just sent away last month. So it's an ongoing issue, even though Khmerers were thrown out in 1979, the seeds of refusal to hold them accountable are still alive. Thank you. Thank you for that historical overview and I'm sure there'll be some points for discussion when we come to that. I'd now like to introduce Liso King from the Documentation Center of Cambodia, who will talk about his work to investigate and document some of what happened during the Khmer Rouge regime and since. Thank you Andrew and hello everyone. Thank you USIP for having me tonight in Cambodia. I'm talking inside of DCM, the director of DCM, the full name of DCM is Documentation Center of Cambodia. It's now an independent Cambodian research institute, but I just want to give you a little bit background of DCM. Actually DCM was founded after the US Congress passed Cambodian Genocide Justice Act in April 1994 and former President Clinton signed it into law and that legislation will start with the office of Cambodian Genocide Investigation in the US State Department through East Asia and Pacific Affair in July 1994. So from 1995 to 1997, JL University got a grant from the State Department and then JL created a program for Cambodian Genocide Program to conduct research training and documentation on the Khmer Rouge regime. So at that time the CGP Cambodian Genocide Program have an objective to assemble evidence concerning the leadership of the democratic Cambodia and to determine whether the decay regimes violated international criminal law on genocide, war crimes, and crime against humanity. So later on in CGP created a field office and that's what DCM started its work. So the field office started in 1995 and two years later we have a PC camp. So it's now an independent Cambodian research institute. So we have two objective as I just mentioned about public history. So that's why DCM focused its work on to record and preserve the history of the Khmer Rouge regime for future generation and also to compile and organize information that can serve as a potential evidence in illegal accountability of the Khmer Rouge. So in the meantime DCM have two kind of archives. First we call the Khmer Rouge archive that focus from 1925 to 1929. And we have second category of archive is human rights archive. So we have archive before the Khmer Rouge and the archive after the Khmer Rouge. So we have two categories. And right now we have 200 and approximately 221,000 of document and we have approximately 1.7 million pages of document. So the document we have like the biography of the Khmer Rouge members, victim, mid admitting. So confessions, a lot of document like a mixed document. So we have a lot of documents like a mixed document. And beside this we have a physical information as well in relation to the Khmer Rouge regime. We found out 197 security center or we call TRISM and we found out nearly 20,000 mass grave or we can say 390 real size. And we also have a statistic of the memorials, genocide memorial after the genocide we have 81. So that's the document we have, the archive we have and we in order to make it easy for researcher, for the public or for legal expert to get access to it, we have created a four kind of database. We have a bibliographic database, biographic database, photographic database and geographic database. So with this in 2004 I think June sent its fact-finding team to evaluate our archives. So at least 200,000 pages of document I believe to be very important for the trial of the Khmer Rouge. So during the whole process of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, DCM supply at least 100,000 of pages of documents to ECC that mean to all office of the ECC like prosecution, defense, public lawyer, any party who requested to DCM. So this is, so all the archive we have so as an essential documentary base for those unit or office to further investigate the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. So in the meantime, DCM tried to make it an easy access to people across Cambodia as well, like we create five regional center like myself, I focus on the WEP center, like two province together like Odomian J and CMB. So all the archive we have in Mumbai sent to those province and pre-service teachers, students and the public can get access to it. Very convenient like they have an office space for them to sit and yes, very brief. And I think I look forward to answer any question from the audience. Thank you Andrew. Thank you very much for introducing the work of DCCAM and the An Long Bang Peace Center. And now I'd like to turn to Susanna who will put this in the framework of transitional justice and accountability. Thank you, many thanks Andrew and many thanks to USIP for the invitation to be here today on this panel and to put some context into the exhibit. I thought I'd start out talking a little bit about how the War Crimes Research Office was engaged with the Tribunal with the ECCC, it's a mouthful. And then perhaps move on to an assessment of the court what I think were some of its main accomplishments and outstanding challenges continue to be and then perhaps end with a few recommendations on the way forward as the court now moves into sort of its residual phase. So the War Crimes Research Office was established in 1995 to promote accountability for atrocity crimes and it was created essentially to provide the kind of specialized and technical legal research analysis, research and analysis that prosecuting these kinds of crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide requires. And so for 25 years the War Crimes Office has served as a key resource for tribunals prosecuting atrocity crimes. In the early years we supported mainly the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the sort of contemporary ad hoc criminal tribunals created in the aftermath of those conflicts. But since the early 2000s the office also assisted so-called but are hybrid or internationalized or internationally supported tribunals that were tasked with prosecuting atrocity crimes. And we have provided that same kind of legal assistance to nearly all such tribunals that have been established since the early 2000s including the E-Triple-C. In this case significantly our office was also involved in early initiatives designed to support the establishment in operation of justice mechanisms to prosecute atrocity crimes. And one of our earliest efforts in that regard was our involvement in various sort of civil society and NGO technical assistance missions to Cambodia in support of discussions between civil society groups, government actors and other stakeholders around the establishment of the E-Triple-C and those visits day back to 2003, so 30 years later after you were in the country. So with respect to assessment as many of you are no doubt aware there has been lots and lots and lots of critique about the work of the E-Triple-C. Both with regard to the limited number of cases that it was able to conclude at a significant cost but also with regard to its hybrid structure which gave Cambodians sort of the majority of judges on each of the pre-trial trial and appeals benches and that structure allowed the court to be vulnerable I would say to political influence. And so there's been a fair amount of legitimate critique about the court but that has been much of the press. And so what I wanna do today is start out by saying a few words of what I think is the court's chief accomplishments. So obviously there are the convictions, right? Conviction of Doiq who is the director of Pham Penh's infamous detention and torture center known as the S-21 prison through which 14 to 17,000 people went through and died in less than a four year time span. And of course the convictions of the surviving senior leaders, the late Nunchea and Q-Sampan. But what I wanna suggest is that there are measures beyond convictions, beyond counting those convictions by which to judge the achievements of the court and the tribunal. And what I think gets lost sometimes is one of the most critical accomplishments of the ECCC was its efforts to engage the people most affected by its work, the Cambodian people through its early public outreach efforts and innovative participation and reparation schemes. The tribunal was brought much closer to those who suffered atrocities than previous tribunals had been able to do. So unlike for instance the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda which sat far from the communities affected by those conflicts, the ECCC was not only located in the country where the atrocities occurred but had particularly during the trial periods a robust public outreach program through which it brought Cambodians to the trials and trials to the people. The court, if you, we don't have a photo but I'm sure it's in the exhibit. The court has a very spacious public gallery. The seating capacity is for over 450 people. It's enabled thousands of people to attend the trials and thousands were engaged in the trials through the court's public outreach programs. They included film screenings and study tours, school lectures. There were even daily television broadcasts during the trials. A staggering 31,000 people attended the first trial against Deuk, the head of the S21 Center. At some stage in the proceeding and two million Cambodians watched video footage of the trial. That's significant, right? That didn't happen with the earlier tribunals. Another significant innovation of the ECCC compared to previous tribunals was a recognition of the independent role of victims in its proceedings. So this is a little complicated. The law establishing the court did not explicitly provide for victim participation but that law made Cambodian criminal procedure applicable in proceedings before that court and that procedure, which is based on the French legal system included a mechanism by which victims of the crimes being prosecuted could participate in the proceedings as part of civil civil parties. So the court's rules, which were drafted by the judges in 2007 permitted victims to exercise their right to take civil action during the criminal proceedings, giving them a right to make interventions in the case independent of witnesses for the prosecution or defense and to seek, and this is important to seek collective and moral reparations. So victims who were able to demonstrate that they suffered physical, material, psychological harm as a result of at least one of the crimes prosecuted before the court were given an opportunity through their appointed legal representatives to be informed about and participate in the justice process. And they did. So this was something, it was a scheme that was used. Over 4,000 victims applied to participate as civil parties in the first two cases to go to trial, nearly all of which were granted. And for many, that ability to participate in the proceedings was meaningful, was significant, right? It meant that their voice and what they had experienced received some degree of recognition by the court. Some victims used that process as an opportunity to process their own experiences, to find some sense of personal closure. And importantly for some, it meant having an actual impact in the case. And I'll give you an example. Lawyers of victims participating in the case against the senior leaders brought to the prosecutor's attention evidence of forced marriage and rape in the context of forced marriage, which was not in the prosecutor's original submissions to the judges charged with investigating the case. Ultimately, that was the reason those charges were in the case, right? The prosecutor sought to and succeeded in including these charges in the indictment against the accused. So again, there was significant impact there. A final contribution, I think, again, compared to previous international tribunals that I quickly want to touch on is the ECCC's approach to reparations, right? Last year, actually over a year ago now, our office conducted research into approaches that courts adjudicating atrocity crimes at both the national, international level have used to implement reparations in cases in which the defendant is indigent or otherwise unable to fully cover their cost. And what we saw was a number of different approaches, including, for instance, the issuance of reparations orders directly against the state, the use of trust funds to fulfill reparations awards, and in the case of the ECCC, the innovative use of what we called quote unquote project partnerships. Now, beyond the first case in which reparations essentially took the form of the court naming or releasing the names of victims of deceased relatives, the ECCC developed a unique model in which civil society actors, NGOs, and in some cases, the government, proposed, designed, and implemented projects to meet the reparation needs of some of the survivors. So really rather than a reparations award against the defendant through the criminal case, the court sort of endorsed projects undertaken by different actors. And in evaluating these projects, the court gave priority to projects that met the express wishes and provided benefits to the civil parties were linked to the crimes, obviously, for which the accused was being tried, were feasible, had a high likelihood of realization, and already had secured some funding. So based on the assessment of these factors, in the first phase of the case against senior leaders, case 002, 11 projects were endorsed in the second phase of case 002, 13 projects were endorsed. The projects were varied, they focused on education, information sharing, data organization evaluation, community reconciliation, mediation, mental health, memorials, et cetera. So there are lots of ideas and lots of projects. The thing I want to point out is that there were significant benefits to that approach, again, by comparison to other tribunals. For one, reparations were made available to civil parties more quickly than through other approaches since the projects were actually designed and implemented in advance of a final judgment regarding a particular defendant. So for instance, several projects in the case against the senior leaders, including a book of statements by civil parties, a songwriting competition, a public exhibition of sketches based on survivor's accounts, and legal education for ethnic minorities. All of that was completed in 2016, couple of years before the final judgment in the first phase against the defendants was issued. So there was delivery on some of those expectations. So while no one denies that there was serious shortcomings in the workings of the ECCC, for some victims, the court has in fact had a significant impact. But the question is, where are we today, right? The court is now approaching the end of its mandate, we'll be closing down before the end of the year, and the discussions have now moved to the residual functions of the court following the end of its mandate. And in fact, there's been an addendum to the agreement between the UN and Cambodia that created the court that recognizes that there will be reduced but essential functions that will need to be undertaken with respect to victims once judicial proceedings have been completed by the court. The point I wanna make here is that this is an important moment. We're at a crossroads here, and if the court wants to be recognized for its efforts to engage and impact victims, if that is going to be one of its lasting legacies, the key question will be, how will the court continue to serve victims in this residual phase? Many, many surveys have been conducted with victims. Most surviving victims are old, they're poor, they're elderly, they suffer from a number of physical and psychological effects from their experiences under the Khmer Rouge even decades later. And the Khmer Rouge atrocities deeply affected not only those who survived, but also younger generations who have been impacted by the trauma affected by their parents and grandparents. And certain victims, like victims of sexual and gender-based violence, face and continue to face additional challenges, including skepticism, that they were subject to the kind of violence at all because of a moral offenses policy of the Khmer Rouge barring sexual relations between unmarried couples. Despite strong evidence that suggests this policy was inconsistently if it all applied or implemented, this perception has and continues to lead to stigma and shame silencing many victims. So what can the court do now? Article two of that addendum requires the ECCC to continue to provide for the protection of victims, disseminate information to the public regarding the court, and to monitor the enforcement of reparations. So I wanna make some suggestions here, some recommendations. In addition to the obvious need for protection, two critical areas should be top of mind as the court moves into its residual phase, outreach and reparations, right? As I mentioned, although there were significant outreach efforts aimed at bringing the trials to the Cambodians in vice versa, in the words of a colleague who has surveyed Cambodians year after year after year about the court since it was created, in the last five years the court has not been victim-centered enough, right? In fact, her research shows a marked decrease in knowledge of support for and satisfaction with the ECCC compared to interviews conducted in the years between 2006 and 2018. Her findings echo Marie Wilmet's submissions to the co-rapper tours who wrote a report about residual functions related to victims, in which she noted, the interviews revealed that the civil parties had not received information from the ECCC or their lawyers since 2017 or 2018, right? That while they were generally positive about their civil party participation, a significant proportion of them expressed frustration at the lack of information and follow-up in recent years. And it actually does seem, like when you look in the court's website, the last outreach activities on the court site actually date back to 2013. And it seems like many of the significant outreach efforts ended largely in 2017 after the end of the case, to second phase of the case two, right? And that now few Cambodians know what is happening at the court. So victims are feeling very discouraged about the court. And I think without an intentional return to a focus on victims, the court actually risks undermining the work it did in service to the victims and the impact it had on the victims during its previous years. Now, what does that mean in practice? Some of the developments of the court aren't easy to talk about, right? There's some of them are less than positive. And that makes it difficult for the court to address certain constituencies. But it is absolutely critical for the court to let Cambodians know what is happening. For instance, it's critical to let Cambodians know what happened to cases, what are called 003004, the next level down from the senior leaders, right? It's critical for the court to know that late last year, the Supreme Court Chamber, the highest appeals chamber dismissed the International Co-Prossecutors' Appeal, requesting the court to send the cases against two other accused to trial, right? It's important for them to not only know that, but also to know what that means, right? For them to know that while the decision means that there will be no trial before the ECCC to judicially determine their criminal liability, it does not mean that the court found either suspect innocent of the serious crimes for which they were being investigated, right? It's important that the public outreach folks talk about both the decision and its significance. And further, to talk about what next, right? That the responsibility to assess their guilt or innocence now rests, if at all, with the Cambodian domestic courts. I would say, so what's happened before is important. It's equally important and critical that the court continue its outreach about the cases it did conclude, right? Included, concerted outreach about the, or when the appeal judgment comes out in the second phase of case two, right? The appeal is actually a great opportunity for the court to remind Cambodians of the work it has done, right? The court could very easily leverage its earlier public outreach experience to mount a widespread information campaign via TV, radio, and other audio-visual mechanisms. Those were extremely effective in the past, so it could reproduce those. And again, there are significant benefits to doing this. Many youth today, in survey, after survey we see this, still do not believe what happened, right, during the Khmer Rouge period, despite educational efforts and programs about the regime. A continued public acknowledgement by the court of the guilty verdicts, of the admissions by the perpetrators, and the harms caused could continue to chip away at some of, at that state of disbelief. Moreover, explaining the verdicts, particularly with respect to charges like sexual violence charges, around which there was so much skepticism, can also be useful to change the narrative about what happened, to help victims shift the shame and stigma that had prevented so many from overcoming the deep psychological impacts. They suffered from the violence and the forced marriages. And finally, it's critical that the court provide outreach about the residual mechanism, right, and how victims can get involved with that work. Of course, all of that requires resources, right, at a minimum, you would expect for this to happen, a fully staffed, funded, dedicated public information unit, or NGO that is able and equipped to do the work. That leads me to my second and last area focus as the court moves into its residual phase, which is reparations, right. I spoke about project partnerships, the innovative work the court had done. They were innovative and unique, but the projects themselves obviously did not address all needs and benefited only a limited number of people. So although thousands of civil parties were recognized in the cases that were investigated and tried, then that number of course pales in comparison to the total number of families victimized by the Khmer Rouge under whose regime a quarter of the Cambodian population perished. So there were obviously countless victims who were not part of the ECCCC's proceedings. So again, there's a clear need to continue to serve the needs of victims through the residual mechanism in some way. One way I think to not reinvent the wheel is to build and expand on some of the projects to benefit those whose needs were not or only inadequately addressed through the court's proceedings. I mean, and there's been lots of discussion about ideas, right. One idea that came up in the context of the court's May, the court held a consultation with victims in May was that the government should issue a card, just a card recognizing civil parties as victims, which is a measure of satisfaction, just like the names in the first case. It's simple, inexpensive, but meaningful. But of course there are many other needs, many other ideas including healthcare and social services for survivors. But there were lots of other potential work that could be done by the residual mechanism in this regard. Another option is to survey and assess existing government programs and explore how to link survivor related initiatives to those programs. Either way, victims and NGOs who support them must be involved in the work of the residual mechanism going forward. Meaning there is a need to ensure that the mechanism work remains centered on victims and that they have some say in the kinds of projects that are prioritized and funded. That means transparency, that means information about how projects are identified, prioritized, selected, funded, and having regular consultations with civil parties, victims, and the NGOs who support and work with them about how they can apply and participate in these processes. And again, I hate to be found the same message, but it will require resources and the residual functions work is an opportunity to do this. Part of this, like I said, can be done through the staffing up of a public information unit or NGO tasked with this work, but another part of this, particularly regarding the sharing of information with civil parties, can be done through the co-lead lawyers who represented the civil parties in the cases before the court. Again, resources are key, right? Apparently the international co-lead lawyer recently resigned because of a cut in resources to her and her team, which she argued rendered her unable to ethically represent her clients. If these lawyers are going to play a role in re-engaging civil parties with the court, they must be given resources to do their job. Yeah, I will conclude by saying that there's a real opportunity here for the court to re-engage with its primary constituency, the victims of the Khmer Rouge atrocities and model a victim-centered approach for other courts. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that view of the history but also the current status and residual functions of the ECCC. So in the time we have left, and I think we can go a little bit beyond the hour if everyone's in agreement with that, like to open the floor for questions from the in-person audience and also online. So there is a mic here at the front. Yes, please. If you could just introduce yourself before your question. Thanks, thanks everyone for those great presentations. My name's Scott Worden. I'm director of the Afghanistan and Central Asia program here at USIP. I want to ask a big question and I'll fill it in with a little bit of context. And the question is, what is the cost of accepting authoritarianism in exchange for, I would put it in quotes, stability? And I see that theme in a couple of these presentations. I know that Elizabeth, if you were saying how the United States and the international community supported one Cambodian leader over another, in pursuit of their own geopolitical ends, largely disregarding Cambodian internal issues or Cambodian will. And then also for the An Long Veng director, I know from my time living in Cambodia that Hun Sen has often defended his own rule and also kind of opposed the full mandate of the ECCC saying that a return to the past would stir up violence and plays upon people's fear of instability. At USIP, we often talk about the difference between positive peace and negative peace. So what negative peace being simply the absence of violence, positive peace being more social harmony. And I see these issues playing out a lot in Cambodia, PS also in Afghanistan. And I just want to know from Elizabeth and also the An Long Veng director, what's your, I've heard you're an implicit critique but what's your defense of a different way forward? How can we, looking at our conflicts today, learn from Cambodia to understand what are the costs of defaulting toward, let's say, acquiescence of strongman tactics versus maybe a harder but longer term attempt to deal with a social peace. Well, always going to this, caving into the strongman, you seed events that you can't even contemplate. I mean, the consequences are severe. It may be, it was easy for the UN to say, okay, Hun Sen, well, I'll start from there because I went through the other history and I think it's quite clear. But the UN caving in and giving Hun Sen co-prime ministership, that's the reason why you now have a one man authoritarian regime in Cambodia. You make that and it was like that kind of a decision. I want to say if the last, one of the last things Prince Ranerit did before he was overthrown was to convince Hun Sen to write the letter to the UN asking for the tribunal and just imagine how things would have been different if you had not had a coup. And I want to add to Susanna's presentation because he wrote that letter and because after difficult negotiations, we had the tribunal and vis-a-vis Hun Sen saying we couldn't have a tribunal because it would start a war, in fact, it proved the opposite. And I give credit to the tribunal for something that wasn't part of their mandate. They gave Cambodians their history back. Because of that, because of their tribunal, you have a repository of all those documents. Now DCCAM is inherited a lot, but the tribunal has it. You can go on the website. It's like what happened in Germany. If you look at the history of Germany and Japan, it was years before they were able to look at their history. And the reason Cambodia was was because of the tribunal. That's critical. And now Hun Sen's trying to take credit for everything, denying that the Paris peace talks meant anything, denying that UN played any role in the peace, denying that the tribunal did anything. And that's why Susanna's presentation for me was very interesting because if you can have that outreach that's gonna be good. But they're running up against a huge fire burst of the Hun Sen government trying to deny it. So all these NGOs that you're talking about, they're working overtime. One of my, one that I work with is the Bopana Center, Ritipan. And he works with Tool Slang. And they put out an app of Khmer Rouge history. And then I know that DCCAM worked with the government to have Khmer Rouge history in their books. It's fabulous, the ripple effect. And it's been so effective that the Hun Sen government is trying to push back. So it's, those consequences are constant. So even though it looks easy to support the strongman, in fact, you're laying the groundwork for difficult ability to then achieve the goals you're talking about. Keying, do you have any comments on that question of how your work is both dealing with and promoting democracy? Thank you, Andrew. And thank you for the, I don't know him, for the question. Actually, I go back to Suzanne a little bit. I totally agree with you to mention about where we focus on the those who survive the Khmer Rouge and victim survivor. We also focus on the gender generation as well. And it's about as mentioned, like DCCAM focus on educating our youth on the history of the Khmer Rouge. So we did this in 2007 and we put it into a school curriculum and we now study about the history in classroom, even now in a long way. So as you may know, like approximately two million people die, but at least five million survive and tell a story. So that's why DCCAM create a healing project, like focus on those survivor and because survivor not victim or perpetrator anymore, because we just, I may be different from you a little bit, Susanna, like I don't want to call civil party have a special privilege, but we put all together as a victim. So that's why we send our team to every province and to approach survivors, including a civil party. So like they can tell us about their history and then we refer them to have a medical checkup so that they can take care of their own health. So this is what we are taking care of the people in the meantime, we start the outbreaks of the COVID-19 2021. So I and we work with 500s volunteer across Cambodia. So this is what we are doing because the court is facing us. So we work with the villagers. So when it comes to the question about peace, it's a really difficult point and people have a different opinion. I do not dispute that agreement, but what I would say is that the Paris peace agreement play a really critical role in bringing peace to Cambodia. And I even contribute my article to the local English newspaper. I encourage the government, even the top leader in the government say, we need to recognize the beginnings as a next of civilization in this country because Paris peace agreement did bring peace to our country. But one, what we do not forget is the win-win policy of Prime Minister Honsang. I think when I work in a long way, it's a difficult situation. And without that policy, I think it's really difficult to find peace for our country because the Khmer rules are on the border on top of the mountain and the government find it hard to defeat them. So promise them position, life guarantee, property, thing like that. I think it's really like type their heart and finally be to reunite our country very consul and they reintegrate into the government in 1998. So peace, it's like a really interesting topic. That's why we create a long way peace and in that final stronghold of the Khmer rules because in that community, 70 to 80% of them are former Khmer rules member, still living there. So during the Khmer rule before and during the Khmer rule tribunal, they were not so cooperative in terms of providing information or interview or sharing document, but when we continue to build trust and work with them, so they are now quite open and they share with us the story and like they provide some photograph during the Khmer rules movement up to 1929, up to 1998. So we see a different, see a different and we now find it easy to work with them. So this is what I want to tell you. The peace is a key thing for us because we need to go to safeguard again thing that can cause a negative effect on our society because of some issue in the meantime, like social like land grabbing, border insecure, long-term border and ties border, like economic factors. So that's why we used it as a case study for us to build a sustainable peace in our country. Yeah, thank you. Do we have time for one more question and then we can also give Susanna a chance to respond? Is this working? No. No, yes, okay. We have a few questions coming online. There's one for Susanna specifically. Corruption and political influence are two other key issues at the court. How much will these affect the legacy of the court and justice for the victims? So it sort of ties into a comment I wanted to add to the responses to the first question, which is I think you're right that Cambodians were given their history through some of this process that victims have had, that the court has had some impact on victims, but the key here in the part that's less easy to sell is the need for persistence, for sustainability in these efforts, right? I think the critiques, the corruption critiques, the political influence critiques, the slow, the cost, all of those matter and are legitimate critiques. But I think if some of the court's accomplishments, the work in support of victims is to survive is to be part of that legacy. What we need to remember is how important persistence, resources and sustainability of these efforts are. It is in this age of disinformation, it is very, very, very easy to roll back gains and to confuse the history, despite the documentation, despite what's been out there. And so the risk is high that some of the gains could be lost and I think the only way to move forward is a lesson that I think pertains not just to Cambodia but to other tribunals as well that come to the end of their mandate. Archives are important, the accessibility, the open access to those archives, the availability in Khmer and languages and accessibility to the actual information to the kinds of exhibit you put on here, that's gonna be critical, I think, to the legacy of this tribunal for victims. Okay, thanks everyone for your attention and if you haven't seen the exhibit, it's open outside and will continue to be open with time tickets through August 1st. There are photographs by Roland Neve from 1975 and Gary Knight from 1990 and 2017, so showing the progression of Cambodia through this process of conflict, atrocities and peace that we've heard about today. Thanks again.