Ta Mok, a senior member of the Khmer Rouge, died this past Friday. He had been in custody since 1999, when he was caught near the border of Thailand-Cambodia with a small group of followers.
Ta Mok was one of several key members of the Khmer Rouge awaiting trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for his involvement in several massacres in 1975. His trial was expected to begin next year.
The White House announced today that President Bush would meet with Minni Minnawi on Tuesday. The talks will reportedly center on how to get broader support for the Darfur Peace Agreement.
Earlier this month, the Sudanese Liberation Army, the only rebel group that signed the peace agreement on May 5, nominated Minnawi to the post of senior assistant to Sudan’s president. This would make him the head of what will be the Darfur Authority, the administration that will run Darfur as an autonomous part of Sudan once the terms of the peace accord have been implemented.
Many of the refugees in Darfur and Chad’s huge camps have rejected the peace agreement because they see no sign that the government will follow through on its pledge to disarm the government-backed militia responsible for most of the attacks.
Last week, Jerry Fowler (of the Committee on Conscience) talked with John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group as part of the Committee’s biweekly podcast. Prendergast has just recently returned from Chad, and had new information on what’s happening in the region:
We went into Eastern Chad and we crossed the border into rebel held areas of Darfur as well and both sides of the border, there is clearly an increasing tension as a result of cross border attacks by government of Sudan backed Janjaweed militias and government of Sudan backed Chadian rebels who are attacking across the border with the same kind of impunity, and in some cases the same kind of intention they did when attacking inside Darfur. We are seeing a sort of exporting some of the genocidal counterinsurgency strategies into Chad now, and that was one of the dominant themes. The other dominant theme was how uniformly the refugees and displaced people that we came across were unable to support the current peace agreement that has been signed between the government and one of the rebel factions in Darfur. There is an intense, palpable fear on the part of those who have been rendered homeless by this assault over the last three years, fear of the provision in the agreement that would leave the disarmament of the Janjaweed in the hands of the government of Sudan with no real international verification. In the absence of that, most people would have just said, “We cannot support this, and we have to keep the struggle alive until we get this fundamentally important provision into any kind of a text of an agreement.” It was quite eye opening to see, and people were not brain washed; they knew what was in the agreement and they just chose to say, “We do not want an incomplete peace because it will not bring peace,” and that was fairly uniform up and down the border, all over.
You can listen to the podcast in its entirety or find a complete transcript of the interview at Voices of Genocide Prevention.
With over 700,000 genocide suspects (almost one in four adults) in the war torn Rwanda, villages are starting local trials to deal with the massive number of suspects.
In the traditional courts, a panel of nine elected community members become judges. The trials are held in the defendant’s place of birth or where they grew up and the audience is encouraged to testify.
Defendants are not allowed to have lawyers and are given the opportunity to confess. If they do, they can be pardoned or have their sentence lessened dramatically.
This system of community courts is not being used for former police and military officers, or the architects of the genocide. Instead, villages are using it as a way to deal with the massive number of perpetrators who would otherwise never stand trial.
Radovan Karadzic
Genocide; crimes against humanity; violations of the laws or customs of war, and grave breaches of the Geneva Convention.
