By James Pringle
PHNOM PENH- Soon after arriving in Pinochet-ruled Chile, some months after the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and resulted in his death, I made my way to a cemetery where the late Marxist president’s body then reposed.
A single, tall, bespectacled Chilean soldier stood on guard — against, I supposed, antimilitary demonstrations. It was, obviously, not an honor guard.
Unable to make out where Allende’s grave was among dozens of others, I asked the only other person around, a boy of about 10, if he could point it out. The bolt slid back loudly on the soldier’s rifle, and the boy’s face flushed red. He was very frightened.
Without looking back, I discreetly withdrew. Endangering the boy was unpardonable, but I hadn’t quite realized the strength of the military’s animus against Allende. Even in death, the former president’s name couldn’t be mentioned.
Even so, the Chilean Navy let me visit a prison island where hundreds of political prisoners were detained, and I was free to listen to their denunciations of ill-treatment by the sinister DINA, the National Intelligence Directorate.
I also visited frightened families whose loved ones were being held, some tortured in venues like the air force’s “scream room.” A front-page Chilean newspaper article accused me of “reporting infamies.”
Afterward I covered a whistle-stop tour of southern Chile by the ramrod-straight Augusto Pinochet in his trademark dark glasses, and it was clear he enjoyed support of his own — Chile is also a deeply conservative country.
Despite the military repression, one had to wonder why Allende, who in free elections had won only a plurality of the vote — 36 percent — and thus not a complete mandate, had pushed ahead so fast in attempting to create a full-blown Marxist state and “people’s militias” to protect it.
This provoked the armed forces, leading to the coup that brought Pinochet to power for 17 years. He died Sunday without ever having to answer for the crimes he committed in front of a court.
When I look back at the Pinochet era, though, my memories of it are overshadowed by what I have also witnessed in Asia.
In 1979 I flew into Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion and the defeat of the Khmer Rouge. I visited the Toul Sleng S.21 Khmer Rouge interrogation and torture center, where the dried blood of the victims was still on the floor.
I had known Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge takeover. In less than four years, it seemed to have regressed to the 14th century, at least in the countryside. As for Phnom Penh, it was still largely devoid of people; civilians who did manage to enter were facing starvation, picking up odd grains of rice in the street.
I realized that revolutions in Asia (I had also witnessed China’s Cultural Revolution) made Latin America’s tough dictatorships seem pallid in comparison. Mercifully Latin America, unlike Asia, is now composed mainly of freely elected governments.
Pinochet’s henchmen killed more than 3,000 people, but under Pol Pot’s rule 1.7 million Cambodians died, and Mao was responsible for millions of deaths in China.
As the proceedings of Cambodia’s mixed foreign and international Khmer Rouge tribunal moves forward at a glacial pace through its initial investigatory phase, and Human Rights Watch alleges government interference in the process, one wonders if justice will occur here for those who carried out one of the great atrocities of the 20th century.
After all, 28 years after the slaughter ended, Pol Pot and several of his top collaborators have died. Only one, “Brother Duch,” a former commandant of S.21, is held in a military prison awaiting trial for 16,000 killings. Other aging mass murderers live freely in Phnom Penh or on the Thai border among their victims, protesting that they had been out of the loop.
Impunity is one of Cambodia’s curses, as it appeared to be one of Latin America’s.
Most of the current leaders of the Cambodian government are members of a faction of the Khmer Rouge that defected to Vietnam. Some of them fear what will be revealed of their own past if a real trial gets under way as scheduled here next year.
Like Pinochet, will the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders also end up cheating justice? Many Cambodians fear that they will, unless the international community pushes the reluctant Cambodian leadership here to permit a real independent judicial accounting.
Source: The International Herald Tribune
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