Please don't let them be misunderstood

The front cover of the September issue (No. 415) of New Internationalist boasts a special feature, 'Was the Khmer Rouge misunderstood?' It isn't online yet, but I'll try to give you some feel for it. The piece is by Brooks Duncan, billed as 'a lawyer and anthropologist who works in the field of international legal development and human rights'; and in his introduction to the piece - 'Cambodia: Year Zero on trial' - Duncan says that there is little doubt that the defendants in the currrent trials of Khmer Rouge leaders 'ordered murder and destruction on a massive scale'. He is concerned, however, about the exclusive focus of the trials on 'a specific period of time' (leaving out, for example, the bombings ordered by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s), and about 'the virtual certainty that most of the real historical questions that are important to Cambodia's understanding of its past will be suppressed'. He goes on to some of these questions.

Duncan writes:

There seems to be agreement that the majority of the deaths between 1975 and 1979 occurred from tropical diseases and famine related to a policy choice to send Cambodians to work in rural areas. If these deaths are being criminalized, it is because the leaders didn't make some other policy choice that would have been 'legal'. But is forced radical de-urbanization a crime against humanity, in a world where urbanization is leading us to an environmental crisis that could result in millions of deaths from similar causes and where forced urbanization through government land-grabs has yet to be put on trial? Is rural culture... to be criminalized?

I like 'related to' in the first sentence. But, in any case, I would have thought there was an obvious answer to these questions. It's not rural culture, or de-urbanization as such, that is the crime; it's a policy of forcibly relocating people from the cities to the countryside in a way that leads to massive loss of life. Duncan again:

Much of the trial will probably focus on the ability of the Khmer Rouge leaders to order bands of angry youth to torture and kill tens of thousands of people. The defendants will say that Cambodia was a society boiling with violent youth whom no-one else could control. They will say that they were seeking to fight injustice, then to establish order and control violence overall, and that most of the deaths that occurred under their reign and are attributed to them happened outside of their control. Or did the Khmer Rouge just use the killing machine that the French and Americans created, but with greater damage and the 'wrong' results?
.....
Children aren't born to torture and murder. But in a broken society, where people were filled with suppressed hatred, their only expression of individuality and independence was through violence.

I'm lost for a comment on this, so I'll just move on:

The prosecution will say that the Khmer Rouge destroyed Khmer religion and culture by attacking Buddhism and monks. That will be easy to prove: the murders are clear and punishable crimes. But the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial could raise troubling questions about whether Buddhism in Cambodia is really Khmer. They will likely note that Buddhism was an Indian religion that arrived well after other religions. They will ask whether this foreign religion, and the monks promoting it, were protecting Khmer culture or making the Khmer more passive, obedient and vulnerable. They will say that they were cleansing the country of an outside religion that symbolized and presided over 600 years of the country's decline... The question for the trial is whether the criminalization of attacks on Buddhism as a religion are designed to protect the Khmer or are designed by foreign prosecutors - and the Khmer élite aligned with them - to criminalize attempts at independence and reform.

My guess is that it's the murders that are at the core of this, rather than attacks on Buddhism in some mere battle-of-ideas sense or attempts at 'independence and reform' tout court.

On its back cover, New Internationalist presents itself thus:

The New Internationalist Workers' Co-operative (NI) exists to report on world poverty and inequality; to focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide; to debate and campaign for the radical changes necessary to meet the basic needs of all; and to bring to life the people, the ideas and the action in the fight for global justice.

On the first page of Issue 415, it says that Brooks Duncan puts forward a 'controversial case'. That wouldn't have been my choice of words, given the magazine's declared aims. It wouldn't have been my choice of special feature. (Thanks: HW.)