Spokesperson for the Ghosts

A very nice piece on the ECCC spokesperson in Asian Sentinel. A few other bloggers have reprinted it as well, but its worth spreading it around. Mr. Reach would appear to be the ideal person to be representing the public face of the court. Some choice quotes;

A respected journalist with a master’s degree from Columbia University and a career as a university lecturer and reporter in Cambodia with Agence-France Presse behind him, Reach Sambath has suffered as much as anyone from the Khmer Rouge. He is a persuasive spokesman for a tribunal many criticize as being too little, too late and too political to accomplish much of anything. “I am a spokesperson for ghosts,” he explains as we sit in the bar of the elegant Raffles Le Royale Hotel in Phnom Penh. “I am surrounded by ghosts and if I don’t do good they will know.”

They are searching only for senior leaders, not the thousands of lower-ranking cadres who slaughtered, tortured and starved as many as 2 million people on orders from Pol Pot, who died in 1998, and other leaders. The likely suspects—among them Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, President Khieu Samphan and “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea—have been living free in Cambodia for many years. Only “Comrade Duch,” the chief interrogator at Tuol Seng prison in Phnom Penh where thousands died, is under arrest, having confessed to his role after a foreign journalist found him in 1999.

Trying the few ageing despots, Reach Sambath says calmly, will be enough. It has to be. “Things here now are much better now because we have peace and stability,” he says. Cambodia is becoming normal and the last thing left is to deal with the past. That is the job of the tribunal. All of this is still inside the minds of our people,” he says. But it is time, he believes, for the ghosts to sleep.