In the wake of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen's visit to Japan last week, we must consider the price of justice. The topics of his talks with Japanese leaders included a request for financial support for an international tribunal to try surviving members of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Japan should provide those funds. But it should also continue demanding that the tribunal provide a full accounting -- real justice -- for the victims of that savage government. A show court that provides anything less will only compound the indignities, and the injustices, the people of Cambodia have already endured.
It has been three decades since the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia. The world watched when the fighters clad in black pajamas, many of them adolescents, occupied the nation's capital in 1975. From Phnom Penh the movement's leadership announced that they would rebuild their society; they declared "year zero" and ordered Cambodians out of "polluted" cities and into the countryside. Any sign of the bourgeoisie was fiercely exterminated: The mere wearing of glasses was enough to warrant execution.
After only four years in power, the Khmer Rouge managed to kill some 2 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population. It created the famous "killing fields" that are today synonymous with torture and murder. Its rule was sufficiently brutal to provoke a Vietnamese invasion in 1979. That unleashed 13 years of civil war that ended when a peace deal was brokered in 1991 and U.N.-sponsored elections were held in 1993.