More than 100 people gathered in Phnom Penh on Thursday evening, 26 September, to express their solidarity with the people of Palestine. At this time every year, over two weeks of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-amXPJFmuF0">Pchum Ben</a>, Cambodians pay remembrance to those who have died. Pchum Ben is a fifteen-day festival in September to October during the lunar month of photrobot, the traditional period for mourning and making offerings to transfer merit to the dead, especially one’s own ancestors. Traditionally, it is believed that special attention needs to be paid to the wandering spirits of those who suffered violent or painful deaths, who need to be venerated and assuaged so that they can rest in peace.
Pchum Ben has heightened significance in Cambodia’s society today. During the 1970s civil war and Khmer Rouge genocide, more than a quarter of the population perished. Families were dispersed across the country, and bodies of those more than 2 million people who died were discarded without ceremony. Most people lost relatives and friends, but do not know where they died, and thus have never been able to perform proper funerals for them.
In 2023, as Israel’s attack on Gaza began, a solidarity ceremony was held in Phnom Penh, launching traditional offerings of rice balls, candles, flowers and incense onto the Mekong River. It is unbelievable that the carnage could have gone on relentlessly day after day until now. As Pchum Ben has come around again, Israel is extending the same horror into Lebanon.
It is in this context that a number of artists decided to stage a “Pchum Ben 4 Palestine” exhibition. Some 70 paintings, posters, photographs and other artworks were displayed, mostly offered for sale along with the traditional Cambodian black and white checked krama scarf, closely resembling the Palestinian keffiyeh. Funds raised will be given to the Palestine Children’s Defence Fund.
More than 100 people crowded into <a href="https://www.facebook.com/FTGalleryPhnomPenh">the FT Gallery</a>—Cambodians and foreign residents from many different countries, faiths and political opinions stood or sat in traditional prayer. A Buddhist monk chanted and gave a brief sermon, followed by speakers from Cambodia, India and Palestine and singers from the Messenger Band, expressing their ongoing solidarity, all noting the parallels between Cambodian and Palestinian suffering.
At the United Nations, Cambodia has voted for repeated General Assembly resolutions <a href="https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/kingdom-votes-for-un-gaza-ceasefire">demanding a ceasefire</a>. The current and former PM have spoken out clearly against the hypocrisy of Western governments preaching human rights, international law and the rule-based world order while condoning and even aiding and abetting genocide in Cambodia in 1975-1979 and again today in Palestine.
First published at <a href="https://forsea.co/">Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia</a>. Helen Jarvis is vice president of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal and a <a href="https://www.aupp.edu.kh/congratulations-dr-helen-jarvis-on-achieving-2021-lifetime-achievement-award/">life member</a> of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Helen Jarvis

Standing with Palestine in Cambodia

The Indonesian army constructed a sustained and false narrative of acts of extreme brutality and conspiracy against the state in order to create a pretext for the anti-communist purge and slaughter, which was quickly launched [and] the diplomatic and propaganda apparatuses of the US, Britain and Australia propagated this version of events with the purpose of manipulating international opinion in favour of the Indonesian army (and against President Sukarno), in the full knowledge that the army was preparing to, and later had already begun to, carry out or encourage such killings on a massive scale …
The UK and Australia conducted a sustained campaign repeating false propaganda from the Indonesian army, and that they continued with this policy even after it had become abundantly clear that killings and other crimes against humanity were taking place on a mass and indiscriminate basis. On balance, this justifies the charge of complicity in the above crimes against humanity.
It is well established that Australia … ran a sophisticated propaganda operation, with information favourable to the Indonesian army being relayed by its embassy in Jakarta to Canberra and disseminated through various media including Radio Australia. A recent study notes that the Australian Department of External Affairs had always taken a “keen interest” in the way in which Radio Australia reported events in Indonesia, and that after 30 September the Department “received and acted” upon advice from the Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Keith Shann, who in turn “received advice from the Indonesian Army on how it wanted the situation in Indonesia reported”.
The Department sought to direct Radio Australia in these matters and was also successful in “convincing [Australian] newspaper editors to report and editorialise in a manner sensitive to the Department’s concerns”.
Another study relates in detail how Shann was approached on 9 November 1965 “by an unnamed colonel from the army’s Information Section, who told him that Radio Australia should ‘mention as often as possible youth groups and other organisations, both Moslem and Christian’ that were involved in anti-communist actions (thus clearly hoping to dilute the army’s culpability)” … Shann [is reported to have] concluded his report to Canberra “with the comment that he could ‘live with most of this, even if we must be a bit dishonest for a while’. Radio Australia was also told to avoid ‘giving information to the Indonesian people that would be withheld by the army-controlled internal media’, to avoid compromising the army’s position …”
Information was also passed regularly to Canberra from the Australian embassy in what was described as “the methodical slaughter of PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] prisoners”. This was presumably the basis for a remark in July 1966 by the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, who when asked about events in Indonesia commented that “with 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off … I think it is safe to assume a reorientation [in Indonesia] has taken place”.
The mass killings were also described in a number of media reports, although these did not always receive prominence when published. Examples include a vivid report in Melbourne’s Age in January 1966 by journalist Robert Macklin, who described what he and his wife had witnessed in Bali: “We saw four villages where every adult male had been killed … We saw mass graves in each of which up to 10 Communist men and women had been packed after being stabbed to death”.
In seeking to explain the widespread indifference to the human suffering in Indonesia, academic studies of this period place these events within the broader international context of cold war, heightened in Asia at the time by the war in Vietnam. Gabriel Kolko has observed that “Indonesia by late 1965 presented US strategy in Southeast Asia with a danger at least as great as Vietnam” because of the logic of the “domino theory” which saw communism as a threat to be opposed, even when as in Indonesia it took a peaceful form.
Thus, “the events of September 30 created a small challenge but also an enormous opportunity to resolve America’s dilemmas by directing the military’s wrath against the Communists” … The Indonesian army … saw the opportunity for a bargain, asking “how much is it worth to the US for the PKI to be ‘smashed’?”
 Both [the UK and Australia] shared the US aim of seeking to bring about the overthrow of president Sukarno … in extending their propaganda operations to legitimise the false propaganda of the Indonesian army after 30 September (and in the UK’s willingness not to take military advantage of the situation), both governments evidently hoped that this would assist the army to eliminate the PKI as well as remove Sukarno.
They continued with this policy even after it had become abundantly clear that killings were taking place on a mass and indiscriminate basis. On balance, this appears to justify the charge of complicity.
The claim that the events in Indonesia were too obscure or confusing to be understood at the time has no merit. The countries referred to above were fully aware of what was taking place through their diplomatic reports, from contacts in the field and accounts in Western media.
Nor were the mass killings a secret to the international community in general, even if they were only reported intermittently. Yet there is no record that any of the governments considered above made the slightest attempt to urge restraint upon the Indonesian government or army.

Australia found complicit in crimes against humanity

In recent weeks, world attention finally has focussed on the desperate situation of the thousands of Rohingya refugees stranded on rickety boats in the Andaman Sea, the horrific remains of staging camps in Malaysia and Thailand and the unbearable conditions at home in Burma that forced them to flee in the first place.
Their plight is by no means a new story, but it has been ignored by those wishing to paint a rosy picture of the new democratic Burma, ripe for foreign investment and support.
Rohingyas in exile, and their supporters, have for years been documenting the increasing abuse. Their status and rights as one of Burma’s formally recognised ethnic groups have been stripped away – to the point that they are labelled “Bengali immigrants” and forced into squalid and overcrowded refugee camps.
The majority of the country’s Rohingyas are not in camps, but in neighbourhoods that have been described as “vast open prisons”. Their movement severely restricted by armed guards. The government says that this is “for their own protection”. George Soros, who escaped from Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, visited one of these neighbourhoods. He described it as “a ghetto”.
Rejected and oppressed by the Burmese government, about half the Rohingya population, more than one million people, have fled to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Indonesia. Some also have made it to Canada, the UK and Australia.
Successive military governments since the 1970s have demonised the Rohingyas – the only Muslim community with its own ancestral geographic pocket along Burma’s colonial borders – as “a threat to national security”.
While earlier generations often found acceptance in other countries, such possibilities are becoming ever more remote, as countries in the region adopt the barbaric anti-refugee policies instituted by both Liberal and Labor governments in Australia.
Indonesian, Thai and Malaysian governments have now taken minimal steps to allow for the temporary settlement of those Rohingya currently at sea. But they are doing nothing to challenge the Burmese government to address the horrific conditions that continue to force Rohingyas to risk their lives fleeing the country by boat.
In Oslo, Norway, on 26-27 May, a major international conference called this crime by its name: genocide, an intentional destruction of a people as an ethic group
In a pre-recorded address, Desmond Tutu, a leader of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, called for an end to the persecution.
Tutu’s appeal was amplified by six other fellow Nobel Peace laureates: Mairead Maguire from Ireland, Jody Williams from the USA, Tawakkol Karman from Yemen, Shirin Ibadi from Iran, Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel from Argentina.
They said: “What Rohingyas are facing is a textbook case of genocide in which an entire indigenous community is being systematically wiped out by the Burmese government”.
The evolution of this genocide was described in chilling detail by representatives of the Rohingya community and was further analysed by scholars Penny Green, Maung Zarni and Amartya Sen and by Tomas Ojea Quintana, former UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the country (2008-14).
The conference called on the Burmese government immediately to end its policies and practices of genocide; to restore full and equal citizenship rights of the Rohingyas; to institute the right of return for all displaced Rohingyas; to provide the Rohingyas with all necessary protection; and to promote and support reconciliation between communities in Rakhine state (which is home to the majority of Rohingyas).
During the conference, three leading monks who have saved Muslim lives in Burma and opposed Islamophobia were given awards by the Parliament of the World’s Religions, a 120-year-old interfaith organisation. “These extraordinary monks challenge the widespread perception that all Buddhist monks clamour for violence against the Rohingyas”, said the parliament’s chair, Imam Malik Mujahi.
The Dalai Lama now has added his voice to those of a number of speakers at the Oslo conference calling on Burma opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to come to the defence of the Rohingyas.
She apparently has decided that her electoral fortunes will be aided by staying silent on this issue, thereby retaining the support of racist anti-Rohingya voters. Many who came to her defence while she was under persecution and house arrest by the Burmese government are dismayed by the moral bankruptcy displayed by such electoral calculations.

Oslo conference calls for end to Rohingya genocide

The ongoing genocide against the Eelam Tamils by the Sri Lankan state is finally attracting condemnation – both internationally and, more significantly, within Sri Lanka. On 27 January the Northern Provincial Council (the elected regional authority of the north and east of the island) adopted a resolution condemning the killing of more than 100,000 Tamils during the civil war. The ethnic cleansing carried out by the Sri Lankan state was described as equivalent to genocide.
Just one week earlier, the judgment of the second session of the Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka was released in Geneva. It found the Sri Lankan state guilty of genocide, with the complicity of the UK and US.
I was one of 11 judges who formed the panel for this second session of the Peoples’ Tribunal, held in Bremen, Germany, in December, which considered the accusation of genocide filed jointly by the International Human Rights Association Bremen and the Irish Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka.
Guilty as charged
The Bremen tribunal took up the charge of genocide, as requested by the first session of the Peoples’ Tribunal, held in Dublin in 2010, which found Sri Lanka guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal focused on the crimes committed during the last months of the war, which culminated in the attempted physical extermination not only of the government and armed forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), but also of the hundreds of thousands of Eelam Tamils who had sought refuge in cynically named “no fire zones”.
An enormous amount of written documentation was submitted to the tribunal, supplemented by video footage and testimony from more than 30 eyewitnesses. Evidence was provided on acts that could be determined to constitute the crime of genocide, as well as on the legal and historical background.
Repression against the Tamils escalated from 1956, when the Sinhala language was declared to be the only official language, after which pogroms took place in response to non-violent resistance from Tamils. Successive waves of pogroms were accompanied by at least 149 massacres and numerous assassinations and disappearances of activists and intellectuals (including prominent journalists, parliamentarians, priests and civil society leaders).
The details of the all-out war against the LTTE, especially from the collapse of the peace process in 2006 up to the final phase of the civil war in May 2009, were covered in the Dublin tribunal.
In Bremen, the judges unanimously found Sri Lanka guilty of the crime of genocide against the Eelam Tamil people, as a national group protected under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
It continues
The tribunal found that genocide against the Eelam Tamil group has not yet achieved the total destruction of their identity. While the genocide reached its climax in May 2009, it is clear that the government’s project is to erase the Eelam Tamil identity. The genocidal strategy changed once the perpetrators gained control of the territory.
The killings are being transformed into other forms of conduct, but the attempt to destroy the group and its identity continues through land seizures, militarisation, Sinhalisation and other measures, including widespread rape and sexual violence, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the Eelam Tamil group.
Without the substantial political and military assistance from its external accomplices in the West, the Sri Lankan state would not have been able to conduct its extermination campaign. The tribunal found that UK complicity in the genocide during the period of the armed struggle and its repression was overt and explicit and qualifies as “‘aid or assistance’ furnished by one State for the commission of a wrongful act by another State”.
The events of 2009 are the logical outcome of the structural genocide that had been put in place during the colonial period by amalgamating the traditional Tamil and Sinhala areas and then engineering historiographical, archaeological and anthropological constructs that laid the basis for the creation of an “Aryan Sinhala Buddhist” identity amongst the Sinhala people, presenting India as an invader and the Tamils as the “descendants of the invaders”.
Active US complicity in the genocide arose not only from its sustained efforts from as early as 1951 to increase the power and effectiveness of the Sri Lankan military, but from its role in blocking and even reversing political and diplomatic initiatives for peace as well as blacking out information on the unprecedented worldwide protests by Tamil communities in the diasporas.
These military and non-military actions constituted “the provision of means to enable or facilitate the commission of the crime” under international law.
Resistance
In the same week as the resolutions were adopted by the Northern Provincial Council and the judgment of the Bremen session released, thousands took the brave step of demonstrating publicly in Colombo against the repressive actions of the Sri Lankan government of Mahinda Rajapaksa, including the killing of at least 15 journalists and disappearances and forced exile of almost 100.
Condemnation of the Sri Lankan government has been building since the November 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo. Rajapaksa’s planned public relations exercise to whitewash his repressive government backfired, boycotted by the prime ministers of India and Canada and drawing an enormous amount of media coverage and exposure of the genocide against the Eelam Tamils.
This crescendo can be expected to continue in the coming weeks in the lead-up to the 2014 session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where the genocide charge will be firmly on the agenda.
[The full text of the judgment can be found at: <a href="http://idh.uv.es/es/noticias/226-peoples-tribunal-on-sri-lanka.html">idh.uv.es/es/noticias/226-peoples-tribunal-on-sri-lanka.html</a>.]

Standing with Palestine in Cambodia

Australia found complicit in crimes against humanity

Oslo conference calls for end to Rohingya genocide

Tribunal condemns Sri Lankan genocide against Eelam Tamils

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