Stéphanie Giry: Necessary Scapegoats? The Making of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

This spring, almost a decade after its difficult birth, the joint Cambodian-UN tribunal set up to prosecute the officials who orchestrated the Khmer Rouge’s worst crimes seemed finally to be gaining momentum. In February, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia sentenced Duch, the head of the regime’s most notorious torture center, to life in prison. A month later, Duch appeared as a key witness in the court’s second and most important case, the trial of the only remaining members of Pol Pot’s immediate entourage: Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologue; Ieng Sary, the foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the head of state. At last, the tribunal appeared to be making real progress toward finding out why, or at least how, the Khmer Rouge killed some 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.