[Music]
I want to speak to you today about a
subject that is somehow difficult for
many people to hear about but I want to
help you understand it the subject is
genocide genocide in the 20th century
killed 200 million people more than all
of the international and civil wars
combined the first genocide I saw was in
Cambodia in 1980 Church World Service
and care asked me and my wife to go to
Cambodia to establish a relief program I
hadn’t applied for the job and at first
I didn’t want to go we had planned to
start a family and didn’t think going to
Cambodia was such a good idea in 1980
little did we know the Khmer Rouge who
had been in power from 1975 through 1979
killed 2 million Cambodians out of 8
million a quarter of the population
there were a Maoist communist movement
so I made a fateful promise
I promised church world service I’d pray
about it I’ve prayed about every
important decision of my life
well this time the the message was clear
and consistent and as my labor law
professor put it
Jack Kepler who’s Jewish Greg you don’t
have any choice you’ve been called I
thought I’d been called to hand out rice
and rice seed and vaccines and school
supplies what I didn’t know
was that I had been called to witness
the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide
it was a call that changed my life
genocide is the worst of all crimes
against humanity it is defined as the
intentional destruction in whole or in
part of a national ethnic racial or
religious group and it would include
political and social groups as well if
Stalin hadn’t taken those out of the
Genocide Convention the reason it is the
worst is because it directly attacks the
diversity of the human race all human
beings are hurt by genocide the
elimination of any culture impoverishes
all of us and the Khmer Rouge had
committed genocide I was among the first
Westerners to see the opening of the
mass graves at Cheung ACK where over
7,000 people had been buried victims of
the tool slaying extermination prison in
padam penh there were so many bodies
there that the process of destruction of
the flesh had not even been completed
there was still flesh on human bones
I saw one tiny skeleton with a Mickey
Mouse t-shirt and I wept how could
anybody how could anybody commit such a
crime and I talked to the survivors
every every person had lost members of
their family a woman named Sophie Das
who was a charm Muslim woman
told me how on one terrible evening in
1977 the Khmer Rouge had clubbed to
death five thousand people in her
village and dumped their bodies over a
cliff
including her her whole family how they
had in fact soaked her husband in
gasoline before they set him on fire and
how they had taken her grandchild and
beaten her head against a tree and guy
Mariana told me how she had helped her
sister-in-law suckle her newborn baby
and then when the orders came to move
the commune she and her sister-in-law
had set out but her sister-in-law had
only given birth about eight weeks
before and she fell behind and so she
gave guy Mariana her baby and so guide
Mariana had two babies to take care of
and a Khmer Rouge soldier came up and
took the sister-in-laws baby and threw
him into the jungle to die you have no
need for two small babies
he explained but perhaps it was the
orphans who were the hardest to drive
out of my mind
Chauhan father told me how she had
survived only by hiding under the body
of her sister who was dead in a mass
grave and the pnom Penn stationmaster
son told me how he had had to watch his
parents disemboweled in front of his
eyes the Khmer Rouge had left a hole in
his heart that couldn’t be filled by all
of his tears
it was the charm
and the Vietnamese who were specially
targeted and these two men here are
chunks John Muslims a minority of about
500,000 people in Cambodia the Khmer
Rouge decided they would eliminate them
and so they simply took away all of the
chomp children made them join Khmer
speaking communists for bad all chance
to speak their own Shan language and
then killed over half of the towns in
Cambodia that was a clear case of the
intentional destruction of part of an
ethnic and religious group it was
genocide and they had also of course
killed well over a million of their own
people the Khmer people now when I came
back from Cambodia in 1981 I should have
been elated a bright future ahead of me
and yet I went into a very deep
depression and so at the wise advice of
my wife I went to see a psychiatrist for
the first time in my life and she told
me Gregg if you weren’t depressed after
what you’ve seen there would be
something wrong with you
depression she said is repressed anger
what are you angry about and I said I’m
mad as hell that the Khmer Rouge have
gotten away with mass murder and she
looked me straight in the eye and she
said so what are you going to do about
it
it was another call
because I realized that instead of
turning that anger destructively against
myself I needed to find a way to channel
it into finding justice for Cambodians
to find a way to bring the Khmer Rouge
to justice now at that time there was no
court to bring them – there were no
individual trials possible under the
Genocide Convention so I went to my law
professors and we talked about how we
might in fact bring this this case so
that at least the world would know what
had happened and we found that there was
a way the International Court of Justice
could actually hear a case state versus
State not against individuals in which
we could bring the evidence and it could
be heard so I went back to Yale and
Myers mcdougal who was probably the
greatest international lawyer in the
world and it was also a Mississippi
gentleman looked at me and he said well
great why don’t you do it and I said but
I’m just a just a law student and then
he looked at me and he leaned back and
he said yes son but your Yale Law
student
now I know that was pure Ivy League
arrogance but it also was an
encouragement and it was certainly a
call and so I went to Cambodia to get
permission to gather the evidence and
the Cambodian genocide project which is
still going at Yale was born and over
the 1980s we gathered thousands of pages
of evidence well actually tens of
thousands of pages because the Khmer
Rouge like many genocide or regimes had
a desire to make records of their crimes
and yet we could not find one state
willing to take it to the International
Court of Justice what I learned was
international law is weak not because it
doesn’t exist it’s weak because there is
not the political will to enforce it and
so genocide us get away with their
crimes and have impunity well by 1992
the Cold War was more or less over and
so with Senator Rob we wrote a an act
called the Cambodian genocide justice
act which was designed to reverse u.s.
foreign policy make it official policy
of the United States to favor trials of
the Khmer Rouge but I knew if that act
was to be made effective somebody had to
get inside the State Department to make
it happen and so I gave up my law
professor ship I took the foreign
service exam and I joined the State
Department
[Applause]
[Music]
and my first assignment was Bangkok and
I was a consular officer out there but
then genocide struck again in 1994 in
1994 the Rwandan genocide killed 800,000
people in just three months and so I
went and they sent me out to Rwanda with
the UN Commission of Inquiry which
recommended that we set up an
international tribunal and so I wrote
the UN Security Council resolutions that
created the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda and that tribunal by
the time it closed in 2015 indicted 93
people and convicted 62 people for
genocide and crimes against humanity and
[Applause]
and it came to the first conviction in
history for genocide finally the
International Convention for the
prevention and punishment of the crime
of genocide became law that tribunal
opened the way for us to also create a
tribunal for Cambodia I wrote a proposal
that proposed that there be a mixed
tribunal of Cambodian and international
judges that would try the people most
responsible for the Khmer Rouge crimes
and would be held right in phenom penh
cambodia in – by 2006 that tribunal came
into being and i wrote its rules it has
now tried and convicted three people i
know that doesn’t sound like a lot but
these were the top people who on Chaia
the head of the whole death camp system
and Kusum found the ideologist of the
regime as well as Dyke who was the
commander of the toul sleng prison the
prison that had sent those people to the
chung act mass grave what I learned from
all of this was that we can in fact take
steps to combat genocide not just to
punish genocide but the problem that I
saw was tribunals are too late we need
to prevent genocide before it happens
and I had learned in the State
Department that we couldn’t count on
governments to do that and yet in 1999
there was not a single organization in
the world
not a single coalition devoted solely to
the prevention of genocide this crime
that had killed more people than any
other crime during the 20th century
and so in 1999 I found a genocide watch
and the Alliance against genocide and
the Alliance now has over 70 member
organizations around the world as well
as many other organizations that are
part of this mass movement we needed a
mass movement to end genocide and it now
exists at the genocide watch we use a 10
stage model that I first wrote when I
was in the State Department that helps
us understand the early warning signs
and the process of genocide and helps us
to develop the policies that we need to
actually stop it in its tracks it’s all
behind the scenes you won’t hear about
us I’m telling you that because we work
only through the policymakers and it’s
faith that we need if we’re going to win
this struggle
I have faith every time I look at the
picture and the living presence of our
daughter on November 16th 1980 a newborn
baby was abandoned on the steps of the
National pediatric hospital in Phnom
Penh it was a Sunday morning bright and
sunny and she came in to our prayer
meeting and she laid that baby in my
wife’s arms and I remember walking down
the hallway after that when my wife was
sitting in the front row
handed her to me saying after all of the
horror we have seen here is this your
gift and I had this tremendous feeling
yes
and yet we knew no one had ever adopted
a baby in Cambodia since 1975 but there
are forces in this world that change
human hearts and they can change history
and just a few weeks later the adoption
certificate came through for her and it
was signed by the man who later became
the foreign minister of Cambodia and it
was the first act of that government
ever to be recognized by a court in the
United States when I went back in 1982
established the Cambodian genocide
project I said why did you let us adopt
her and they said because we knew that
she needed you and because we knew that
you needed her that’s love they loved us
you see love is more powerful than evil
and justice is stronger the genocide in
life triumph over death and cambodia has
now come back to life thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]
I want to speak to you today about a
subject that is somehow difficult for
many people to hear about but I want to
help you understand it the subject is
genocide genocide in the 20th century
killed 200 million people more than all
of the international and civil wars
combined the first genocide I saw was in
Cambodia in 1980 Church World Service
and care asked me and my wife to go to
Cambodia to establish a relief program I
hadn’t applied for the job and at first
I didn’t want to go we had planned to
start a family and didn’t think going to
Cambodia was such a good idea in 1980
little did we know the Khmer Rouge who
had been in power from 1975 through 1979
killed 2 million Cambodians out of 8
million a quarter of the population
there were a Maoist communist movement
so I made a fateful promise
I promised church world service I’d pray
about it I’ve prayed about every
important decision of my life
well this time the the message was clear
and consistent and as my labor law
professor put it
Jack Kepler who’s Jewish Greg you don’t
have any choice you’ve been called I
thought I’d been called to hand out rice
and rice seed and vaccines and school
supplies what I didn’t know
was that I had been called to witness
the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide
it was a call that changed my life
genocide is the worst of all crimes
against humanity it is defined as the
intentional destruction in whole or in
part of a national ethnic racial or
religious group and it would include
political and social groups as well if
Stalin hadn’t taken those out of the
Genocide Convention the reason it is the
worst is because it directly attacks the
diversity of the human race all human
beings are hurt by genocide the
elimination of any culture impoverishes
all of us and the Khmer Rouge had
committed genocide I was among the first
Westerners to see the opening of the
mass graves at Cheung ACK where over
7,000 people had been buried victims of
the tool slaying extermination prison in
padam penh there were so many bodies
there that the process of destruction of
the flesh had not even been completed
there was still flesh on human bones
I saw one tiny skeleton with a Mickey
Mouse t-shirt and I wept how could
anybody how could anybody commit such a
crime and I talked to the survivors
every every person had lost members of
their family a woman named Sophie Das
who was a charm Muslim woman
told me how on one terrible evening in
1977 the Khmer Rouge had clubbed to
death five thousand people in her
village and dumped their bodies over a
cliff
including her her whole family how they
had in fact soaked her husband in
gasoline before they set him on fire and
how they had taken her grandchild and
beaten her head against a tree and guy
Mariana told me how she had helped her
sister-in-law suckle her newborn baby
and then when the orders came to move
the commune she and her sister-in-law
had set out but her sister-in-law had
only given birth about eight weeks
before and she fell behind and so she
gave guy Mariana her baby and so guide
Mariana had two babies to take care of
and a Khmer Rouge soldier came up and
took the sister-in-laws baby and threw
him into the jungle to die you have no
need for two small babies
he explained but perhaps it was the
orphans who were the hardest to drive
out of my mind
Chauhan father told me how she had
survived only by hiding under the body
of her sister who was dead in a mass
grave and the pnom Penn stationmaster
son told me how he had had to watch his
parents disemboweled in front of his
eyes the Khmer Rouge had left a hole in
his heart that couldn’t be filled by all
of his tears
it was the charm
and the Vietnamese who were specially
targeted and these two men here are
chunks John Muslims a minority of about
500,000 people in Cambodia the Khmer
Rouge decided they would eliminate them
and so they simply took away all of the
chomp children made them join Khmer
speaking communists for bad all chance
to speak their own Shan language and
then killed over half of the towns in
Cambodia that was a clear case of the
intentional destruction of part of an
ethnic and religious group it was
genocide and they had also of course
killed well over a million of their own
people the Khmer people now when I came
back from Cambodia in 1981 I should have
been elated a bright future ahead of me
and yet I went into a very deep
depression and so at the wise advice of
my wife I went to see a psychiatrist for
the first time in my life and she told
me Gregg if you weren’t depressed after
what you’ve seen there would be
something wrong with you
depression she said is repressed anger
what are you angry about and I said I’m
mad as hell that the Khmer Rouge have
gotten away with mass murder and she
looked me straight in the eye and she
said so what are you going to do about
it
it was another call
because I realized that instead of
turning that anger destructively against
myself I needed to find a way to channel
it into finding justice for Cambodians
to find a way to bring the Khmer Rouge
to justice now at that time there was no
court to bring them – there were no
individual trials possible under the
Genocide Convention so I went to my law
professors and we talked about how we
might in fact bring this this case so
that at least the world would know what
had happened and we found that there was
a way the International Court of Justice
could actually hear a case state versus
State not against individuals in which
we could bring the evidence and it could
be heard so I went back to Yale and
Myers mcdougal who was probably the
greatest international lawyer in the
world and it was also a Mississippi
gentleman looked at me and he said well
great why don’t you do it and I said but
I’m just a just a law student and then
he looked at me and he leaned back and
he said yes son but your Yale Law
student
now I know that was pure Ivy League
arrogance but it also was an
encouragement and it was certainly a
call and so I went to Cambodia to get
permission to gather the evidence and
the Cambodian genocide project which is
still going at Yale was born and over
the 1980s we gathered thousands of pages
of evidence well actually tens of
thousands of pages because the Khmer
Rouge like many genocide or regimes had
a desire to make records of their crimes
and yet we could not find one state
willing to take it to the International
Court of Justice what I learned was
international law is weak not because it
doesn’t exist it’s weak because there is
not the political will to enforce it and
so genocide us get away with their
crimes and have impunity well by 1992
the Cold War was more or less over and
so with Senator Rob we wrote a an act
called the Cambodian genocide justice
act which was designed to reverse u.s.
foreign policy make it official policy
of the United States to favor trials of
the Khmer Rouge but I knew if that act
was to be made effective somebody had to
get inside the State Department to make
it happen and so I gave up my law
professor ship I took the foreign
service exam and I joined the State
Department
[Applause]
[Music]
and my first assignment was Bangkok and
I was a consular officer out there but
then genocide struck again in 1994 in
1994 the Rwandan genocide killed 800,000
people in just three months and so I
went and they sent me out to Rwanda with
the UN Commission of Inquiry which
recommended that we set up an
international tribunal and so I wrote
the UN Security Council resolutions that
created the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda and that tribunal by
the time it closed in 2015 indicted 93
people and convicted 62 people for
genocide and crimes against humanity and
[Applause]
and it came to the first conviction in
history for genocide finally the
International Convention for the
prevention and punishment of the crime
of genocide became law that tribunal
opened the way for us to also create a
tribunal for Cambodia I wrote a proposal
that proposed that there be a mixed
tribunal of Cambodian and international
judges that would try the people most
responsible for the Khmer Rouge crimes
and would be held right in phenom penh
cambodia in – by 2006 that tribunal came
into being and i wrote its rules it has
now tried and convicted three people i
know that doesn’t sound like a lot but
these were the top people who on Chaia
the head of the whole death camp system
and Kusum found the ideologist of the
regime as well as Dyke who was the
commander of the toul sleng prison the
prison that had sent those people to the
chung act mass grave what I learned from
all of this was that we can in fact take
steps to combat genocide not just to
punish genocide but the problem that I
saw was tribunals are too late we need
to prevent genocide before it happens
and I had learned in the State
Department that we couldn’t count on
governments to do that and yet in 1999
there was not a single organization in
the world
not a single coalition devoted solely to
the prevention of genocide this crime
that had killed more people than any
other crime during the 20th century
and so in 1999 I found a genocide watch
and the Alliance against genocide and
the Alliance now has over 70 member
organizations around the world as well
as many other organizations that are
part of this mass movement we needed a
mass movement to end genocide and it now
exists at the genocide watch we use a 10
stage model that I first wrote when I
was in the State Department that helps
us understand the early warning signs
and the process of genocide and helps us
to develop the policies that we need to
actually stop it in its tracks it’s all
behind the scenes you won’t hear about
us I’m telling you that because we work
only through the policymakers and it’s
faith that we need if we’re going to win
this struggle
I have faith every time I look at the
picture and the living presence of our
daughter on November 16th 1980 a newborn
baby was abandoned on the steps of the
National pediatric hospital in Phnom
Penh it was a Sunday morning bright and
sunny and she came in to our prayer
meeting and she laid that baby in my
wife’s arms and I remember walking down
the hallway after that when my wife was
sitting in the front row
handed her to me saying after all of the
horror we have seen here is this your
gift and I had this tremendous feeling
yes
and yet we knew no one had ever adopted
a baby in Cambodia since 1975 but there
are forces in this world that change
human hearts and they can change history
and just a few weeks later the adoption
certificate came through for her and it
was signed by the man who later became
the foreign minister of Cambodia and it
was the first act of that government
ever to be recognized by a court in the
United States when I went back in 1982
established the Cambodian genocide
project I said why did you let us adopt
her and they said because we knew that
she needed you and because we knew that
you needed her that’s love they loved us
you see love is more powerful than evil
and justice is stronger the genocide in
life triumph over death and cambodia has
now come back to life thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]
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