JAMES GREENLAND/Fairfax NZ
EYES OPENED: Nelson woman Flossie Van Dyke has
returned from a six-month legal internship with the Khmer Rouge
Tribunal prosecutors in Cambodia.
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She said the way she looks at humanity has changed and that she's gained "new perspective" on what can be achieved with a law degree, after volunteering for six months in the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia where two key leaders of Pol Pot's communist regime have been on trial.
"I think I am a different person", Ms Van Dyke said.
"It's made me realise the importance of protecting the basic human rights of every global citizen.
Working with the prosecution, Ms Van Dyke's goal was to help convict two senior Khmer Rouge leaders; "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea; and Khieu Samphan, Head of State.
Both are alleged to be at least partly responsible for a series of heinous crimes against humanity committed during Cambodia's failed agrarian revolution (1975-79) Their charges include genocide (it is estimated more than two million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge's rule, from executions, disease, exhaustion and starvation), as well as murder, enslavement, imprisonment, torture and deportation.
"It makes me feel so lucky to have grown up in New Zealand."
Ms Van Dyke, who graduated from Nelson College for Girls in 2007 and from law school at the University of Otago in 2012, said she had always wanted "a break" from study before she started her career.
While glad to have worked in Cambodia before moving to Auckland to start a new job at law firm Bell Gully, she said there wasn't much time to rest or take breaks during the at-times heart-wrenching internship.
The Extraordinary Chambers are a special court, jointly funded by the United Nations and Cambodian Government, established to try to bring justice to those responsible for the Khmer Rouge's atrocities.
Ms Van Dyke said some days she sat for hours and listened closely while victims' family members described the horror of living, and dying, under the murderous regime.
They shared tragic stories of death and loss, and families torn apart. Some bravely confronted the accused, directly asking them if and why they had sanctioned the torture or execution of their loved-ones, Ms Van Dyke said.
"It was disconcerting to see the accused right there, sitting in the court.
"[Nuon Chea] would tell victims' families, ‘I'm so sorry for your loss'," Ms Van Dyke recounted.
"But he would also tell them he had no idea that it [a genocide] was happening." She said the deputy leader had accepted moral responsibility and had apologised to his people, but he denied having broken any laws.
"Brother Number One", Pol Pot, died in 1998 denying the Cambodian people a chance to bring him to justice, and most Cambodians were keen to see the Khmer Rouge leaders convicted, she said.
The trial was characterised by a lack of funding, particularly because the Cambodian Government had repeatedly failed to meet its financial obligations, "and, perhaps because of pockets of Khmer Rouge influence that still lingered within Cambodian politics," Ms Van Dyke said.
"There are still a lot of ex-Khmer Rouge associates in the present-day government, which has slowed down the progress of the court."
An under-staffed prosecution team meant she and other interns took on some serious legal work, including helping to draft the head prosecutor's final submissions.
She said a lot of it involved trawling through the 20,000 pieces of evidence that were on file, at times reminding her of the tedium of law school.
That tedium was broken though, when she came into contact with individual victims' case files, which detailed the extent of the communist revolution's brutality and paranoiac insanity.
"As soon as you come across a single person's story - that was the most harrowing part," Ms Van Dyke said.
"It is when I could imagine myself in the victims' shoes that the extent of what happened in Cambodia really hit me." She said the horror really came home when she encountered a statement signed by Kiwi man Kerry Hamill at the infamous S-21 death camp.
Mr Hamill was captured and executed by the Khmer Rouge in 1978, aged 28, after he was caught in a storm on his yacht Foxy Lady and accidentally strayed into Cambodian waters.
His statements were not admitted as evidence during Chea's trial, but Ms Van Dyke said his story was particularly difficult for her to deal with, because he was just a "young adventurous New Zealander", not unlike herself, and certainly was not a CIA-trained spook.
Kerry Hamill's "confession" said he grew up in Blenheim where his primary school was a CIA spy-base, sponsored by McDonald's restaurant. It said he was in Cambodia to corrupt the communist revolution by introducing Western materialist ideals, Ms Van Dyke said.
Mr Hamill's resilient Kiwi sense of humour, in the face of unimaginable terror and torture, is riddled throughout his obviously-false confession, which at one point refers to his army commander as a "Major Rouse" and a CIA trainer as "Colonel Sanders".
It remains unknown what the Khmer interrogators thought of Hamill's claim that Westport and Whanganui were both homes to CIA spy bases.
During the internship, Ms Van Dyke lived in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, in a flat with other interns from around the world.
In 1975, "year zero" of the Khmer Rouge revolution, the city was emptied and abandoned, after almost all who lived there were taken to work at forced labour camps in the countryside, or were executed.
Today it's an Asian metropolis, home to well-over one million people.
"It was a cool lifestyle," she said.
"Everyone was so passionate about the work, the conversations we would have were awesome."
In another Kiwi connection to the case, former New Zealand Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright was one of two international judges sitting in the trial chamber (three were Cambodian nationals).
Dame Cartwright had a massive job, listening to witnesses and hearing other evidence during the trail, which started in 2011, Ms Van Dyke said.
"Silvia was keen to meet the young Kiwi lawyers so my supervisor, prosecutor William Smith, organised for us to meet up for lunch, which was awesome.
"We chatted a lot about the challenges she faced as a young female lawyer in New Zealand, and the ways Otago Uni has transformed since she was there 50 years ago."
Ms Van Dyke landed the internship through her work with New Zealand organisation, Law For Change [lawforchange.co.nz].
She looks forward to starting at a corporate law firm but hopes one day to return to the international human rights law field.
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