By Kate Rix

When a high-ranking Khmer Rouge official known as “Duch” stood trial before an international court last year, one in five Cambodians gathered to watch the televised proceedings. It was Cambodia’s trial of the century, made even more significant by the fact that many young Cambodians had never heard about the atrocities of the 1970s.

“The Khmer Rouge period has never been taught in Cambodian schools,” says David Cohen, professor of Rhetoric and Classics and director of Berkeley’s War Crimes Study Center. “It’s a complete white spot. It is hard for us to imagine how people in a traditional, rural society look at the world. Their frame of reference may be just a few miles from the center of their village. Even many who lived through the Khmer Rouge don’t see its larger context as a political or historical event.”

However, video and computer technologies make it possible for human rights organizations and governments to reach out to the public in new ways, allowing people in countries with a history of conflict and even genocide to gain access to the courtrooms where war crimes abuses are prosecuted.

“Our films in Cambodia are aiming to increase accessibility,” says Cohen. “That’s the key. This televised trial has completely transformed how Cambodians understand their own past.”

Berkeley’s Center developed and managed the weekly television broadcast of Duch’s trial, and part of the program’s impact came from its accessibility. Producers strove to make sure that on-air journalists commenting on and explaining the complex trial reached out to a mass audience — no easy task in a largely rural, poorly educated country.

For a decade, the Center has partnered to support war crime tribunals around the globe, working with court and government officials in Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, East Timor, and Bosnia. Its mission is to help complete the link between the legal system and people in places where genocide or conflict have raged. Their tools: innovative IT and community outreach projects, trial monitoring, and international law seminars for judges, prosecutors, and defense counsel.

“All of these various international criminal courts are trying to deal with outreach, communicating what they are doing to the populations affected by mass atrocity,” says Cohen, who joined Cal’s faculty in 1979. “The courts are pretty bad about doing this. In industrialized countries we assume people have access to media, but in places where only a small percent of people have access to television, where print media only reaches a small population and where many are not literate, we step in to assist.”

The Center’s work involves historical preservation (among its collections is an archive of trial materials from World War II), but it also supports current tribunals directly, through judicial training in international law and trial monitoring. It is highly collaborative work. Cohen notes that looking over the past ten years since the Center formed, he is most proud of the partnerships it has forged with international organizations and local experts.

“In Indonesia we work with two nongovernmental organizations in Papua,” Cohen says, seated in his Dwinelle Hall office. “If you are doing training for an organization like the Indonesian military or judges, you want to work with Indonesians who are likely to have a greater degree of credibility.”

In Indonesia, Cohen notes, credibility was a particularly charged issue. After judges on a human rights court there had prosecuted 18 government and military officials for human rights crimes, they handed down six convictions, followed by a number of acquittals and light sentences. In 2003 Cohen and his colleagues began to monitor trials in Indonesia and made a number of recommendations to enhance judicial independence. Cohen, who holds a degree in law as well as a Ph.D. in Classics, led a number of seminars for the Indonesian judges that delved into international humanitarian law and the operations of human rights courts.

The Center’s initiatives are various and inter-related. In January Cohen began a new initiative in Indonesia, helping to lead workshops for the different factions engaged in ongoing separatist violence. At the request of the U.S. State Department, Cohen gathers members of the military, the police and all sides of the current conflict together, helping to pave a road for constructive dialogue. He travels to Indonesia regularly for the workshop meetings.

“The only breaks I get these days are when I am in the air, out of range to receive emails,” he says.

Indeed, technology is creating new opportunities in human rights work. Cohen describes a “mini-revolution” in ways of thinking about presenting and accessing information. One of the Center’s newest initiatives, the Virtual Tribunal, aims to expand the accessibility of war crimes tribunals with enriched and interactive additions to basic video footage.

Over the long term, as the internet becomes increasingly available in countries like Cambodia, resources like the Virtual Tribunal will become another connection between the people and human rights work in the courts and elsewhere. One of Cohen’s graduate students has interviewed citizen groups, human rights workers and others to help develop a design that gives a broad range of people access to video, expert commentary, interviews, and historical information.

Given Cambodia’s “white spot” when it comes to teaching about the Khmer Rouge, it will be a challenge to put the events of the 1970s into context. What would a Cambodian university student want to know about the Khmer Rouge? What would an elderly farmer want to know, or a policy maker in another country?

The Cambodian government and NGOs are already establishing provincial learning centers throughout the country where people will be able to access the Internet. Most ambitious, notes Cohen, are plans to set up solar panels to power computer centers where there is no electricity.

“As time goes on this will be a more and more meaningful medium,” says Cohen. “Our job is to make sure that every different user group has an avenue of access that suits their needs, interests and capabilities.”