Duch in court
The Sydney Morning Herald
Even as theinternational Khmer Rouge court's first case ends, it is coming under political pressure, writes Ben Doherty inPhnom Penh.
Chum Mey walks slowly through the corridors of Tuol Sleng – once a school, then a prison, now a museum – past thousands of black-and-white photographs, unsmiling portraits of the Khmer Rouge's victims in this place.
He stops at faces he recognises, pointing out friends, colleagues, a relative he saw for the final time through barbed wire.
It is reckoned that over four years in the late 1970s more than 12,000 men, women and children passed through Tuol Sleng prison in central Phnom Penh, and were murdered by the Khmer Rouge.
Most were tortured into confessing crimes they could not have committed, and into implicating others, before being loaded on to trucks and driven to the “killing fields" of Choeung Ek, where they were bludgeoned to death with ox-cart axles.
In nine days, more than 30 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the man who ran Tuol Sleng, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, will be sentenced for the crimes committed here.
Pol Pot's executioner-in-chief will be the first Khmer Rouge figure to be held accountable for the crimes of the ultra-communist regime which killed an estimated 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia's population, between 1975 and 1979.
Duch has confessed, telling the court last year: “I am solely and individually responsible for the loss of at least 12,380 lives.”
And few in Cambodia doubt he will be sentenced to life in prison, the heaviest penalty the court can impose, or at the very least a sentence of several decades, which will ensure the 67-year-old never leaves prison alive.
His sentencing is of enormous interest across the country. More than 30,000 Cambodians attended the purpose-built international court over his nine-month trial. His sentence will be broadcast live on TV.
“I want the court to give Duch a life in prison,” Chum Mey says through an interpreter. “He must never be allowed out, so that the younger generation cannot follow suit. It cannot happen again.”
He stops at the tiny cell that was his for nearly a year. He was shackled by his ankles, and taken out only to be interrogated, tortured or put to work.
Chum Mey is one of only 12 prisoners known to have survived Tuol Sleng. He was saved by his ability to repair sewing machines. It kept him alive long enough for Vietnamese troops to storm the Cambodian capital, ending four years of bloodstained Khmer Rouge rule.
“I was only lucky. I was waiting for my day. I knew that I would have to do my work, and then I would be killed.”
Chum Mey recounts the tortures used to extract false confessions from prisoners, and to force them into implicating others as CIA spies. He was beaten with bamboo rods, forced to eat faeces, given electric shocks to his ears, and had his toenails ripped out with pliers. Others were waterboarded, hung upside down, and had their hands crushed in clamps. Children were thrown from third-floor balconies to their deaths. Prisoners were presumed guilty, in effect “already dead”, Duch has said.
Despite Duch's courtroom confessions and his pleas that he be allowed to apologise in person to his victims' families, Chum Mey cannot forgive him.
“When he went into the dock, he only paid respect to the judges. He did not pay respect to the victims; [he did] not acknowledge [us]. It shows his cruelty still exists.”
In court, Duch is an ordinary-looking old man. He has been calm and polite, but his evidence has been littered with casual references to “smashing” people considered “enemiesof the state”.
The former high school maths teacher said he was ordered to kill prisoners at Tuol Sleng against his wishes, and obeyed out of fear he would be killed if he refused. But he did not directly implicate those who will follow him before the court.
“I cannot forgive him, because what he testified was not true,” Chum Mey, who testified against his former jailer, says. “He only blamed those who already die; he did not testify against those still alive. That is injustice that he did not tell the whole truth.”
Allegations of corruption have plagued the Cambodian side of the Khmer Rouge court, shaking international confidence.
Members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations have been reluctant to commit funding, and most has come from the United Nations, Europe and the US, although last month Japan donated $2 million to help cover Cambodian staff wages.
And there is a growing concern the government is interfering in the court's work, refusing to co-operate with inquiries already under way and trying to stifle further investigations it might find politically uncomfortable.
The Prime Minister, Hun Sen, himself a former low-level Khmer Rouge cadre whose cabinet contains several former senior Khmer Rouge figures, is openly critical of the court.
He has said further investigations could lead to civil war.
“And if war breaks out again and kills 20,000 or 30,000 people, who will be responsible? I wish the court would have a budget shortfall as soon as possible.”
Investigations into another five Khmer Rouge leaders, understood to include senior government figures and described by the court's international prosecutors as “strong, solid cases”, have been stifled by the Cambodian side of the court, it is believed on government orders.
Outside now, and standing at Tuol Sleng's barbed-wire gates, Chum Mey remembers the final cruelty, inflicted during the regime's desperate last days. Marched from the prison by his jailers, Chum Mey, by sheer chance, came across his wife and the young son he had never met, born just weeks after he was jailed. His family was marched north at gunpoint for two days. Then, without warning, they were woken at midnight and ordered to run into a rice field.
“They kill. As we ran we were sprayed with bullets. My wife fell, she screamed to me, 'You have to escape.' I looked back to see another friend shot and fall to the ground. My wife was already dead. My son was crying for a moment, then he was shot, too. I escaped into the forest.”
Thirty years on, in the bright sunshine of a busy Phnom Penh street, Chum Mey is still haunted by that night.
“When I sleep I still see their faces. Every day I think of them. What was their crime? My wife and son were innocent.”
