Reporter: Philippa McDonald
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio National
This is a transcript from Correspondents Report. The program is broadcast around Australia on Sundays at 08:00 on ABC Radio National.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Now to an atrocity that was committed a generation ago, yet whose perpetrators still have to be brought to account.
In Cambodia last week, 27 judges were sworn in for war crimes trials which are due to start next year.
It's a significant milestone in what's been a fraught process, bringing to trial the leaders of the Khmer Rouge on charges of genocide.
The ABC's Philippa McDonald was recently in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, where she compiled this report.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: I've just flown into Phnom Penh, and I've headed straight to the Tuol Sleng Museum, where I meet my guide for the morning, Lach Somaly.
LACH SOMALY: In 1976 the Khmer Rouge killed my father and brother, not here, but in Battambang Province. But in 1980 I come backing Phnom Penh with my mother. I remember at that time I was maybe 12 years old. I remember.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: Lach Somaly and I are on the edge of a massive quadrangle of what used to be a high school.
In 1975 it was taken over by Pol Pot's security forces and turned into a prison, and it's here that some of the worst atrocities of the regime occurred.
Lach Somaly points to 14 concrete headstones, shaded by frangipani trees. They are the graves of prisoners who died just before the Vietnamese Army arrived in 1979.
Twenty-thousand Cambodians died here in just four years, and only 14 of the prisoners got a decent burial. The remains of thousands of others are underneath the playground here where I'm standing, and in the killing fields not far from here.
I find it almost impossible to fathom that a school could be turned into torture chambers, that classrooms could be divided up into cells where prisoners are shackled and treated with such cruelty that they die within a couple of months.
LACH SOMALY: When it was the school the student is outside, you know. When it was school student it's outside, but the Khmer Rouge became the torture, yeah. They tied the victims' hand behind his back and raise him up in the air. And then they put them in the jar of water.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: Lach Somaly tells me that the prisoners here were ordinary people: factory workers, doctors, university professors, lawyers and some sporting heroes, that here whole families where killed if they were considered to be an enemy of the regime, that torture methods included electric shock, fingers being cut off and starvation, and that the Khmer Rouge documented much of this cruelty. In each room I go into there are photographs, and they're not just of the prisoners.
LACH SOMALY: And behind you different, the prisoner. The Khmer Rouge not prisoner. You can see picture of the Khmer Rouge uniform had… had had. Khmer Rouge soldier, they work here in the (inaudible), security, guard, they work here, but the Khmer Rouge most of them very young - 13, 14, 18-years-old.
They run away in 1979, when the Vietnam Army came, they run away - maybe still alive now, near the border, near the Thai border.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: Classroom after classroom I'm shown instruments of torture - barbed wire to stop prisoners leaping to their deaths, and the clothes that were taken from their bodies when they died.
In the last classroom, a tourist is taking photographs of two glass cabinets, but in the reflection it's hard to make out what's inside. Then it dawns on me, there are human skulls piled high on top each other, 10 and 20 deep.
There are 300 on that shelf, says Lach Somaly.
Quietly she tells me Cambodians have been waiting a long time for justice to be done.
"How do you feel about next year's war crimes trials," I ask?
"Most of the leaders have died before they've even reached prison," she says. "Two more face trial next year, but they are old."
"As for the rest," she says, "they're among us."
This is Philippa McDonald reporting from Phnom Penh for Correspondents Report.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Now to an atrocity that was committed a generation ago, yet whose perpetrators still have to be brought to account.
In Cambodia last week, 27 judges were sworn in for war crimes trials which are due to start next year.
It's a significant milestone in what's been a fraught process, bringing to trial the leaders of the Khmer Rouge on charges of genocide.
The ABC's Philippa McDonald was recently in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, where she compiled this report.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: I've just flown into Phnom Penh, and I've headed straight to the Tuol Sleng Museum, where I meet my guide for the morning, Lach Somaly.
LACH SOMALY: In 1976 the Khmer Rouge killed my father and brother, not here, but in Battambang Province. But in 1980 I come backing Phnom Penh with my mother. I remember at that time I was maybe 12 years old. I remember.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: Lach Somaly and I are on the edge of a massive quadrangle of what used to be a high school.
In 1975 it was taken over by Pol Pot's security forces and turned into a prison, and it's here that some of the worst atrocities of the regime occurred.
Lach Somaly points to 14 concrete headstones, shaded by frangipani trees. They are the graves of prisoners who died just before the Vietnamese Army arrived in 1979.
Twenty-thousand Cambodians died here in just four years, and only 14 of the prisoners got a decent burial. The remains of thousands of others are underneath the playground here where I'm standing, and in the killing fields not far from here.
I find it almost impossible to fathom that a school could be turned into torture chambers, that classrooms could be divided up into cells where prisoners are shackled and treated with such cruelty that they die within a couple of months.
LACH SOMALY: When it was the school the student is outside, you know. When it was school student it's outside, but the Khmer Rouge became the torture, yeah. They tied the victims' hand behind his back and raise him up in the air. And then they put them in the jar of water.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: Lach Somaly tells me that the prisoners here were ordinary people: factory workers, doctors, university professors, lawyers and some sporting heroes, that here whole families where killed if they were considered to be an enemy of the regime, that torture methods included electric shock, fingers being cut off and starvation, and that the Khmer Rouge documented much of this cruelty. In each room I go into there are photographs, and they're not just of the prisoners.
LACH SOMALY: And behind you different, the prisoner. The Khmer Rouge not prisoner. You can see picture of the Khmer Rouge uniform had… had had. Khmer Rouge soldier, they work here in the (inaudible), security, guard, they work here, but the Khmer Rouge most of them very young - 13, 14, 18-years-old.
They run away in 1979, when the Vietnam Army came, they run away - maybe still alive now, near the border, near the Thai border.
PHILIPPA MCDONALD: Classroom after classroom I'm shown instruments of torture - barbed wire to stop prisoners leaping to their deaths, and the clothes that were taken from their bodies when they died.
In the last classroom, a tourist is taking photographs of two glass cabinets, but in the reflection it's hard to make out what's inside. Then it dawns on me, there are human skulls piled high on top each other, 10 and 20 deep.
There are 300 on that shelf, says Lach Somaly.
Quietly she tells me Cambodians have been waiting a long time for justice to be done.
"How do you feel about next year's war crimes trials," I ask?
"Most of the leaders have died before they've even reached prison," she says. "Two more face trial next year, but they are old."
"As for the rest," she says, "they're among us."
This is Philippa McDonald reporting from Phnom Penh for Correspondents Report.
1 comment:
Please don't forget king Sihanouk. He was one of the leaders of Khmer Rouge.
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