Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Lone female survivor of Pol Pot's secret prison breaks silence

Jul 24, 2007
DPA
"I didn't tell anyone all these years. Not even my husband. It was too painful" - Chim Math, lone woman survivor of S-21
Phnom Penh - Possibly the only woman to survive Pol Pot's infamous Toul Sleng S-21 torture centre, Chim Math broke her silence Tuesday after nearly 30 years saying she wants to testify at an impending trial of Cambodia's former Khmer Rouge leaders.

The 49-year-old becomes the first woman and among only eight known survivors entered the gates of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's secret prison, where an estimated 14,000 people perished.

Previously, only three men were believed to still be alive as the 56-million dollar joint UN-Cambodia trial of a handful of surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge's brutal Democratic Kampuchea regime looms.

Former commandant of S-21, Kang Kech Ieu, alias Duch, is the only person currently in jail awaiting a decision by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia on indictments.

Documentation Center of Cambodia director Youk Chhang confirmed that records had been recovered from Toul Sleng proving Math had been held at the former school that became one of the epicentres of Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Chhang said Math had previously denied she had been held at the prison, possibly out of fear. Math says she kept her story secret because it was too difficult to tell.

'I didn't tell anyone all these years. Not even my husband. It was too painful,' Math said as she stared at her picture taken by her captors, among more than one thousand images documenting the victims of the slaughter that took place in S-21 between 1975 and 1979.

'Now the trial is coming, my family has persuaded me to come forward so I can be an eyewitness and help my country.'

Known as Khem Math at the time of her October 10, 1978 arrest, she says she was held in S-21 for two weeks before being transferred to nearby Prey Sar prison, which she escaped from to run to the mountains of Kampong Speu province when Vietnamese-backed troops overthrew the Khmer Rouge on January 7, 1979.

Math thinks she may have been spared because she was from Stoeung district in Kampong Thom, prison chief Duch's place of birth.

She held a copy of a Khmer Rouge document showing she joined the movement in 1974 as a 16-year-old. Above her picture is a stamp from S-21 in Khmer script. At the bottom corner of the page, a blank space remains next to the column grimly titled 'date of death'.

'This is a real breakthrough,' David Chandler, a historian and author of 'Voices From S-21,' replied in an email Tuesday.

Up to 2 million Cambodians are believed to have died during the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge as the ultra-Maoists attempted to turn the country into an agrarian utopia, bereft of markets, money and social classes.

Math says two photos she kept with her of her father dressed in a Lon Nol-era police uniform had led to her arrest during a period when the south-western zone, led by former military commander Ta Mok, began conducting internal purges.

'I can't describe what I saw there. I could look out of my cell through cracks in the wall and see the torture and the bodies being thrown away like rubbish. For two weeks, that was my television. The smell of pig excrement mixed with blood which was S-21 will never leave me.'

Court officials say they hope hearings will get underway by early next year. Pol Pot died at his home in 1998 without facing trial. Ta Mok died in hospital of age-related complications last year.

Researchers say Math's testimony will shed invaluable light on the conditions inside S-21 for female prisoners, about which little was previously known.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does this latest testimony prove that Tuol Sleng was a torture centre for communist cadres who had been suspected of deviating from the communist line, and not for ordinary people? If this was the case, Tuol Sleng would simply be a symbol of what communist revolution was doing to its own offsprings, and not the symbol of the massacres across the country. Ordinary people did not have that "privilege" of being taken to Tuol Sleng. They were simply killed where they were or in their areas.

It seems that Khmer Rouge scholars (mostly foreign) have overlooked this important aspect of the communist revolution in Cambodia. A number of those scholars were supporters of the Khmer Rouge anyway.

LAO Mong Hay, Hong Kong

Anonymous said...

Which is proves that Tuol Sleng facility was a distribution center. Means people were moved in and out . Some were sent to Prey Sar , some were executed. BTW only 4000 files survived , but why then claims of executed go up to 20.000 ? Such an obvious things nobody looked up.

The reality is in Tuol Sleng were executed roughly 4.000 people , most of them were Khmer Rouge own cadres.

Anonymous said...

Excellent observations above! This is one of the reason I never visited S-21 whenever I'm there. It's like paying sympathy for the devil.

expat-advisory said...

here is an exclusive interview with Chim Math

http://www.expat-advisory.com/cambodia/phnom-penh/