The UN-backed genocide tribunal began trying 5 former Cambodian leaders for the death of 1.7 million people this week
February 20, 2009
The Electric New Paper (Singapore)
AMID the quiet countryside once filled with anguished screams of the innocent, the former maths teacher added up the figures and made an entry into a notebook.
Kaing Guek Eav, the butcher of Tuol Sleng, was carefully tabulating the misery, torture and death he had inflicted on his fellow Cambodians.
Better known as Duch, he oversaw the Khmer Rouge's security apparatus and ran the regime's killing machine with cold, numerical precision, reported the Phnom Penh Post.
The Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia lasted from 1975 to 1979. About 1.7million people (over a quarter of the population then) died in the Khmer Rouge's self-inflicted genocide.
And Duch was the chief executioner who oversaw the torture and extermination of 16,000 men, women and children at Tuol Sleng centre.
On the run since 1979, he was finally caught in 1999.
He is now on trial for crimes against humanity in Cambodia.
One New Paper journalist who visited the centre three decades after the killing said it still made her hair stand.
That is of little wonder if you read how The Times described the situation there through the eyes of some former guards and prisoners.
Him Huy, a seasoned executioner at Tuol Sleng, said he would study the list of names of people he would kill that night. When the silent, terrified prisoners had been lifted on to his lorry, he drove them out to the pretty orchard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.
There, he took them one by one to the ditches that had been freshly dug, forced them to kneel and clubbed them to death with an iron bar.
'Sometimes it took just one blow, sometimes two,' he told The Times.
'After I clubbed them, someone else would slit their throats. But every time I clubbed someone to death, I would think, tomorrow, this might be me kneeling here, with one of the other guards killing me.'
Climate of fear
No one was safe.
'Out of my interrogation unit of 12, only I survived,' said Prak Khan, a soldier who became a torturer at the prison.
Bou Meng, an artist who was taken to S-21 in 1977, remembers how Duch would visit the room where he and dozens of other prisoners were shackled to the floor.
'He ordered me to beat the man beside me with a bamboo cane while he watched,' he said. 'Then Duch ordered the man to beat me. You could see the pleasure in his face.'
Duch was a frequent visitor to the torture rooms, where he drove the interrogation units to ever harsher techniques as they worked through the day and night in four-hour shifts.
Screaming all around
'The sound of screaming was all around us all the time,' said Vann Nath, a former prisoner and now a renowned artist.
Duch kept a meticulous record of the prison's workings and read every confession.
Often, he would send them back with corrections marked in red pen, as if they were the test papers of a reluctant student.
'Sometimes the confessions came back saying, 'must get more from the prisoner',' said Prak Khan.
The prisoners were deemed guilty simply because they had been accused - and it was the interrogators' duty to force them to admit that guilt.
Many admitted to crimes they did not even understand. 'I had not even heard of the CIA,' said Bou Meng.
'But they beat me with bamboo rods and electric cables until I confessed that I worked for the CIA and the KGB.'
'We kept torturing them until they confessed,' said Prak Khan. 'If they didn't, the torture got worse. We pulled out their finger and toenails and gave them electric shocks.
'Sometimes we would tie a bag over their heads so they suffocated. We'd take it off just as they were about to fall unconscious. If they still didn't confess, they'd be killed.'
Some inmates were sent to a clinic to 'donate' blood to the army hospitals.
Prak Khan, whose interrogation room was adjacent to the doctors' clinic, said: 'They would bring the prisoners blindfolded and tie them to the beds with their legs and arms spread out. They attached lines to their arms.
'The tubes led to a bottle on the floor. They pumped all the blood out until the bodies were limp. Then they threw the bodies into pits outside.'
Hell for guards too
The guards lived through their own hell. Him Huy, known to the prisoners as 'Cruel Him', said: 'One day I would be guarding prisoners with another soldier and that afternoon the other soldier would be arrested. You always expected to be arrested.'
Prak Khan often recognised old friends among the people taken into S-21.
'When I heard the names of people I knew, I pretended I didn't know them,' he said.
'If I showed I recognised them I would be killed too.'
Norng Chan Pal, a child survivor of the prison, told a press conference on Monday that he wanted Duch to face justice 'because Duch's hands are full of blood,' reported AFP.
Now, 49, he cried as he described making a recent visit to the prison, which is now a genocide museum, and returning to the spot where he last saw his own mother.
'I miss my mother,' he said.
'I looked at the place where my mother looked at me through a window on the second storey. I never saw her again.'
February 20, 2009
The Electric New Paper (Singapore)
AMID the quiet countryside once filled with anguished screams of the innocent, the former maths teacher added up the figures and made an entry into a notebook.
Kaing Guek Eav, the butcher of Tuol Sleng, was carefully tabulating the misery, torture and death he had inflicted on his fellow Cambodians.
Better known as Duch, he oversaw the Khmer Rouge's security apparatus and ran the regime's killing machine with cold, numerical precision, reported the Phnom Penh Post.
The Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia lasted from 1975 to 1979. About 1.7million people (over a quarter of the population then) died in the Khmer Rouge's self-inflicted genocide.
And Duch was the chief executioner who oversaw the torture and extermination of 16,000 men, women and children at Tuol Sleng centre.
On the run since 1979, he was finally caught in 1999.
He is now on trial for crimes against humanity in Cambodia.
One New Paper journalist who visited the centre three decades after the killing said it still made her hair stand.
That is of little wonder if you read how The Times described the situation there through the eyes of some former guards and prisoners.
Him Huy, a seasoned executioner at Tuol Sleng, said he would study the list of names of people he would kill that night. When the silent, terrified prisoners had been lifted on to his lorry, he drove them out to the pretty orchard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.
There, he took them one by one to the ditches that had been freshly dug, forced them to kneel and clubbed them to death with an iron bar.
'Sometimes it took just one blow, sometimes two,' he told The Times.
'After I clubbed them, someone else would slit their throats. But every time I clubbed someone to death, I would think, tomorrow, this might be me kneeling here, with one of the other guards killing me.'
Climate of fear
No one was safe.
'Out of my interrogation unit of 12, only I survived,' said Prak Khan, a soldier who became a torturer at the prison.
Bou Meng, an artist who was taken to S-21 in 1977, remembers how Duch would visit the room where he and dozens of other prisoners were shackled to the floor.
'He ordered me to beat the man beside me with a bamboo cane while he watched,' he said. 'Then Duch ordered the man to beat me. You could see the pleasure in his face.'
Duch was a frequent visitor to the torture rooms, where he drove the interrogation units to ever harsher techniques as they worked through the day and night in four-hour shifts.
Screaming all around
'The sound of screaming was all around us all the time,' said Vann Nath, a former prisoner and now a renowned artist.
Duch kept a meticulous record of the prison's workings and read every confession.
Often, he would send them back with corrections marked in red pen, as if they were the test papers of a reluctant student.
'Sometimes the confessions came back saying, 'must get more from the prisoner',' said Prak Khan.
The prisoners were deemed guilty simply because they had been accused - and it was the interrogators' duty to force them to admit that guilt.
Many admitted to crimes they did not even understand. 'I had not even heard of the CIA,' said Bou Meng.
'But they beat me with bamboo rods and electric cables until I confessed that I worked for the CIA and the KGB.'
'We kept torturing them until they confessed,' said Prak Khan. 'If they didn't, the torture got worse. We pulled out their finger and toenails and gave them electric shocks.
'Sometimes we would tie a bag over their heads so they suffocated. We'd take it off just as they were about to fall unconscious. If they still didn't confess, they'd be killed.'
Some inmates were sent to a clinic to 'donate' blood to the army hospitals.
Prak Khan, whose interrogation room was adjacent to the doctors' clinic, said: 'They would bring the prisoners blindfolded and tie them to the beds with their legs and arms spread out. They attached lines to their arms.
'The tubes led to a bottle on the floor. They pumped all the blood out until the bodies were limp. Then they threw the bodies into pits outside.'
Hell for guards too
The guards lived through their own hell. Him Huy, known to the prisoners as 'Cruel Him', said: 'One day I would be guarding prisoners with another soldier and that afternoon the other soldier would be arrested. You always expected to be arrested.'
Prak Khan often recognised old friends among the people taken into S-21.
'When I heard the names of people I knew, I pretended I didn't know them,' he said.
'If I showed I recognised them I would be killed too.'
Norng Chan Pal, a child survivor of the prison, told a press conference on Monday that he wanted Duch to face justice 'because Duch's hands are full of blood,' reported AFP.
Now, 49, he cried as he described making a recent visit to the prison, which is now a genocide museum, and returning to the spot where he last saw his own mother.
'I miss my mother,' he said.
'I looked at the place where my mother looked at me through a window on the second storey. I never saw her again.'
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