Khmer Rouge torturer faces justice

March 30 2009
By Tim Johnston in Phnom Penh
Financial Times (UK)

More than 30 years after Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge was driven from power, one of its prominent officials stood in the dock on Monday to answer for his crimes.

Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, his nom de guerre , ran the regime’s notorious torture centre, Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, where an estimated 16,000 men, women and children died between 1975 and 1979.

Charged with crimes against humanity, murder and torture, he is the only prominent member of the Khmer Rouge regime to express remorse for its attempt to create an agrarian utopia. The communist clique’s political experiment led to the deaths of up to 1.7m people – a quarter of the population – through murder, overwork, disease and starvation.

Duch’s case is being heard by a unique Cambodian/international hybrid court based loosely on French civil law, with five judges – three Cambodian, two international – and local and international prosecutors and defenders. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in jail.

Prosecutors read out the indictment on Monday, the dry legal language doing little to bleach the horror from the catalogue of inhumanity.

“There were autopsies carried out on live persons, there was medical experimentation and people were bled to death; these were all crimes against humanity admitted by Duch,” the prosecutors said.

Duch said little beyond confirming his identity but he has confessed to many of the crimes.

He sat facing his judges in the purpose-built court on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, a slight figure wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, looking more like the mathematics teacher he once was than the ruthless killer whose punctilious documentary record of his brutality now forms a large part of the case against him.

Hundreds of Cambodian and foreign spectators gathered behind a glass screen at his back to witness an event described as “momentous” by Theary Seng, whose parents were murdered by the regime and who now runs the Centre for Social Development, a pressure group.

“I’m still processing it, but it is just an amazing sensation after having talked and written so much about it, after having waited personally for 30 years for this court to take place,” said Ms Seng, who spent three years in a Khmer Rouge detention centre as a child and still remembers her mother being taken away for execution.

“Every Cambodian can be considered a victim, no one was immune,” she said.

The process of bringing Khmer Rouge leaders to trial – expected to cost $150m (€114m, £106m) – has been deeply problematic, mainly because the Cambodian government, led by Hun Sen, prime minister, a former commander in the Khmer Rouge before he defected to Vietnam, is said to have interfered repeatedly.

“Hun Sen has thrown obstacle after obstacle in the way of fair trials, an independent tribunal and speedy justice,” said Brad Adams, the Asia Director for Human Rights Watch. “We don’t have an independent court. We have a politicised Cambodian judiciary matched with a minority group of UN-appointed people.”

Pol Pot, the man who inspired the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, died in 1998, apparently of natural causes. But four other key members of the regime have been indicted.

They include Nuon Chea, the movement’s deputy leader, who was also known as “Brother number two”.