Khmer Rouge Tribunal Ends Testimony at First Int’l Trial

By Robert Carmichael

PHNOM PENH, Sep 23 (IPS) - After 72 days of hearings, the first international trial of a Khmer Rouge regime member has wrapped up its often horrific testimony in the Cambodian capital.

Comrade Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, has sat placidly in the dock since proceedings began in late March, as the court unravelled his meticulous supervision of at least 15,000 murders while he headed the main Khmer Rouge torture centre, known as S-21, in the 1970s.

Although Duch has repeatedly apologised to victims, many Cambodians do not believe his expressions of remorse are genuine. Despite that he did so again on the penultimate day of testimony.

"I would like to apologise," he told the court. "I would like to seek forgiveness from the families of the victims."

But while Duch admits to the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he has also continually pleaded that he was a mere functionary in a much bigger system. He said he had no choice but to follow the orders handed down from his superiors to execute S-21’s inmates by sending them to the Killing Fields at Chhoeung Ek outside Phnom Penh.

"The only way to survive was to fulfil the duties assigned to us … so I tried to survive on a daily basis," Duch told the court during the final week of testimony.

Duch has repeatedly insisted he did not personally arrest, torture or kill anyone, and told the court that suspected "enemies" of the revolution simply had to be killed. Anyone who was arrested was by default guilty, and the function of prisons like S-21 was to extract a confession before killing them.

Many people have expressed hope that the trial will offer some relief and answers to the events that consumed Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Two million people are thought to have died from execution, starvation and overwork in the brutal four years of Khmer Rouge rule.

Prosecutors used the proceedings to accuse him of operating S-21, one of nearly 200 detention centres around the country, with uncommonly ruthless efficiency.

Powerful testimony from witnesses, recounting their harrowing experiences, has echoed those of the many more who were enslaved around the country.

Bou Meng, 68, told the court how he became one of the handful of prisoners who survived S-21. Duch had heard Bou Meng was an artist, so he put him to work painting huge propaganda portraits of Pol Pot and other senior Khmer Rouge leaders.

The former prisoner’s wife, who was arrested with him, disappeared and was killed at S-21. His emotional testimony described how he was beaten with sticks by S-21 interrogators, who accused him of spying for America and the Soviet Union, common charges under an increasingly paranoid regime.

"Every time they beat me, they asked me questions: ‘Who introduced you into the CIA (the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency)? What was their name?’" Bou Meng told the court in July, breaking down in tears. "I responded that I did not know – I gave the same response."

"I could not think of any mistakes I had made," he said. "I did not know of any KGB (Russia’s former national security agency) or CIA network. They just kept beating me up."

Duch admitted to the tribunal that most confessions, which were extracted from each prisoner through beatings, electrocution and even the removal of toenails, were untrue. He told the court a number of times that in ordering the executions, he was simply following orders.

"The decision of the Party was overwhelming," he told the court on the penultimate day of testimony on Sep. 16 as he described how he had his brother-in-law arrested, tortured and then executed. "Nobody could stand in its way. . . . I was an ordinary party member. I had no right to protest."

The damage wrought by the Khmer Rouge was felt mainly in Cambodia, but the trial also showed how the effects of the regime’s murders rippled around the world to terrible effect.

The court heard from a French woman whose Cambodian diplomat husband returned to the country in 1977 and was murdered at S-21, and a New Zealand sportsman whose brother was taken from his yacht, which had strayed into Cambodian waters, and eventually killed.

Duch’s guilt is not in question – the key unknown is what sentence will be levied on him. (Cambodia does not have the death penalty.)

Final arguments in the trial will take place at the end of November, and judges are expected to hand down their verdict in 2010.

Duch’s defence has indicated its belief that judges should take into account his numerous apologies and admissions of guilt, as well as the fact that he spent a decade in detention before his trial.

But whether Duch’s remorse is genuine — which many Cambodians doubt — the fact that he has apologised is important to some, such as former S-21 survivor Chum Mey, 79.

Chum Mey told the court during his testimony in June that five of his children died under the Khmer Rouge. When he finally returned to his village, just two relatives were still alive there. Despite being tortured at S-21, Chum Mey said – in a video recorded before the trial began and shown by the defence on the penultimate day of the trial – that he bears no grudge against Duch.

"Before I was not free to speak out as I am doing now," he said in the video, which was filmed at S-21 in February 2008 when Duch, who broke down in tears at the prison, returned there and apologised to the nation. "I thank Duch for coming to give testimony. . . . I would ask him to speak the truth before the court."

Duch claims to have done that despite some significant inconsistencies in his statements such as refuting the testimony of some parties who said they saw him torture or kill people. But even he admits that saving himself by carrying out the killings of so many thousands of others was fundamentally dishonourable.

"Yes, you can say I am a coward," Duch told the court in the final week of testimony.