Comrade Duch, the Khmer Rouge executioner who killed thousands for Pol Pot, faces his day of justice

Chum Mey points to a photograph of a victim of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh. Photograph: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images

Chum Mey, one of the dozen survivors who walked out of Tuol Sleng death centre in Phnom Penh, counts on the international court imposing a sentence of life imprisonment

Sunday 25 July 2010
Ben Doherty, Phnom Penh
The Observer (UK)

Chum Mey walks slowly through the corridors of Tuol Sleng – once a school, then a prison, now a museum – past thousands of black-and-white photographs, the unsmiling portraits of the Khmer Rouge's victims in this place. He stops at faces he recognises, pointing out friends, colleagues, a relative he saw for the final time through barbed wire.

Over four years in the late 1970s, it is reckoned, more than 12,000 men, women and children passed through Tuol Sleng prison in central Phnom Penh, and were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Most were tortured into confessing crimes they couldn't possibly have committed before being loaded on to trucks and driven to the notorious killing fields of Choeung Ek, where they were bludgeoned to death with ox-cart axles.

Tomorrow, more than 30 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the man who ran Tuol Sleng prison, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, will be sentenced for the crimes committed here. As Pol Pot's executioner-in-chief, he will be the first Khmer Rouge figure to be held accountable by a court for the crimes of the ultra-communist regime which killed an estimated 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia's population, between 1975 and 1979.

Duch, 67, has confessed to his crimes, telling the court last year: "I am solely and individually responsible for the loss of at least 12,380 lives." There seems little doubt in Cambodia that he will be sentenced to life in prison, the heaviest penalty the court can impose.

His sentencing is of enormous interest across the country. More than 30,000 Cambodians attended the purpose-built international court over the course of Duch's nine-month trial. His sentence will be broadcast on live television.

"I want the court to give Duch a life in prison," Mey, a former mechanic, says through an interpreter. "He must never be allowed out, so that the younger generation cannot follow suit. It cannot happen again." He stops now at the tiny cell, barely 3ft by 5ft, which was his for nearly a year. He was shackled by his ankles, taken out only to be interrogated, tortured or put to work. Mey is one of only 12 people known to have walked out of Tuol Sleng.

He was saved by his ability to repair sewing machines; it kept him alive long enough for Vietnamese troops to storm the Cambodian capital, ending four years of bloodstained Khmer Rouge rule. "I was not going to be saved, I was only lucky. I was waiting for my day. I knew that I would have to do my work, and then I would be killed."

The Khmer Rouge tried to turn Cambodia into a classless society by forcing the urban population to work the land in agrarian communes. It targeted "subversives" who included professionals and intellectuals, the educated, ethnic minorities and town dwellers. Thousands died of starvation and disease.

Mey recounts the tortures used to extract false confessions from prisoners and force them into implicating others as CIA spies. He was beaten with bamboo rods, forced to eat faeces, given electric shocks to his ears, and had his toenails ripped out with pliers. Others were waterboarded, hung upside down, and had their hands crushed in clamps. Children were thrown from third-storey balconies to their deaths. Prisoners were presumed guilty, effectively already dead, Duch has said.

Despite Duch's courtroom confessions and his pleas that he be allowed to apologise in person to his victims' families, Mey cannot forgive him. He is angered by Duch's lack of remorse. "When he went into the dock, he only paid respect to the judges, he did not pay respect to the victims, [he did] not acknowledge [us]. It shows his cruelty still exists."

In court, Duch, now an old man, has been calm and polite, but his evidence has been littered with casual references to smashing people considered enemies of the state. The former high-school maths teacher said he was ordered to kill prisoners at Tuol Sleng against his wishes, and obeyed out of fear that he would be killed if he refused. But he did not directly implicate those who will follow him in court. "I cannot forgive him, because what he testified was not true," Mey, who gave evidence in court against his former jailer, says. "He only blamed those who already died, he did not testify against those still alive."

Beyond Duch's sentence, the future of the internationally sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia – the Khmer Rouge tribunal – and, in particular, who comes next before it, is a sensitive issue for the country.

The next case will try, simultaneously, the four most senior Khmer Rouge cadres still alive. Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two, was the Khmer Rouge's second-in-command and chief ideologue. Ieng Sary was foreign minister and his wife, Ieng Thirith, minister for social affairs. Khieu Samphan was the titular head of state.

But the defendants are old – the youngest is 78 – and some are seriously ill. It will be the middle of next year before their trial can start, and it is unlikely to end until 2014 or 2015, says the UN. "There is a high likelihood that one or more of the charged persons will be unfit to plead or will die before the conclusion of their trial," the court's international co-prosecutor, William Smith, has said. The prime minister, Hun Sen, himself a former low-level Khmer Rouge cadre, is critical of the court. He has said further investigations could lead to a civil war. "If war breaks out again and kills 20,000 or 30,000 people, who will be responsible?"

Standing at Tuol Sleng's barbed-wire gates, Mey remembers the Khmer Rouge's final cruelty, inflicted during the regime's last days. Marched from the prison by his jailers, Mey, by sheer chance, came across his wife and the young son he had never met, born just weeks after he was sent to prison.

His family was marched north at gunpoint for two days. Then, without warning, they were woken at midnight and ordered to run into a rice field. "They kill. As we ran we were sprayed with bullets. My wife fell, she screamed to me, 'you have to escape'.

I looked back to see another friend shot and fall to the ground. My wife was already dead. My son was crying for a moment, then he was shot too. I escaped into the forest."

Thirty years on, Mey is still haunted by that night. "When I sleep I still see their faces. Every day I think of them. What was their crime? My wife and son were innocent."