Many victims of the Khmer Rouge regime may now get justice

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot

25 Jul 2010
Trevor Royle
The Herald (Scotland)

"Whoever was arrested must die. It was the rule of our party," Kaing Guek Eav

A Dreadful mark punctuating Cambodia’s recent history will be reached tomorrow when the UN-backed special war crimes court known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) hands down its verdict on Kaing Guek Eav.

Better known as Comrade Duch, he stands accused of the murders of 14,000 innocent fellow citizens during the dark night of the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. The trial will conclude a judicial process that has scarred the nation, and made many people question what happened when Cambodian turned against Cambodian.

Duch, an otherwise nondescript man in his late 60s, does not look like a mass murderer, but if he is found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment – and everything points to that outcome – he will become part of an infamous history in which those in authority killed and tortured simply because they had the power to do it.

In Duch’s case he was in charge of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh where around 17,000 men, women and children were interrogated and tortured. Then they were killed and their bodies thrown into mass graves in the infamous killing fields at Choeung Ek, outside the city.

At the time of the atrocities the prison was an elementary school building, and it still looks like one, even though it has been turned into a museum in a leafy suburb. Codenamed S-21, it represented the careless attitude towards life which infiltrated Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge regime came to power in 1975 under their despotic leader Pol Pot. When he declared “year zero” a massive and carefully orchestrated campaign began to change Cambodian society out of all recognition by identifying and punishing people who were loosely classified as enemies of the state.

Duch, born in the central province of Kampong Thom, was central to that process. Although he was educated and worked as a maths teacher, he joined the extremist Khmer Rouge rebels flourishing in Cambodia in the late 1960s when the country was being attacked by US and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War. According to French philanthropist Francois Bizot, who was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1971 and underwent extreme interrogation at Duch’s hands, his tormentor was a difficult man to read, a “truth seeker… looking for the absolutes in life”.

Later Bizot was released from captivity because Duch thought him innocent. He was able to give testimony to the ECCC trial which seemed to prove the sheer banality of those who allow their lives to be consumed by depravity.

“When I met Duch, he was not predestined to be a killer,” Bizot said. “He did not know where the revolution would lead him. It’s like young Nazis in the 1930s who put on brown uniforms with swastikas. They didn’t know what the uniform would come to symbolise. I think the only answer is to look inside ourselves, not others. The Nazi, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan killer is a man who looks like us.”

In that guise Duch came quickly to prominence after the Khmer Rouge seized power and began to remake the state in their own image. It was a simple but brutal creed. All potential enemies, mostly those with an education, were doomed as soon as they were arrested and sent to S-21. Innocent or not, they faced certain death, or, in the language of the Khmer Rouge, they “absolutely had to be smashed”. And following barbaric torture, including the slow and exquisitely painful extraction of blood from the body, that is what happened.

During the five-year rule of the Khmer Rouge, which ended in 1979 when Vietnamese troops invaded, over a million Cambodians were killed, either through execution or being worked to death.

But Duch’s activities in S-21 are particularly gruesome. It was systematic, orderly and minutely recorded. Once the victims had been photographed and their details copied, Duch wrote “smash” against their names before they made the final journey to the killing fields.

Even today, S-21 remains morbidly fascinating, with its serried ranks of the victims’ mug shots on the walls and those visiting it always ask a necessary question: “What kind of person was capable of committing these atrocities?”

That helps to explain the international interest in Duch’s trial. Following the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, he went into cover in the north of the country along the border with Thailand. He adopted the guise of a teacher, calling himself Hong Pen, and during that time he seems to have become a Christian, after his wife was murdered.

He was only discovered in April 1999 when the investigative journalist Nic Dunlop tracked him down and started quizzing him. In common with other war criminals charged with crimes against humanity he used the excuse of ­

obeying orders and pointed out that if he had not carried out the interrogations Pol Pot would have found someone else to do it.

“Whoever was arrested must die. It was the rule of our party,” he told Dunlop.

“S-21 had no right to arrest anybody. We had the responsibility to interrogate and give the confession to the central committee of the party.”

As a result of Dunlop’s discovery Duch was indicted and sent to trial for crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and homicide and torture.

Although it has been a lengthy process and there have been accusations of foot-dragging, the trial has brought out into the open not just the grim details of Duch’s many executions but also the dynamics of evil. According to the psychological examination commissioned by the court Duch is highly intelligent, but also easily led and impressionable.

“There is a strong trace of obsessive traits in Duch’s personality, both past and present,” the indictment reads. “He is meticulous, conscientious, control-oriented, attentive to detail and seeks recognition from his superiors.”

Throughout the judicial process Duch used the trial to repeatedly apologise for his actions and has expressed “regret and heartfelt sorrow” to those who suffered at his hands. But last week this made little impact on those Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge years. “Duch never talked about real things. Duch did not say sorry to the people, he just said sorry to the judges,” said Chum Mey, 79, one of only 12 inmates who survived S-21, in his case because he was useful as a mechanic. “He changed his testimony. Sometimes he said he was responsible, but then he would say he was acting under orders.”

Duch has expressed the hope that he would be acquitted because he had expressed remorse. But the ECCC judges – one French, one New Zealander and three Cambodians – have been overwhelmed by the weight of evidence, much of it having been produced by Duch at the time of the killings.

How I found this ‘mass murderer’

The large ears, crooked yellow teeth and cropped hair were unmistakeable.

Speaking in perfect English, the man in a T-shirt bearing the initials of the American Refugee Committee, introduced himself to photojournalist Nic Dunlop as Hang Pin, and said he had been a maths teacher.

Dunlop knew better. It was Kaing Guek Eav, who, within a few bloody years in the 70s, had been, in Dunlop’s words, “one of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century.” His nom de guerre had been Comrade Duch.

Dunlop had to remain circumspect at that first meeting, in rural Samlot, Cambodia. The area had been under Khmer Rouge control and only recently opened up.

“At that point, I didn’t know whether he had renounced his past and had changed, or whether he was still killing people. I asked questions about his background, without appearing to take too much interest. I thought, ‘I’m going to have to come back and plan this carefully’, which did happen.”

He returned with a fellow Western journalist, Nate Thayer, who had interviewed Pol Pot shortly before the Cambodian dictator’s death the previous year, 1998.

Together, Dunlop and Thayer began to question ‘Hang Pin’, who talked about how he had become a Christian. Eventually, the man realised the game was up. “It is God’s will that you are here,” he said. “Now my future is in God’s hands.” Following this encounter, Duch disappeared for days. Then one day he simply gave himself up.

This was 11 years ago. It has taken a long time for Duch to be brought to trial.

Dunlop, based in Thailand, made his first visit to Cambodia in 1989. Not long after, the Vietnamese army pulled out of the country, leaving the government to fight the Khmer Rouge alone. In 1992 the UN mounted a peace-keeping mission, but war continued until the Khmer Rouge imploded in 1998.

The Cambodia that Dunlop came to know was generally safer than it had been in the apocalyptic 1970s. But he said: “There were times when it was hairy. Things could change in a matter of seconds. There were frontline areas, but the frontline could move. There was always an element of insecurity, and the country was laced with landmines.”

“At one point there was a big night-time gun battle that raged for about 30 minutes. Next morning, there was nothing to show that anything had happened.”

Gradually, too, Duch began to impinge on Dunlop’s consciousness.

“If there was one person willing to talk, who could explain something of what had occurred in Cambodia, it would be Duch.

“His prison in Phnom Penh has thousands of photographs of his victims and among them is a shot of him, and that is what enabled me to identify him in 1999.

“So it was really not so much a quest to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice – although of course I thought that should be done – it was more to find somebody who could explain what had occurred under the Khmer Rouge. There had been rumours that he was still alive. It was not until 1999, that he walked up to me. It was largely an accidental meeting in Samlot.”

Dunlop, who has written a book, The Lost Executioner: The Story of Comrade Duch and the Khmer Rouge, said of Duch’s trial: “It is a step. As to what it means, you’d probably have to ask ordinary Cambodians.”

Four other leaders of the Khmer Rouge are expected to go on trial next year but if it had not been for Dunlop, there is a very strong chance that Duch would not be in jail, far less awaiting tomorrow’s verdict.