Torture persists in Cambodia

Friday, September 3, 2010
Republican American

"The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now." — Rep. Christopher J. Dodd, D-2nd District, March 12, 1975

For his role in the genocide of 2 million of his countrymen after U.S. military aid to his Southeast Asian nation ended in 1975, Kaing Guek Eav, aka Duch, has become the first Khmer Rouge figure to be convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by a U.N.-backed tribunal.

From 1976 to 1979, Duch was commandant of S-21, one of the most notorious prisons and interrogation centers in communist dictator Pol Pot's network of torture/death camps. On Duch's orders, 17,000 people, maybe more, were tortured to death for crimes they didn't commit. Their bodies were buried in the mass graves in what came famous as the Cambodian Killing Fields. His camp had only 12 known survivors.

Normally quick to fire off news releases touting his role in shaping foreign relations and international history, Sen. Dodd has been silent about the Duch case. Understandably, the survivors of the Cambodian Holocaust have been more forthcoming. Said a man who survived 12 days of torture at S-21: "I am not satisfied! We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and now once again. (Duch's) prison is comfortable, with air-conditioning, food three times a day, fans and everything, I sat on the floor with filth and excrement all around." But this is what can happen when innocent people are left to the mercies of genocidal maniacs so a wet-behind-the-ears U.S. congressman half a world away can score political points with the anti-war left.

For his peacenikery, Mr. Dodd got 35 years in Congress. For exterminating 17,000 people, Duch got 35 years in prison — "11 hours per life," as another S-21 survivor put it — but the sentence was reduced to 19 years to reflect time served and his five years of "illegal detention" in a military prison. Justice is served, said the United Nations.

Gerald Warner of The Daily Telegraph of London offered a different perspective: "The derisory sentence imposed upon a monster testifies to the institutionalized impotence of liberal-controlled societies confronted by evil. The only penalty that could remotely have matched his crimes was death. In so-called 'democratic' countries, however, under the aegis of the EU and U.N. bien-pensant doctrines of clemency, capital punishment is deemed 'barbaric.' That is why Western pseudo-civilization is doomed to extinction at the hands of more ruthless elements. Sparing the life of a creature like Duch is not civilized, it is effete. It does not testify to our regard for the sanctity of human life, but to our rulers' contempt for it.

"A society that hangs a man for stealing a loaf of bread, as ours used to do, has disregard for the sanctity of human life; but a system that does not punish murder with death displays even more indifference to the rights of innocent life, giving sententious liberal cant precedence over the duty to testify to the value of life by insisting that murderers forfeit their own continued existence. Nor, as the inane liberal mantra intones, would it reduce us to the same level as murderers: that is claptrap."

The trial of Steven Hayes, charged with three counts of murder in the 2007 Cheshire home invasion, begins Sept. 13. His lawyer demanded Superior Court Judge Jon Blue abolish Connecticut's death penalty by judicial fiat. Thankfully, Judge Blue does not share the defense's contempt for the sanctity of human life.