Court weighs former Khmer Rouge prison chief's appeal

Students watch a live broadcast of the court hearing for the appeal of former Khmer Rouge jailer Kaing Guek Eav at the canteen inside the complex of the Cambodia's UN-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh, Feb. 3. Hoang Dinh Nam / AFP - Getty Images

Friday, February 03, 2012
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com

A math teacher turned prison chief who oversaw a torture center where at least 12,000 people died under Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime will learn Friday if a war crimes court has decided to overturn his conviction on charges of crimes against humanity.

Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, was deputy and then chairman of S-21, a school converted into a prison where thousands of Cambodians were brought for execution during the regime’s 1975-1979 rule. The classrooms served as torture sites and where prisoners were held shackled for days and months on end often until a “confession” was extracted from them. He is the only former cadre to accept responsibility and express remorse for his role in what has become known as “the killing fields.”

Duch, the first former Khmer Rouge cadre to stand trial before a United Nations-backed tribunal, was sentenced to 35 years in prison in July 2010 on charges that also included numerous grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. After reductions for 11 years he had already served in custody and another five years for his illegal detention by the Cambodian military, he received a 19-year term angering survivors and activists.

“The Chamber decided that there are significant mitigating factors that mandated the imposition of a finite term of imprisonment rather than one of life imprisonment,” the court – the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia -- said in a statement. “These factors include cooperation with the Chamber, admission of responsibility, limited expressions of remorse, the coercive environment in Democratic Kampuchea, and the potential for rehabilitation.”

Prosecutors appealed, asking for a life term. Duch’s attorneys also appealed, seeking an acquittal for the 70-year-old.

Under the Khmer Rouge, nearly one quarter of the country’s population – or at least 1.7 million people – died from execution, disease, starvation and overwork, according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia. The ultra-Maoist group strived to create an agrarian utopia (and called their effort a return to “Year Zero”), forcing city dwellers to rural areas to work on large farms, destroying money, shuttering schools and prohibiting religious worship in the predominantly Buddhist country. Intellectuals, or those with an education, were often deemed their enemies and targeted for execution.

Intensifying border skirmishes with neighboring Vietnam led the Vietnamese to invade Cambodia and thereby end Khmer Rouge rule. Vietnamese troops entered S-21 in April 1979, finding a few surviving prisoners and endless documentation -- confessions, execution orders --of what had happened there. Now called Tuol Sleng, the site serves as a memorial to the victims, with photos taken of them -- by the Khmer Rouge as part of their prisoner intake process -- serving as a haunting reminder of the past.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1999. Four of the regime’s top surviving cadres are on trial before the tribunal, which has come under criticism for alleged political interference by the Cambodian government and lack of judicial independence. An international judge said he resigned last October after government ministers made statements about the court not pursuing more trials after those of the four regime survivors.

The court, a hybrid of international and Cambodian judges, began in 2007 – after 10 years of back-and-forth negotiations on its composition and operations.