Production, speakers offer glimpse into genocide

Hoeur Kim (right) speaks to area high school students Wednesday while her daughter, Sreng Kim-Chhay, looks on. The women are to present “Escaping the Killing Fields: A Daughter and Mother Tell Their Stories” this evening at Heidelberg University. (PHOTO BY ROB LEDWEDGE)

September 20, 2012
By MaryAnn Kromer - Staff Writer
The Advertiser-Tribune (Ohio, USA)

Heidelberg University is observing Genocide Awareness Week with a series of events that recall the atrocities that took place in Cambodia in the 1970s. The annual observance revisits genocides that have occurred in various parts of the world.

Tuesday evening, a readers' theatre presentation, "April 17: Stories from the Cambodian Genocide," was staged.

Chris Tucci, professor of theater at Heidelberg, wrote the script based on the book "First They Killed My Father" by Loung Ung.

The drama recalls April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over the Cambodian government. The military began a purge that claimed more than 20 percent of the Cambodian people over a period of nearly four years.

Pol Pot Revisited [-Revisionist exhoneration of a KILLER?]

By Israel Shamir / September 18th, 2012
Dissident Voice

Now, in the monsoon season, Cambodia is verdant, cool and relaxed. The rice paddies on the low hill slopes are flooded, forests that hide old temples are almost impassable, rough seas deter swimmers. It’s a pleasant time to re-visit this modest country: Cambodia is not crowded, and Cambodians are not greedy, but rather peaceful and relaxed. They fish for shrimp, calamari and sea bream. They grow rice, unspoiled by herbicides, manually planted, cultivated and gathered. They produce enough for themselves and for export, too — definitely no paradise, but the country soldiers on.

Socialism is being dismantled fast: Chinese-owned factories keep churning tee-shirts for the European and American market employing tens of thousands of young Cambodian girls earning $80 per month. They are being sacked at the first sign of unionising. Nouveau-riches live in palaces; there are plenty of Lexus cars, and an occasional Rolls-Royce. Huge black and red, hard and precious tree trunks are constantly ferried to the harbour for timber export, destroying forests but enriching traders. There are many new French restaurateurs in the capital; NGO reps earn in one minute the equivalent of a worker’s monthly salary.

Not much remains from the turbulent period when the Cambodians tried to radically change the order of things in the course of their unique traditionalist conservative peasant revolution under communist banner. That was the glorious time of Jean Luc Godard and his La Chinoise, of the Cultural Revolution in China sending party bonzes for re-education to remote farms, of Khmer Rouge marching on the corrupt capital. Socialist movement reached a bifurcation point: whether to advance to more socialism Mao-style, or retreat to less socialism the Moscow way. The Khmer Rouge experiment lasted only three years, from 1975 to 1978.

At the ROM, photos document Cambodia’s record of horror

Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia Institute for Contemporary Culture’s Roloff Beny gallery Level 4, Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. On display September 22, 2012 to March 10, 2013
(/Courtesy of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Photo Archive Group)

Tuesday, Sep. 18 2012
JAMES ADAMS
The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

The camera, like the unblinking eye of God, has been a mute witness to happiness and horror, and everything in between since the invention of photography in the early 19th century. The 103 black-and-white pictures in the exhibition Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia weave their spell on the horror end of the experiential spectrum, but ever so quietly and sombrely.

The melancholy comes from the realization that soon after these photographs were taken, every single one of the subjects were beaten, mutilated, interrogated, forced to make false confessions, then killed and their bodies dumped into mass graves. These are shots before the shooting, so to speak, taken between 1975 and 1979 in the notorious S-21 prison camp that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge established in a converted high school near Phnom Penh. By the time S-21 was liberated, in late January, 1979, more than 14,000 persons had been imprisoned there. Only 23, including five children, were alive to greet their Vietnamese and non-Khmer Rouge liberators. (The camp is now a museum of genocide.)

The negatives – there are more than 6,000 in total – for these images were discovered in the early 1990s by two U.S. photojournalists who subsequently set up a team, the Photo Archive Group, to clean, catalogue and print them. The original prints used by the Khmer Rouge were about the size of passport photographs and attached to each prisoner’s dossier. However, by the time S-21 was closed, images and dossiers had largely been separated, with the result that the inmates pictured in the exhibition, opening Saturday at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, are, with only a handful of poignant exceptions, anonymous.

Khmer Rouge photos solve decades old mysteries

Photo: Reaksa Chuon poses with a photograph of his father (Claire Slattery)

Youk Chhang, Documentation Centre of Cambodia Director (Claire Slattery)

Photographs of Khmer Rouge victims (Claire Slatterly)

31 August 2012
Claire Slattery Phnom Penh for Connect Asia
Australia Network News

For thousands of Cambodians, the fate of their loved ones under the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s remains a mystery, and the focus sometimes of a life-long search for answers.

DC-Cam, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, is an organisation dedicated to collecting and researching documents from the Khmer Rouge period. From time-to-time, new documents and photographs emerge that provide people with information about how their friends and family members died but, a recent donation to DC-Cam has done just that.

Chuon Reaksa was eight-years-old when he last saw his father in 1976. For 36 years, Mr Reaksa has searched for answers about what happened to his father after he disappeared from Cambodia's Battambang Province during the Khmer Rouge Regime.

Now, he's has come face-to-face with his father again, in a photo.

"They sent him by train to Pronet Preah around my family, the whole family, only three days in Pronet Preah and he go, he leave family. So at that time, the information is finished until now I found him in picture. I'm very sorry," he said choking back tears.

Duch fails to ID Westerners imprisoned in S-21

The above photographs, of two unidentified men, were found with a cache of recently donated photographs of S-21 prison victims. Photograph: Documentation Center of Cambodia

Thursday, 30 August 2012
Joseph Freeman
The Phnom Penh Post

As part of an ongoing search to confirm the identities of two Westerners whose faces emerged in a recent anonymous donation of photos featuring inmates from the notorious S-21 prison, researchers yesterday turned to a man they believed might have special insight into the duo’s fate – their jailer.

Sitting in a small room outside his detention cell at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, where he is currently serving a life sentence for his crimes as the former chairman of the Phnom Penh detention and interrogation centre, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, briefly studied the faces of the men, put them aside and began to talk.

There would be, however, no great revelations.

“He said there were only four Western prisoners at S-21, and he didn’t really remember the faces of those people,” the Documentation Center of Cambodia’s Savina Sirik told the Post. Sirik, and her colleague Kok-Thay Eng, interviewed Duch for two hours yesterday to try and solve the mystery of the two mens’ identities.

Evidentiary Hearing in Case 002 | August 23, 2012 (Khmer)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slJaIxtGcd0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK1p_swSu8U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5o5N4IthFI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubhUpgVvQt8

Chilling Evidence in Khmer Rouge Trial

Em Oeun

August 29, 2012
By Luke Hunt
The Diplomat

Chilling evidence surrounding the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge leadership continues to mount at the Extraordinary Chambers for the Courts in Cambodia where three of Pol Pot’s senior henchmen – Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary -- are back before a bench of local and international judges.

This time the evidence was delivered by 61-year-old Em Ouen who worked as a medic during 1977 and 1978 and testified he had seen live humans being used for medical experiments, instead of corpses, while in Sector 20, a Khmer Rouge provincial base at Prey Veng southeast of Phnom Penh.

He described how, as a trainee, he was forced to stand and watch as fingers and limbs were amputated saying, “And the whole body would be chopped or operated and cut into pieces and put into a bag to be discarded.”

Former doctor recounts Khmer Rouge paranoia

Em Oeun

Tuesday, 28 August 2012
Joseph Freeman
The Phnom Penh Post

When soldiers yanked people out of the rooms of the Phnom Penh hospital where Khmer Rouge-era physician Em Oeun trained in the late 1970s, there were few explanations and the movement was swift.

The Khmer Rouge “actually arrested people in the hospital”, said Oeun, a civil party in Case 002 who retook the stand yesterday. “They put those people who were arrested in the trucks, which were already prepared outside the hospital premises. I don’t know where they took them to.”

The general atmosphere, as a result of all the inexplicable arrests, was one of constant paranoia and mistrust.

“Normally, people did not talk about the truth, they never chit-chatted, the reason being, we could not find time to converse because they were all afraid,” he said. “At the time, the party paid greater attention to obeying the discipline rather than paying attention to human beings or their lives.”

Tribunal Witness Describes ‘Reeducation’ of Medical Students

Em Oeun

Em Oeun, 61, a former medical student of the regime, said Monday that Nuoin Chea told students they should follow the regime’s doctrine.

28 August 2012

Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer

PHNOM PENH - Top Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan ordered lower cadre to be “faithful” to the Communist Party of Kampuchea and to purge its internal enemies, a witness told the UN-backed tribunal Monday.

Em Oeun told the court the three leaders held political training and re-education of medical students, of which he was one, and “destroyed” those who did not follow.

Nuon Chea, the regime’s ideologue, and Khieu Samphan, its nominal head of state, are on trial for atrocity crimes, alongside Ieng Sary, its foreign minister.

Em Oeun, 61, a former medical student of the regime, said Monday that Nuoin Chea told students they should follow the regime’s doctrine. “If we did not follow the party, we would be responsible for what we had done,” he told the court.

Do Dantrei killing fields

The discovery of a mass grave in Do Dontrei brings back terrible memories for a community

Khmer Rouge survivor Chea Nouen. Source: AP

Skulls and bones have been unearthed at a newly-discovered grave site in Do Dantrei village in Cambodia. Source: AP

August 26, 2012
AP

Cambodia's regime prefers to literally bury the past, especially since some of its current leaders, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, were once Khmer Rouge.

IT was four gray skulls resting on a bed of jumbled bones that again triggered Chea Nouen's memories.

Breast-feeding her baby with her hands and feet shackled; her husband thrown into a pit to be turned into human fertilizer, her own marches to the killing fields - where she was saved three times by an executioner.

The past came hurtling back earlier this month when a new mass grave was discovered in a village in northwestern Cambodia, one of the bloodiest killing grounds in the country. Like most of Cambodia's 300 known mass grave clusters, it is not being investigated or exhumed to find out what happened.

More than three decades after the Khmer Rouge ultra-revolutionaries orchestrated the deaths of nearly 2 million people, or one out of every four Cambodians, the country has not laid its ghosts to rest.

Cambodia's regime prefers to literally bury the past, especially since some of its current leaders, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, were once Khmer Rouge.

S-21 photo leaves husband's search futile

Kim Vun, 53, looks through S-21 prisoner photos yesterday at the Documentation Centre of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. Vun learned at the Khmer Rouge tribunal on Wednesday that his wife had been held and executed at the notorious prison in 1978. Photograph: Meng Kimlong/Phnom Penh Post

Chim Nary, Kim Vun's wife

Friday, 24 August 2012
Bridget Di Certo and Chhay Channyda
The Phnom Penh Post

After learning the fate of his wife while giving testimony at the Khmer Rouge tribunal on Wednesday, Kim Vun yesterday sat with Documentation Center of Cambodia S-21 file photos trying to find the last living photo of his wife.

Flipping through the thousands of passport-sized photos collected by DC-Cam, an anxious Vun paused, his forefinger resting on an unnamed photo of a young woman with short-cropped hair, marked only as “1226” by the organisation.

“Her hair was just like this,” Vun, whose wife ,Chim Nary, was taken for re-education in 1977 and never heard from again, said.

“But in this photo, she is so skinny, it is hard to know absolutely,” he said, his eyes lingering on the black and white mug shot.

Researchers Find Rare Photo of Westerner Killed by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012
Voice of America

A Cambodian-led research team has uncovered a rare photograph of one of the few Westerners to be killed at a notorious Khmer Rouge prison in the 1970s.

The Documentation Center for Cambodia sent the photograph of French embassy worker Andres Gaston Courtigne to VOA's Khmer Service Thursday. Chief archivist Chhang Youk said his team found the photograph by chance while sifting through thousands of paper documents at the center, which seeks to preserve the history of Khmer Rouge genocide victims. The ultra-leftist group ruled Cambodia from 1975-79.

Courtigne already was known to have been one of 11 Westerners killed at the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng interrogation center, also referred to as S-21. But the newly released photograph is the first known to show the Frenchman after his detention.

Khmer Rouge court witness learns of wife’s fate

Kim Vun

Thursday, 23 August 2012
Joseph Freeman
The Phnom Penh Post

In a rare show of common cause, defence and civil parties at the Khmer Rouge tribunal yesterday objected to an attempt by senior assistant prosecutor Keith Raynor to unveil the fate of a witness’ wife to him as he sat on the stand giving testimony.

The witness, 53-year-old Kim Vun, worked in broadcasting and state-run journalism at the Khmer Rouge’s Ministry of Propaganda and Education. His wife, Chim Nary, was employed reading daily radio broadcasts until she disappeared in the late 1970s.

Raynor prompted objections from several lawyers when he tried to show Vun a document that contained identities of prisoners held and killed at the notorious Phnom Penh torture centre, S-21.

The list, it emerged later, bore Nary’s arrest and execution date – both in May of 1978. Vun and Nary also had a toddler daughter who disappeared under the Khmer Rouge. There was, apparently, no information about her whereabouts.

Tribunal Witness Describes Nuon Chea’s Agricultural Broadcasts

Khmer Rouge "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea attends a public hearing at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, file photo.

Jailed Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea sought to educate the Cambodian population daily with radio programming and a Chinese book of agriculture.

Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer

23 August 2012

PHNOM PENH - Jailed Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea sought to educate the Cambodian population daily with radio programming and a Chinese book of agriculture, a witness told the UN-backed tribunal Wednesday.

“He took a thick book of agriculture made by Chinese experts to broadcast page by page,” said Kim Vun, 53, who worked in a printing house and became a Khmer Rouge “journalist.”

Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the regime and Pol Pot’s second, is on trial for atrocity crimes, alongside Khieu Samphan, the regime’s nominal head of state, and Ieng Sary, its foreign minister.

Kim Vun told the court that Khieu Samphan had “no power,” and neither did the ousted monarch, Norodom Sihanouk.

Lawyers debate scope of Khmer Rouge trial

Former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan. Photograph: ECCC/POOL

Monday, 20 August 2012
Bridget Di Certo
The Phnom Penh Post

The scope of the first and, according to the prosecution, likely only trial in the Khmer Rouge tribunal’s landmark second case is being determined behind closed doors, much to the dismay of the involved parties, lawyers said yesterday.

In a closed session Friday, lawyers for every party put forward their cases regarding the enlargement of the scope of the first segment of Case 002 to include three additional crime sites proposed by the prosecution.

Speaking to the Post yesterday, Michael Karnavas, defence counsel for former Minister of Foreign Affairs Ieng Sary, said he reiterated his position that such discussions should have been held in public.

“These are more than just management issues, these are major substantive issues,” he said. “These are matters that will impact what we have also covered thus far [in the trial].”

Latest tourist attraction has 'bloody' past

Vaeng Vanhorn, 30, the wife of fisherman Heng Meng, dumps freshly caught fish into a bucket near the Trapeang Thma dam in Banteay Meanchey province. Photograph: Heng Chivoan/Phnom Penh Post

Comrade Im Chaem (Photo:Im Navin, RFI)

Monday, 20 August 2012
May Titthara and Bridget Di Certo
The Phnom Penh Post

The brilliant green rice paddies of Banteay Meanchey’s Phnom Srok district stretch as far as the eye can see this time of year. Locals are thankful for the bounty, but it’s a gratitude tempered by the painful history of its source – the Khmer Rouge-era Trapeang Thma dam.

The construction of the massive dam and its associated canal network transformed the area’s once-volatile agricultural fortunes with the introduction of year-round irrigation. Building it today would cost in the millions, but in the late 1970s, the price was paid in human life.

“The authorities celebrate ceremonies every year, especially during the water festival, to dedicate to the spirits of the victims who died during the construction of that dam,” Heng Meng, 34, said as he arranged his fishing net by the edge of the dam.

New Momentum for Cambodia's Khmer Rouge Trial?

Friday, 17 August 2012
Written by Richard S. Ehrlich
Asia Sentinel

US official says attempt will be made to indict 15 more top cadres

The long-stalled attempt to indict up to 15 additional top former Khmer Rouge cadres for alleged war crimes could gain some traction when a new American investigating judge is added to a UN-backed court in Cambodia in September, a US official said this week.

The Nuremberg-style trial, which has droned on since 2009, is currently prosecuting only five of the late Pol Pot's senior leaders who abetted him in a murderous reign that caused the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million innocent Cambodians and resulted in the ruination of the country, from which it is still recovering 33 years later.

The 15 additional suspects who could be brought before the court are "former military commanders and former provincial chiefs, or leaders," who were among Pol Pot's 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime, Ambassador David Scheffer, the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Expert on the U.N. Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials, said in an interview.

Witness gives emotional 'tell-all' in Khmer Rouge court

Sa Siek

Friday, 17 August 2012
Joseph Freeman
The Phnom Penh Post

The wife of co-accused Khieu Samphan paid a visit to witness Sa Siek in 2010 to tell her and her late husband not to conceal anything from investigators with the Office of Co-Investigating Judges, according to testimony yesterday at the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

A former Ministry of Propaganda employee and member of an arts unit, Siek said that the Khmer Rouge head of state’s wife, So Socheat, also wanted to learn more about places that Khieu Samphan had visited, but Siek didn’t go into any more detail. She did not mention Khieu Samphan’s wife by name.

How Siek came into the orbit of one of the three elderly leaders accused of war crimes was not clear. She told the prosecution yesterday that she got to know him and his family members “after 1979”.

She told the court that she saw Samphan briefly at the Ministry of Propaganda in 1975, just after the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh that April.

Describing Disappearances, Tribunal Witness Breaks Down

Sa Siek

Sa Siek, who had worked for the regime’s information ministry and an “art unit,” was describing the disappearances of several colleagues when she began crying.

17 August 2012
Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer

PHNOM PENH - Proceedings at the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal were halted briefly on Thursday, after a witness and former regime cadre broke down on the stand.

Sa Siek, who had worked for the regime’s information ministry and an “art unit,” was describing the disappearances of several colleagues when she began crying.

“Cars came and took them,” she said. “I never knew where they went.”