Former Child Nurse Testifies in Duch Trial

By Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
03 August 2009

A former child nurse at Duch’s notorious Khmer Rouge prison told a UN-backed court Monday he had been asked to treat prisoners even though he had no medical training and was in fact illiterate.

“Most of the detainees were not sick,” said Sek Dan, he was 11 years old when he was tasked as a medic at the prison, Tuol Sleng, brought in from his home province of Kampong Cham. “I cured them of all kinds of wounds caused by torture I can’t explain.”

Several hundred of Tuol Sleng’s prisoners died of illness, said Sek Dan, who was one of four child medics.

Duch, whose real name is Kaing Kek Iev, is undergoing an atrocity crimes trial for his role as head of the prison and other Khmer Rouge facilities. Prosecutors say he is responsible for the deaths of 12,380 people.

“I never learned medicine,” Sek Dan, now 48, told the court. “I followed the elders and they told me to give medicine to this one or that one.”

Prisoners “were wounded by torture in the back, on the nails of their hands and in their legs,” he said.

Duch said he recognized that children were used as Tuol Sleng staff, but he said Sek Dan’s confession was “unclear.”

Pills kept inmates alive

Aug 3, 2009
AFP

PHNOM PENH - A FORMER child medic at the Khmer Rouge's notorious main prison told Cambodia's war crimes court Monday that he tried to keep torture victims alive with pills known as 'rabbit pellet medicine'.

Sek Dorn, now 48, was testifying at the trial of Duch, who is accused of overseeing the torture and execution of about 15,000 people in the late 1970s at Tuol Sleng prison, also known as S-21.

The witness, who said he was assigned to care for prisoners when he was still a child, told the UN-backed court that he mostly gave the wounded and sick inmates pills they called 'rabbit pellet medicine'.

The so-called medicine, nicknamed for its grainy resemblance to rabbit faeces, was a homemade mixture of various ingredients used to treat a wide range of illnesses during the Khmer Rouge regime.

The witness told the court that he sometimes cleaned prisoners' wounds, but the primary method of care was providing the pills, even though he did not know their properties.

Sek Dorn said that despite receiving the pills, hundreds of prisoners died from their wounds and sores after being tortured.

'Most of the prisoners had diarrhoea or fever or headaches, and the majority of them had wounds on their backs. Some of them had their fingernails or toenails missing,' Sek Dorn said, adding that some had their ears torn.

The 66-year-old Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, has previously accepted responsibility for his role governing the jail and begged forgiveness for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But he has consistently rejected claims by prosecutors that he held a central leadership role in the Khmer Rouge, and says he never personally killed anyone.

Led by Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia's cities in a bid to forge a communist utopia. Up to two million people died of starvation, overwork and torture or were executed during the 1975-1979 regime.