The butcher of Tuol Sleng

The UN-backed genocide tribunal began trying 5 former Cambodian leaders for the death of 1.7 million people this week

February 20, 2009
The Electric New Paper (Singapore)

AMID the quiet countryside once filled with anguished screams of the innocent, the former maths teacher added up the figures and made an entry into a notebook.

Kaing Guek Eav, the butcher of Tuol Sleng, was carefully tabulating the misery, torture and death he had inflicted on his fellow Cambodians.

Better known as Duch, he oversaw the Khmer Rouge's security apparatus and ran the regime's killing machine with cold, numerical precision, reported the Phnom Penh Post.

The Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia lasted from 1975 to 1979. About 1.7million people (over a quarter of the population then) died in the Khmer Rouge's self-inflicted genocide.

And Duch was the chief executioner who oversaw the torture and extermination of 16,000 men, women and children at Tuol Sleng centre.

On the run since 1979, he was finally caught in 1999.

He is now on trial for crimes against humanity in Cambodia.

One New Paper journalist who visited the centre three decades after the killing said it still made her hair stand.

That is of little wonder if you read how The Times described the situation there through the eyes of some former guards and prisoners.

Him Huy, a seasoned executioner at Tuol Sleng, said he would study the list of names of people he would kill that night. When the silent, terrified prisoners had been lifted on to his lorry, he drove them out to the pretty orchard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

There, he took them one by one to the ditches that had been freshly dug, forced them to kneel and clubbed them to death with an iron bar.

'Sometimes it took just one blow, sometimes two,' he told The Times.

'After I clubbed them, someone else would slit their throats. But every time I clubbed someone to death, I would think, tomorrow, this might be me kneeling here, with one of the other guards killing me.'

Climate of fear

No one was safe.

'Out of my interrogation unit of 12, only I survived,' said Prak Khan, a soldier who became a torturer at the prison.

Bou Meng, an artist who was taken to S-21 in 1977, remembers how Duch would visit the room where he and dozens of other prisoners were shackled to the floor.

'He ordered me to beat the man beside me with a bamboo cane while he watched,' he said. 'Then Duch ordered the man to beat me. You could see the pleasure in his face.'

Duch was a frequent visitor to the torture rooms, where he drove the interrogation units to ever harsher techniques as they worked through the day and night in four-hour shifts.

Screaming all around

'The sound of screaming was all around us all the time,' said Vann Nath, a former prisoner and now a renowned artist.

Duch kept a meticulous record of the prison's workings and read every confession.

Often, he would send them back with corrections marked in red pen, as if they were the test papers of a reluctant student.

'Sometimes the confessions came back saying, 'must get more from the prisoner',' said Prak Khan.

The prisoners were deemed guilty simply because they had been accused - and it was the interrogators' duty to force them to admit that guilt.

Many admitted to crimes they did not even understand. 'I had not even heard of the CIA,' said Bou Meng.

'But they beat me with bamboo rods and electric cables until I confessed that I worked for the CIA and the KGB.'

'We kept torturing them until they confessed,' said Prak Khan. 'If they didn't, the torture got worse. We pulled out their finger and toenails and gave them electric shocks.

'Sometimes we would tie a bag over their heads so they suffocated. We'd take it off just as they were about to fall unconscious. If they still didn't confess, they'd be killed.'

Some inmates were sent to a clinic to 'donate' blood to the army hospitals.

Prak Khan, whose interrogation room was adjacent to the doctors' clinic, said: 'They would bring the prisoners blindfolded and tie them to the beds with their legs and arms spread out. They attached lines to their arms.

'The tubes led to a bottle on the floor. They pumped all the blood out until the bodies were limp. Then they threw the bodies into pits outside.'

Hell for guards too

The guards lived through their own hell. Him Huy, known to the prisoners as 'Cruel Him', said: 'One day I would be guarding prisoners with another soldier and that afternoon the other soldier would be arrested. You always expected to be arrested.'

Prak Khan often recognised old friends among the people taken into S-21.

'When I heard the names of people I knew, I pretended I didn't know them,' he said.

'If I showed I recognised them I would be killed too.'

Norng Chan Pal, a child survivor of the prison, told a press conference on Monday that he wanted Duch to face justice 'because Duch's hands are full of blood,' reported AFP.

Now, 49, he cried as he described making a recent visit to the prison, which is now a genocide museum, and returning to the spot where he last saw his own mother.

'I miss my mother,' he said.

'I looked at the place where my mother looked at me through a window on the second storey. I never saw her again.'

My Savior, Their Killer

By Emilano Ponzi

February 16, 2009
By FRANÇOIS BIZOT
Op-Ed Contributor
The New York Times

Phnom Penh, Cambodia - AFTER 10 years of detention, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Comrade Duch, is to appear today before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was arrested in 1999, after 20 years of living incognito, for crimes committed on his orders as commander of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia and were responsible for the deaths of more than a million people.

I was his prisoner for three months in 1971, in a camp known as M13 hidden in the forest of the Cardamom mountains. I had been doing field work in the Cambodian countryside, searching for ancient Khmer Buddhist manuscripts, when I was ambushed by Khmer Rouge militants fighting Cambodia’s American-backed government. I was accused of being a C.I.A. spy and sentenced to death.

Duch was in charge of the jungle camp, both my jailer and my prosecutor. I was kept in chains and interrogated daily by him. Somehow, during the strange dialogue that began between us, he became convinced that I really was just a Frenchman who wanted to study Buddhist texts. Duch undertook to secure my release. My two Khmer assistants did not have the same good fortune: despite Duch’s promise to me, they were executed soon after I left the camp, as so many thousands were in the years to come under his meticulous supervision.

I did not see Duch again until 2003, in the military prison in Phnom Penh. Conditions there were rudimentary, but the general feel was not that of a jail. I remember that he had the same look of determination that he had had 32 years earlier, though the smile that he had occasionally flashed when he ruled over my fate was gone.

In the whirl of conflicting emotions provoked by seeing him again, I asked him: “How are things here? Is it all right?” Compelled to repeat the question, I felt its incongruity: the executioner was now on the other side of the gate, as I had foreseen in my dreams, in the place once occupied by his victims.

In July 2007, he was transferred to one of the eight cells in the detention center that is part of the vast complex where the war crimes court is based and where his trial will take place. I visited him there. At the time, he enjoyed the relative comfort of his new surroundings. Four other elderly Khmer Rouge leaders were also incarcerated there. They were well cared for; food, cells, a television room, a visiting room — everything was in conformance with international rules, enough to make the guards jealous.

But Duch may today regret having left the tedium of the military prison. After years of stalling, and many months of thorough preliminary investigations, the trial that so few people wanted is about to begin. The sound of the preparations for it rings out in the detention center as if it were an execution.

The death penalty, which Duch ordered at least 12,380 times, does not exist in United Nations-backed tribunals like this one. His condemnation will not have the too-familiar instantaneousness of the Khmer Rouge hoe striking the back of the neck, but his sentence will be long and relentless.

The worst that he risks, however, is not imprisonment itself, but seeing his reasons for living disappear. His life now revolves around the visits from his children, a right that was denied to his victims, and his faith in the judicial process — a process that did not exist at Tuol Sleng.

Duch does not raise any objection to his trial. In his heart lie the same fears that haunted each of his victims — ancient fears that have never ceased to haunt mankind. Thus he has admitted his guilt, bowed over and humbled by the horror of what he has done.

Last February, Duch was led, with his consent, to the scenes of his crimes. The visit was a shock for all who witnessed it. This major judicial step took place in an atmosphere of intense, palpable emotion.

“I ask for your forgiveness — I know that you cannot forgive me, but I ask you to leave me the hope that you might,” he said before collapsing in tears on the shoulder of one of his guards.

I was not there — it was a closed hearing — but those who were reported that the cry of the former executioner betrayed such suffering that one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng screamed out, “Here are the words that I’ve longed to hear for 30 years!”

It could be that forgiveness is possible after a simple, natural process, when the victim feels that he has been repaid. And the executioner has to pay dearly, for it is the proof of his suffering that eases ours.

Let us not fool ourselves. Beyond the crimes that Duch committed against humanity, those of the Khmer Rouge will also be judged. And beyond the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, the capacity of the tribunals to mete out justice will be tested, as well as our ability to judge man himself, and history. We shall all be at the trial — not just as judges, but also as victims, and the accused.

The genocide of the Khmer Rouge will be judged as a “crime against humanity,” a crime against ourselves. As such, Duch’s guilt exceeds his immediate victims; it becomes the guilt of humanity, in the name of all victims. Duch killed mankind. The trial of the Khmer Rouge should be an opportunity for each of us to gaze at the torturer with some distance — from beyond the intolerable cry of the suffering, which may veil the truth of the abomination. The only way to look at the torturer is to humanize him.

François Bizot is the author of “The Gate,” a memoir. This essay was translated by The Times from the French.

DUCH: PROFILE OF A REVOLUTIONARY

Duch (left) and a colleague photographed at Tuol Sleng in this undated photo. (Photo by: DC-CAM)

Friday, 13 February 2009
NETH PHEAKTRA AND AFP
The Phnom Penh Post

A GIFTED maths teacher before he turned revolutionary, Duch, the man who oversaw the Khmer Rouge's security apparatus, ran the regime's killing machine with cold, numerical precision.

"Duch oversaw a precise department of death," journalist Elizabeth Becker says in her book When the War Was Over. "Duch even set aside specific days for killing various types of prisoners: one day the wives of ‘enemies'; another day the children; a different day, factory workers," she writes.

Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, oversaw the torture and extermination of 16,000 men, women and children at the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng prison during the regime's 1975-79 rule. He was arrested in 1999 after photojournalist Nic Dunlop uncovered him earlier that year working for a Christian relief agency in western Cambodia.

Born in 1942 in Kampong Thom province, Duch's revolutionary roots were laid early. In the mid-1960s he studied for his teaching certificate under Son Sen, a fiery activist who would later emerge as the Khmer Rouge's defence minister and Duch's immediate superior.

He was remembered not as a committed teacher but as a committed communist, and he fled to the Khmer Rouge following the March 1970 toppling of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, when Cambodia's political environment became more volatile.

Inside the "liberated" zones, Duch is said to have been appointed head of special security. He allegedly oversaw a series of prisons before consolidating his power in Tuol Sleng after in 1975.

What began as only a few dozen prisoners each day turned into a torrent of condemned coming through Tuol Sleng as the regime repeatedly purged itself of its "enemies".

Ever meticulous, Duch built up a huge archive of photos, confessions and other documents with which the final horrible months of thousands of inmates' lives can be traced.

His alleged last act before slipping away from advancing Vietnamese troops was to oversee the murder of Tuol Sleng's few remaining prisoners, whose mutilated bodies were found still chained to their beds.

Shortly after his wife was murdered in 1995, Duch began attending Christian prayer meetings and was later baptised by Christopher LaPel, a Khmer-American minister.

In a 1999 interview with Time magazine, LaPel remembered Duch as an enthusiastic convert, but said there were signs of his dark past.

"Before he received Christ, he said he did a lot of bad things in his life. He said: ‘Pastor Christopher, I don't know if my brothers and sisters can forgive the sins I've committed against the people'," LaPel was quoted as saying at the time.

Hong Kimhong, Duch's younger sister, living in Battambang's Somlaut district, told the Post on the eve of his hearing that she had mixed feelings about the trial. "As Duch's sister, I was not happy when [he] was accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes. As I know him, my brother Duch is a good person," she said.

"But I will let the court decide."