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.

Westerner in Photograph Identified as American Sailor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7Df4ybZNOs

In this photo taken on Aug. 20, 2012, Director of Documentation Center of Cambodia, Youk Chhang arranges photos, a part of about a thousand of newly-discovered photo collection of detainees at the former Khmer Rouge main prison S-21, in his office in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. More than three decades have passed since the Khmer Rouge ultras orchestrated the deaths of nearly 2 million, one out of every four Cambodians, and turned the country into a slave labor camp.

The photographic evidence proves there were more than just four Westerners detained, tortured and ordered executed at the Tuol Sleng prison.

04 September 2012

Men Kimeng, VOA Khmer

WASHINGTON DC - Researchers at the Documentation Center of Cambodia have identified one of two Westerners who appeared amid more than 1,400 photographs donated to the center last month.

Researchers say one of the men photographed was American Christopher DeLance, who was seized by the Khmer Rouge as he sailed off the coast with three other foreigners.

The photographic evidence proves there were more than just four Westerners detained, tortured and ordered executed at the Tuol Sleng prison, known to the Khmer Rouge as S-21, which was supervised by jailed torture chief Duch.

“This finding is testimony against what Duch has always claimed, that there were only four westerners who died at S-21,” Chhang Youk, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, told VOA Khmer. “On the contrary, there were 12 of them, and one life is already important, not to say 10,000 or 20,000 lives. It adds to more responsibility for Duch.”

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.

Tuol Sleng photos recovered, Khmer Rouge prisoners remembered

Fourteen newly discovered photographs of people incarcerated at the notorious S-21 prison are displayed at the offices of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia yesterday. Photograph: Hong Menea/Phnom Penh Post

Wednesday, 15 August 2012
Bridget Di Certo and Chhay Channyda
The Phnom Penh Post

To Sochanthy made an unusual discovery when his family packed up their home on Monivong Boulevard to relocate four months ago.

The 47-year-old government official was overwhelmed with a rush of memories as he stumbled upon 14 photographs of S-21 prisoners he had found as a teenager and kept stored in his post-1979 family home.

“I lived [after 1979] near the health university, and in 1983, I saw those photos and some other documents scattered under a tree on the corner of the street,” Sochanthy said, describing a Khmer Rouge bulletin, handwritten books and some photographs of Lon Nol soldiers marching.

“I chose only the photos to keep, because they looked like prisoner photographs I had seen at Tuol Sleng museum when my family visited after the Pol Pot regime,” he said, recalling a deserted building with clothes and torture implements strewn across the grounds.

ឌុច៖ នួន ជា ជា​អ្នក​បញ្ជា​ឲ្យ​សម្លាប់​មនុស្ស​នៅ​ទួល​ស្លែង - Duch: Nuon Chea ordered the killings in Tuol Sleng

សវនាការ​របស់​សាលាក្ដី​ខ្មែរក្រហម នៅ​ថ្ងៃ​ទី ២៨ មីនា ឆ្នាំ ២០១២ អង្គ​ជំនុំជម្រះ​នៅ​បន្ត​សួរ​ដេញដោល​សាក្សី ឌុច នៅ​ឡើយ​ទេ។

2012-03-29
ដោយ ឡេង ម៉ាលី
Radio Free Asia

សាក្សី កាំង ហ្កេក​អ៊ាវ ហៅ ឌុច បាន​ប្រាប់​អង្គ​ជំនុំជម្រះ​ថា ជន​ជាប់​ចោទ នួន ជា បាន​បញ្ជា​ឱ្យ​សម្លាប់​អ្នកទោស​ទួល​ស្លែង​ទាំង​អស់​នៅ​ថ្ងៃ​ចុង​ក្រោយ​នៃ​របប​កម្ពុជា​ប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ។

សាក្សី ឌុច បញ្ជាក់​ដូច្នេះ គឺ​នៅ​ពេល​ឆ្លើយ​តប​នឹង​សំណួរ​របស់​សហ​ព្រះរាជអាជ្ញា ដែល​បាន​សួរ ឌុច ថា តើ​មន្ទីរ ស២១ ឬ​គុក​ទួល​ស្លែង​បិទ​ទ្វារ​នៅ​ពេល​ណា៖ «ស-២១ បើ​និយាយ​ពី​បិទ​ទ្វារ​ពិបាក​និយាយ​ណាស់។ បើ​និយាយ​អំពី​បញ្ជា​បង នួន ឱ្យ​កម្ទេច​មនុស្ស​ឱ្យ​អស់ គឺ​ប្រហែល​នៅ​ថ្ងៃ ៣ ខែ​មករា ឆ្នាំ ១៩៧៩។ ម៉ោង ១១ រថក្រោះ​វៀតណាម​មក​ដល់​មុខ​ផ្ទះ​ខ្ញុំ។ ម៉ោង ៣ យើង​ខ្ញុំ​ចេញ​ពី ស-២១ ទៅ​សាលា​សន្សំ​កុសល។ អត់​មាន​បិទ​ទ្វា​ទេ គឺ​រត់​ចេញ​តែ​ម្ដង។ មេ​រត់​ចោល​បាត់»។

របាយការណ៍​ពី​មន្ទីរ ស-២១ ឬ​គុក​ទួល​ស្លែង ដែល​សហ​ព្រះរាជ​អាជ្ញា​លើក​ឡើង បាន​បង្ហាញ​អំពី​អ្នក​ទោស​ជាង ១ ម៉ឺន ២ ពាន់​នាក់ ត្រូវ​បាន​គេ​ឃុំ​ខ្លួន ធ្វើ​ទារុណកម្ម និង​សម្លាប់​ចោល បន្ទាប់​ពី​យក​ចម្លើយ​រួច។

សាក្សី ឌុច បាន​បន្ត​ថា បញ្ជី​ឈ្មោះ​អ្នក​ទោស​ជាង ១ ម៉ឺន​នាក់​នោះ គឺ​ចាប់​តាំង​ពី​ខែ​មេសា ឆ្នាំ ១៩៧៥ ដល់​ឆ្នាំ ១៩៧៩។

Former Khmer Rouge Prisoners Sell Story of Their Lives

http://www.voanews.com/templates/widgetDisplay.html?id=139008429&player=article

February 09, 2012
Say Mony | Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Voice of America

The United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Cambodia has ordered the Khmer Rouge’s main jailer to spend the rest of his life in prison for crimes it says were “among the worst in recorded history.”

The tribunal said Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch oversaw a “factory of death” in the 1970’s at the feared Tuol Sleng Prison, where an estimated 14,000 people died.

The prison itself, called “S-21” by the Khmer Rouge, is now a museum.

One of two former inmates, Bou Meng sits outside the Tuol Sleng Museum selling copies of his biography, "A Survivor From Khmer Rouge Prison S-21". He makes $70 to $80 per day. On a lucky day, he can earn up to $200 to $300.

“If I sell [the book] at $10 a copy, they give me $20. They say I can keep the change. They wave their hand like this and say ‘You can keep the change.’ I thank them by holding their hands and kiss them, to mean that it is these hands that work to buy my books and give me a livelihood,” Bou Meng said.

'Gentle, intelligent' man turned tyrant: photographer plans Pol Pot memorial

Nhem En (above) was recruited at 17 to be photographer for Pol Pot. Photo: Lindsay Murdoch

January 7, 2012
Lindsay Murdoch, Angkor Wat
The Sydney Morning Herald

MANY of the photographs taken at Cambodia's notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation centre are too gruesome to publish: a man shot in the head crawls through his own blood before his executioner finishes his grisly work.

Victims stare without expression from images hanging on the walls of the centre where the women were dubbed ''she-animals'' and the men enemies and traitors of Pol Pot's 1970s revolution.

One photograph shows a mother cradling her sleeping baby. Another shows a girl's delicate beauty, defying the horror of the moment.

But Nhem En, 52, Pol Pot's official photographer, says he cannot describe how he felt taking 10,000 photographs of Tuol Sleng's victims.

''I had no feelings about that … I had the responsibility to do my work 100 per cent for the organisation,'' Nhem En says, referring to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge that was responsible for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

Touring Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields

For a project exploring the "origins of evil," what could be more evil than the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia? My talented, adventurous intern at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sarah Collman, recently visited the Cambodian killing fields. I invited her to contribute a guest blog post:

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

By Sarah Collma

Foreign Policy

Perpetrators of genocide use different methods to kill and maim. In Bosnia, Serb forces lined up Muslim men and boys at mass execution sites, and shot them through the head. In Rwanda, Hutu gangs hunted down their Tutsi neighbors with knives and machetes. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge tortured their fellow Cambodians with farming tools and bamboo sticks in prisons, before dumping their bodies in mass graves in the countryside. .

It is an eerie feeling to follow in the footsteps of the executioners and their victims, and stand in places that have witnessed so much pain, horror, and death.

I began my tour of the Cambodian "killing fields" by visiting Tuol Sleng, the death prison known as S-21, in Phnom Penh. I walked through each of the tiny rooms and cells in buildings A, B, C, and D, which were used for extreme torture and interrogation, detention, and extermination from 1975-1979. Guards at S-21 beat prisoners until they were nearly dead, pulled off their fingernails and toenails, forced them to eat human excrement, and poured salt water over their wounds -- in order to force confessions of non-existent crimes.

Cambodian Prison: A place of torture and death for innocent

Human skulls representing some of the 1.8 million victims tortured and murdered in prisons and the notorious “killing fields” in Cambodia during the communist Khmer Rouge regime are exhibited at the former S-21 or Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, the nation's capital.

Columnist David C. Henley is shown at the former Khmer Rouge prison and torture center in suburban Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city. (Photos Courtesy of David C. Henley)

Sunday, November 14, 2010
By David C. Henley
Nevada Appeal

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — From a distance, the former Chao Ponhea Yat High School provided no outward evidence of the horrors that awaited me once inside when I arrived aboard a “tuk-tuk” taxicab, a small, two-wheeled canopied trailer pulled by a motorcycle.

Set on a narrow side street in this chaotic and poverty-stricken capital city of Cambodia, the complex of five three-story concrete buildings surrounded by a playground, palm trees, small shops and food stalls appeared commonplace and ordinary as my driver, 35-year-old Kosal, let me off at the front gate.

But first impressions can be deceiving.

The former school that once accommodated 1,000 students had been converted into the notorious Security 21 or Tuol Sleng Prison by the Communist Khmer Rouge regime when it won the Cambodian Civil War in the mid-1970s, and it soon became the nation's largest penal center where thousands of innocent men, women and children were interrogated, beaten, tortured and killed until it was shuttered four years later.

Now a genocide museum, the prison serves as the testament to the irrationality and cruelty of the radical Khmer Rouge movement led by the infamous “Brother Number One” Pol Pot from 1975 until 1979, when the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia during a border dispute between the two nations that ultimately led to the defeat and flight of the Communists, the closing of the prison and the re-establishment of comparative peace and order.

During their four-year reign, the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh and other cities, forcing their inhabitants to move to the countryside and work as slave laborers in an effort to create a fundamentalist, agrarian utopia in which money, machinery, automobiles, modern medicine, religion, private property, education and all semblances of modern civilization were abolished.

Government officials, Buddhist monks, teachers, professors, students, doctors, scientists and all those in the middle and upper classes were murdered outright by the Khmer Rouge or taken to Tuol Sleng Prison and other facilities where they were interrogated and forced to write false confessions that implicated family members, friends and neighbors before being tortured and put to death.

As I entered the prison, I was joined by a middle-aged German couple and two young Swedish backpackers.

“I hope all five of us can stay together in here. It is too terrible just for the two of us,” said the German woman as she clutched her husband's arm.

I, too, needed the company of sympathetic others. What lay before me in the museum was unspeakable. I will never be able to erase from my mind what I saw.

The former classrooms had been converted into tiny brick cells where prisoners were chained to the walls and floors before being photographed and interrogated. The windows, doors and outer corridors were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes or prisoners jumping to their deaths from the upper levels.

Prisoners were ordered to stand at attention in their cells during daylight hours, and when night came they were shackled together with bars and chains, instructed not to speak with their fellow inmates and forced to sleep in their underwear jammed head-to-toe against one another on the bare floors.

Following days of interrogation, the prisoners were led to windowless chambers where they underwent medieval tortures too gruesome to describe, taken to a courtyard and beaten to death with shovels, pickaxes or clubs and buried on the school grounds.

When the graves could hold no more bodies, prisoners were bound with wire, blindfolded and trucked 10 miles to the famous killing fields at Choeug Ek where they were beaten to death and thrown into mass graves.

Of the estimated 14,000 to 20,000 prisoners incarcerated at Tuol Sleng, all met death except for seven who managed to escape. More than 1.8 million Cambodians, approximately one-fourth of the nation's population, died during the four-year Khmer Rouge terror from torture, murder, starvation, overwork or disease.

Walking the halls of the prison, I arrived in a room where photographs of the prisoners taken by their captors were displayed on large panels. Several were of women holding infants in their arms. I also came upon a case holding several of the prisoners' skulls that were unearthed in the schoolyard.

The German woman in my small group burst into tears at this sight. “This is like Nazi Germany,” she cried, running outside.

More than 35 years after the depredations began, justice has finally commenced. The prison chief known as “Duch,” who has already served 11 years in prison, was convicted four months ago by a UN-backed tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity and will serve an additional 19 years behind bars. Trials for other Khmer Rouge officials are to begin in early 2011.

Kosal, my taxi driver, told me when I left the prison, “Duch's sentence was too lenient. He should have been executed. Both my parents, two brothers and 20 of my aunts and uncles were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. There is no real justice here.”

Perhaps John Hall, associate professor of international law at Chapman University who has carried out extensive human rights field work and research in Cambodia, best articulates the reactions of those such as myself who have visited Tuol Sleng.

“I have been to the prison many times,” he told me, “and each time I am more shocked by its depravity and inhumanity. Tuol Sleng was a center of bestiality, barbarism and hopelessness.”

• David C. Henley is publisher emeritus of the Lahontan Valley News.

UN Secretary-General Says Khmer Rouge Tribunal Plays Vital Role

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (center) is escorted around the former security prison known as S-21 with a guide (right). The commandant of S-21, Comrade Duch, was convicted by the war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh earlier this year. (Photo: VOA - R. Carmichael)

Robert Carmichael, Voice of America
Phnom Penh 28 October 2010

The U.N. Secretary-General says the Khmer Rouge tribunal plays a vital role in Cambodia's search for justice for victims of the 1970s government. But Ban Ki-moon is encountering resistance to the tribunal from Cambodia's current government.

During a tour of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Ban endorsed efforts to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.

"The conviction of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, was a milestone in Cambodia's journey for justice," the U.N. secretary-general said. "We know it is difficult to relive this terrible chapter in your history, but I want you to know that your courage has sent a strong and powerful message to the world that there can be no impunity, that crimes against humanity shall not go unpunished."

Tuol Sleng was a prison known as S-21 under the Khmer Rouge government in the 1970s. The international tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity sentenced its commander, known as Duch, in July.

Next year the U.N.-Cambodian tribunal will start its second case - against four former leaders of the Khmer Rouge, which is blamed for as many as 2 million deaths during its rule.

But the message from Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen - delivered bluntly to Ban on Wednesday - was that the second case would be the tribunal's last.

It is not entirely clear if the Cambodian government can prevent new cases, as the tribunal is supposed to be free from political interference. It is investigating five more suspects.

Ban sidestepped questions on whether there will more trials.

"I had a good discussion on this matter twice with the Prime Minister Hun Sen, and also [the] deputy prime minister this morning, and I can tell you that the government of Cambodia is committed to completion of the process," he said. "The United Nations will discuss this matter with the international community members, particularly donors. That is what I can tell you at this stage."

The U.N. secretary-general closed his speech at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum by praising Cambodian efforts to find justice.

"I will never forget my visit here today. In this place of horror, ladies and gentlemen, let the human spirit triumph. Wars cannot do justice, but we can. Thank you people of Cambodia for leading the way," Ban said.

Later Thursday, Ban flew to Vietnam, where he will meet with the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. After that, he travels to China.

An inhuman education

Genocide museum: Tales of hopelessness

September 25, 2010
MAYA JAYAPAL
The Hindu

When we reached Pnom Penh, our guide welcomed us with gifts of checkered cloth which he called krama. It has multiple uses for the Khmer- to keep off the sun when working in the rice fields, to carry food such as vegetables or corn, to give to one's love as a token. And finally the Khmers used it to hang themselves in the ultimate act of desperation when they saw no other option to escape from the brutal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Somehow it seemed an apt, albeit grisly reminder, of the reason I was here — to visit the Genocide Museum.

Pol Pot's prison

It looked like any other average school in Southeast Asia — long three- storeyed buildings whose whitewash has yellowed with the harsh heat and overuse. It was indeed an education for our little group of eight, one that will remain with us a longer time than the education given us by our blue- eyed Irish nuns in the convent schools we went to in South India.

The Genocide Museum was once the Tuol Svay Prey High School in Phnom Penh, and the five buildings in the complex were utilised to house prisoners who were being interrogated by the Pol Pot regime. It was then renamed Security prison 21 (S-21) in 1975 and the unspeakable horrors that went on here have been meticulously documented in the form of hundreds of photos taken by the prison authorities, instruments of torture and row upon row of grinning skulls.

I stopped cold in my tracks when my guide, himself a poignant casualty of that infamous regime, was detailing the events that led to the war in Cambodia. Our guide, a young man in his early forties, was one of six children who were parted from each other. It was only recently that he discovered one sister and brother in Canada. Of the rest he had no idea. What is like to have no past to hang on to? It was a topic that recurred to the four of us siblings and spouses when we were together for our family reunion at our next stop in Thailand where we laughed and got angry and became sad as we recounted childhood memories which bound us together.

The compound is surrounded by the original barbed wire. Building A, which was used for detaining cadres who were accused of leading the uprising against Pol Pot, had cage-like cells each with a bed, blanket, cushion, mat and an iron bucket for holding human waste. There were glass doors to minimise the screams of prisoners during interrogation. In Buildings C and D, the ground floor was divided into small cells by brick walls. And the first floor had larger cells capable of holding more prisoners. In front of the first building were the graves of the seven people who had been discovered- barely alive; the last of the victims. Frangipani trees shaded them, and the white starred flowers lay softly like a benediction on their graves.

Tyrannical regime

There was a gibbet-like structure in the yard, which was once a wooden pole for exercise. The hands of the prisoner were tied to his back and he was lifted in an upside down position again and again until he lost consciousness, then his head was dipped into a barrel of water. The moment he regained consciousness the process was repeated. It was not surprising that confessions were extracted very quickly, even to crimes not committed.

Rooms after rooms are full of photographs of people interrogated, impersonally documented by the interrogators. Most had their arms tied behind their backs. But their eyes tell a different story — of anguish and hopelessness, of sometimes a grim defiance. It is an unremittingly cruel glimpse of the estimated 20,000 prisoners — men, women and fresh-faced children — who passed through these walls. The photographs were mostly of Cambodians, although there were some foreigners too. Pol Pot's twisted ideology meant that anyone with an education was suspect, even one who wore glasses. The guide who took us to Angkor Wat told us that his father was taken away because he was a professor. He was never heard of again.

Pol Pot's dream was concentrated on the growing of rice. To that end he saw no need for urban cities, trade or markets, money or medicine. He wanted to eliminate all these; and educationists such as teachers, doctors and dissidents. Every one had to work for 18 hours a day under the pitiless Cambodian sun on pitiful rations of rice gruel, supervised by pitiless “cadres”.

In another prison (Tuol Sleng), according to an article in a National Geographic issue, there was a notice translated into English with a list of 10 regulations. The tenth read: “If you disobey any point of my regulations, you will get either 10 lashes or five shocks by electrification.” The fifth regulation reads: “While getting lashes or electrification, you must not cry at all.”

The skulls in the Tuol Svay Museum are in a cupboard, ghastly reminders of cruelty. Apparently the most grisly attraction was a map of Cambodia using skulls; fortunately it was dismantled in 2002. And it's said that the Vietnamese found this prison by following the stench of decay.

Glimpses of heaven — and hell — in Cambodia

A Buddhist temple, or wat, in rural Cambodia near Phnom Penh (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)

September 2, 2010
By Erik Tryggestad
The Christian Chronicle

Just after finishing our Global South feature on Cambodia, “Life, death and rebirth in The Killing Fields,” I left on an Africa reporting trip. So I didn’t get the chance to share some insights from my visit to Cambodia earlier this year.

I flew to Phnom Penh, the capital, from Singapore and stayed for a few days before traveling northwest to Siem Reap, where I made a brief visit to the Angkor of Faith 4 youth camp. While in Phnom Penh, I stayed at the home of Rich and Ronda Dolan. They moved to Cambodia a few years ago to work with the Cambodia Bible Institute, a satellite campus of Lubbock, Texas-based Sunset International Bible Institute. Rich is the former youth and family minister for the Broken Arrow, Okla., Church of Christ, so we spent some time talking about mutual friends in the Sooner state.

Dennis and Sharon Welch (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)

I also met Dennis and Sharon Welch, who also help with the institute. Dennis was an air-traffic controller in Dallas for 20 years before enrolling in Sunset’s mission program in Lubbock. Joy and Lynn McMillon interviewed him in 2007 for a feature on Sunset. It was nice to see him and his wife at work in the mission field.

The Welches are transitioning into a new ministry role. They will oversee the rural nutrition program I wrote about in the Cambodia feature. The program, which provides nutrition and education for 1,600 children in 11 villages, formerly was overseen by Arkansas-based Partners in Progress.

Now the Central Church of Christ in Stockton, Calif., is taking over support of the ministry.

I got to see the nutrition program firsthand while I was in Cambodia. I took some photos and video of happy children lining up to get a nutritious snack from the Cambodian Christians who work with the program. My favorite part was watching the Cambodians hold up flash cards with words like “ear” and “nose” and teaching the children how to say and spell them in English.

Snacks in hand, girls in rural Cambodia are all smiles. (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)

Troy Snowbarger took me from village to village as he showed me the program in action. He and his wife, Tabitha, have overseen the program for a few years, but plan to return to the States to pursue master’s degrees. They formerly worked with the Peace Corps in East Timor. (I’m guessing they were the first Church of Christ members to set foot in that tiny, impoverished nation, but I could be wrong about that.)

Troy Snowbarger watches as children line up for snacks in rural Cambodia. (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)

The Central Church of Christ already has funds committed to oversight of the nutrition program, but more money is needed. If anyone is interested in helping out, please contact the church. (Check out Dennis and Sharon’s blog for more information.)

Church members also teach English using the Bible to Cambodian students in Phnom Penh.

I visited a ministry center where volunteers were doing just that, using the World English Institute curriculum. Partners in Progress had oversight of the program at the time, but in the months since that has changed.

Now the program is called Bible English Study and Training, or BEST. Julie Broyles oversees the program, and she’s looking for teachers to come to Cambodia on short-term mission trips. Contact World English Institute for more info. (Julie is Ronda Dolan’s sister, by the way. They both grew up in Thailand, where their father, Loren Hollingsworth, served as a missionary for 30-plus years.)

Cell block at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Memorial in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)

In the Cambodia feature, I wrote about Sokhom Hun, the Cambodian-born minister who endured prison and torture at the hands of the brutal Khmer Rouge.

While I was in Phnom Penh I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Memorial. It’s a former school that became the infamous S-21 prison during the Khmer Rouge years. Vietnamese troops discovered the prison when they ran the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh in 1979. They took photos of the dead bodies strapped to iron bed frames in former classrooms that had become torture chambers.

Those photos hang on the walls of the rooms in which they were taken. The bed frames and the torture implements are still there. The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous notes and photos of the people they imprisoned and murdered there. The photos are on display in the museum. You can see the terror behind the prisoners’ blank stares. An estimated 17,000 people entered those walls and never left.

I can barely put into words what walking through that museum was like. A Cambodian walked up to me while I was looking in one of the rooms.

“Where you from?” he asked, in broken English. I told him I was from Oklahoma.

“This my first time,” he said. Then he shuddered and pointed to his forearms.

I knew what he meant — goosebumps. I had them too.

An interrogation room at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Memorial in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)

While preparing the report on Cambodia, I was blessed to come across “Survival in the Killing Fields” by Haing Ngor with Roger Warner. Ngor won an Oscar for his portrayal of Cambodian journalist Dith Pran in the 1984 film “The Killing Fields.” Ngor himself was a physician in Cambodia who was tortured repeatedly by the Khmer Rouge. (In fact, what he endured during the regime makes Dith Pran’s experiences seem almost mild.) Ngor is a tragic figure (he was killed in 1996 in an apparent robbery) and his insights into the paranoid mentality of the Khmer Rouge really helped me to understand the regime — as much as it is possible to do so. The parts of the book that deal with torture are graphic, but it’s a compelling read. I highly recommend it.

Bandam Tuol Sleng (Tuol Sleng Memory) song could become a world memorial document

KI-Media appeal: Dear Readers, If you have a copy of the entire song, could you please share it with our readers. Please send the song or the link to kiletters@gmail.com. Thank you!

In Sophara, the author of the Bandam Tuol Sleng lyrics and its singer (Photo: Ky Soklim, RFI)

18 August 2010
By Ky Soklim
Radio France Internationale
Translated from Khmer by Socheata

Click here to listen to a song clip and the interview in Khmer (MP3)

The author of the “Bandam Tuol Sleng” is looking for support to include his famous song among the list of UNESCO world memorial documents. A UNESCO official said that the UNESCO working group will review this song and will consider whether to include this song or not.

A painful past

Haunted memories: Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng facility is a museum to the victims of Khmer Rouge’s brutalities . Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikimedia

Three memorials in Phnom Penh, Berlin, Johannesburg show us the meaning of remorse and mercy

Thu, Aug 5 2010
Salil Tripathi
livemint.com

As far as schools go, there was nothing remarkable about Tuol Sleng. The building stood unobtrusively along an avenue in Phnom Penh. But it was in its ordinariness, in the way it became part of Cambodia’s urban landscape, by not drawing any attention, that the school gave meaning to Hannah Arendt’s chilling phrase, the banality of evil.

Tuol Sleng had, at one time, been the torture chamber of the Khmer Rouge, whose murderous rule lasted from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia. In July, an officer of the Khmer Rouge known as Duch was sentenced after the tribunal adjudicating war crimes committed in Cambodia found him guilty for his pitiless reign over that building. That sentencing won’t offer salve to the wounds of any of the thousands of victims who had been in the jail. But its intent was to offer a sense of closure, or completeness, to those who were jailed, beaten, tortured, and killed for crimes they didn’t commit.

The rooms inside were filled with ordinary objects—a bed made of iron, on which victims were tied and their arms and legs stretched to inflict maximum pain. The beds were rusted. There were dark blotches on the wall. I didn’t need a guide to tell me it was blood—and not one person’s blood, but of many, mingled together in pain, splattered on the wall, frozen in time. There were other tools—some used to dig, some used to cut, some used to sharpen, a few to drill walls, some to push nails through walls. But none had been used for those intended purposes; each had been used instead to savage human bodies, to cause wounds, to puncture skin, to let blood pour out.

To avoid that, people were willing to admit to anything. I read confessions, written in crooked, shaky handwriting, by young men, many of them foreigners, saying they had plotted to overthrow the government. The sheets on which the confessions were written had faded, as had the ink, but the desperation was apparent—the unsteady hand suggested how the people were willing to confess to whatever the man with the iron chain demanded, if only to stop the beatings. But the pain only ended with their death.

I recall stranded Indian sailors admitting to being spies; a backpacker owning up to being an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency; another Thai national saying he was going to blow up an army truck; and an interminably convoluted account about the seizure of an American warship.

In the hall before I left the school, now turned into a museum commemorating the Khmer Rouge atrocities, was a large map of Cambodia on the wall, made entirely of skulls. I left speechless, which was the intended effect. Words were not necessary; silence—out of respect for those who died, and out of the sense of horror over those responsible—was the only response.

Many years later in Berlin, as I walked through another memorial built to mark another colossal atrocity—the Holocaust, at the Jewish Museum—I experienced something similar: the silence that cries out for some sound of love or hope. The museum in Berlin had stark lines and tilted walls. There were large pillars that rose and fell. As their height reduced, the ground beneath your feet seemed to rise, making you feel as though you were sinking in a tunnel that was getting narrower, squeezing you. But just as you adjusted to that level, it would change again, altering the topography, confusing you about where the ground lay, where the sky reached, and where you stood, within that space.

Disorientation is a complex idea—it is not easy to describe it; but most of us have felt it sometime. What that spatial experiment achieved was what no photograph, no testimony could: It disturbed your sense of certainty, of your moral universe. This was Germany, the land of philosophers such as Kant and Schopenhauer, and authors such as Goethe, Mann and Schiller, the home of abstract ideas. But also the land which, driven by an insane, messianic zeal, devoured millions of lives. That space symbolized the lives cut short, and how that destabilized the moral universe, as if you were alone aboard a ship tossing in waves.

What happens after such a ghastly experience? A tragedy on such a scale evokes mixed responses. Some seek justice, failing which they want revenge. Some find the adequacy of justice itself insufficient, and want to plunge back into violence. Forgiveness can heal, but before the survivors can forgive, those who committed those evil deeds have to express remorse. Many find it hard; they return to pointing fingers—you did it first.

There, the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg shines: It forces you, almost by design, to be what you are not, and experience history through the lives of others. The ticket assigns you an identity—you are white. Or non-white. You are suddenly separated from those who came with you. And you discover the world through eyes not your own.

Understanding the horrors of the past century is not easy. But reality is different when you look at those horrors not as a film on a giant screen, but through a different pair of eyes, of the person struggling to emerge out of the stamped boot. It explains why people seek justice. And it brings us closer to the meaning of remorse and forgiveness.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com

Khmer Rouge victims pray at prison before historic verdict

Martine Lefelivre (C) the widow of Cambodian diplomat Ouk Ket, killed on Dec. 9, 1977 at Tuol Sleng sits along side her daughter( R) as they greet the monks after an emotional prayer ceremony at the Toul Sleng Genocide museum July 25, 2010 in Phnom Penh (Photograph by: Paula Bronstein, Getty)

PHNOM PENH, July 25, 2010 (AFP) - About 150 Khmer Rouge victims gathered at the site of a notorious regime prison for a Buddhist prayer ceremony Sunday, on the eve of the first verdict at Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes court.

Survivors of the late 1970s regime and relatives of its dead, led by five Buddhist monks, knelt at Tuol Sleng in tribute to the estimated 15,000 people who were tortured and murdered at the prison under its chairman, Duch.

Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, was due to hear his verdict Monday on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, premeditated murder and torture after nine months of proceedings last year.

Under an overcast sky in the courtyard of the prison, which now serves as a genocide museum, deputy president of the Victims Association of Democratic Kampuchea Chum Sirath called on the souls of the dead to come and hear the verdict.

"When you have heard the verdict, we ardently pray for your souls to enjoy peace and happiness that was denied to you during the time you were on this earth," he said.

The Khmer Rouge, led by "Brother Number One" Pol Pot, emptied Cambodia’s cities during its 1975-1979 rule, exiling millions to vast collective farms in a bid to take society back to "Year Zero" and forge a Marxist utopia.

Up to two million people were executed in the notorious "Killing Fields" or died from starvation and overwork before a Vietnamese-backed force toppled the regime. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998.

Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, was the centre of a network of 198 secret torture centres around the country and is one of the most visible symbols of Khmer Rouge brutality that continues to haunt Cambodia.

Duch last year repeatedly used his court trial to apologise, but the former maths teacher, 67, surprisingly asked to be released in the final day of hearings on grounds that he was not a key leader in the regime.

Other Khmer Rouge members awaiting trial next year are "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea, former head of state Khieu Samphan, ex-foreign minister Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith, who was the minister of social affairs.

Cambodia set to renovate genocide museum

(Photo: Reuters)

2010-03-19
By SOPHENG CHEANG
Associated Press

Cambodia's Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, established in what once was a torture center operated by the radical Khmer Rouge regime, will be renovated, officials said Friday.
Officials said the museum's physical infrastructure will be upgraded, as will its archive of materials that document the atrocities of the ultracommunist regime.

The museum, formerly a high school in Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, was turned into S-21 prison after the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. Of the estimated 16,000 men, women and children who passed through its gates, only a handful survived. An estimated 1.7 million people died as a result of the Khmer Rouge's radical policies from 1975 to 1979.

Culture Minister Him Chhem said that the museum has never had a major renovation. He said the unique photos and documents it holds could be damaged if not better cared for.

The museum's director, Chey Sopheara, said UNESCO will help build two more entrances to help ease traffic, as well as new space for parking, a garden and public toilets. UNESCO is also working with the museum to preserve copies of the original documents by storing them digitally on a computer network server.

The existence of S-21 prison was a well-kept secret until discovered in early 1979 by Vietnamese troops who invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power. They discovered the corpses of recently killed prisoners, as well as an astonishing quantity of photos and documents that the prison's overseers failed to destroy in their haste to flee capture.

The museum's archive includes 4,186 confessions - often falsely given by prisoners under torture - 6,226 biographies of prisoners, 6,147 photographic prints and negatives of prisoners and other items.

The prison was commanded by Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who is currently under detention at Cambodia's U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal.

His was tried last year for war crimes and crimes against humanity and the verdict is expected later this year.

Home Fires: Shaking All Over

February 9, 2010
By BRIAN TURNER
Opinionator
The New York Times

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

PHNOM PENH — It’s mid-afternoon. From my hotel room at the Bright Lotus Lodge — only a block from where the Tonle Sap converges with the Mekong River — I can hear the keyboard strains of The Doors’ “Light My Fire” drifting out from one of the bars on the riverfront.

I’m lying in bed with a blanket pulled up over my shoulders, arms and legs shivering with fever, my forehead hot, my internal thermostat all screwed up. I don’t have a cough or a sore throat or diarrhea, thankfully — it’s a traveler’s cold, I think. The symptoms at the moment include fever, muscle tremors, fatigue, lack of appetite, nausea. What I would’ve called a really bad case of “the crud” back when I was in the military.

Outside, the riverside boulevard, Sisowath Quay, temporarily closes down until the king and his entourage drive by from the nearby Royal Palace. Things return to normal soon afterward. The tour buses unload their passengers near the palace entrance. Most of the foreigners try to ignore the man in the wheelchair, the man without legs who told me he lost them to a mine in Battambang province back in 1995. He wears a cardboard sign on his chest that explains he’s not begging, just trying to earn a living selling books (some of which I highly recommend, like “The Gate” by Francois Bizot and Jon Swain’s “River of Time.”)

Somewhere nearby a young woman in rags pulls a broken-down wood and metal vegetable cart with a man — or the remnants of a man — strapped to the wooden top. The man is moaning in a high tenor — an incomprehensible and yet fully recognizable pain, both of his legs permanently wrecked, bent out of plane by polio, perhaps, or some other disfigurement of birth or bad fortune, though I don’t really know.

There are a long line of people like this, street by street, trying to scratch out a living.

---------------

Photographs of prisoners at Cambodia’s S-21 on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. (All photos by Brian Turner)

Earlier in the day, I went to S-21 at Tuol Sleng, the former high school that was turned into a prison and death camp by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970’s. Of the some 17,000 prisoners that passed through the S-21, only a handful survived. It is now part of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Raksmey, one of the drivers who sleeps in his motoremorque, drove me out there early in the morning.

As soon as I took the photograph above I wondered to myself whether or not I was repeating a kind of violence against these Cambodians. If you look at the boy in the middle row, third from the left, you can see how each person had a kind of brace against their neck to keep them placed for the photographer, for uniformity. I kept the photo — and I share it with you now — because Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge want all to remember what happened here, who suffered and who was lost. And to remind us that each generation needs to remain vigilant to keep it from happening again.

A former torture room at the S-21 prison.

I’m not one to talk about ghosts much, but there was a moment in the prison when one of the wooden shutters slowly opened up to allow more sunlight in. I thought maybe someone was outside, but of course there was no one. None of the other shutters moved at all.

There were bats, though, in broad daylight. Even at a high shutter speed it was difficult to get a clear, sharp image of them; they were shivering on the wall. It seem liked fear and stress and the spirit of the place had sunk into their bones.

Bats at S-21 prison.

After the museum, Raksmey drove me to Choeung Ek, the killing fields, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

Skulls of victims at the Choeung Ek memorial.

By the time I returned in the afternoon the shivers had already begun.

----------

As the sun falls at dusk and the twilight deepens into night, and I continue to sweat the fever out, I can’t help but think I am in the throes of a physical reaction to S-21. After walking through the prison, standing in the rooms of torture and death, the long hallways where bodies must have been dragged in and dragged out, where the photographs of prisoners stare within those walls both day and night, their eyes never closing, waiting for the world to recognize them and remember, how could I not be sick?

When I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau not too long ago I had a similar reaction. I didn’t get physically sick, but I couldn’t get the smell of human hair and death out of my nostrils for at least a week afterward. In fact, whenever I think of it, that smell returns.

As I head towards sleep, pale yellow geckos stalk mosquitoes and other night fliers with the pads of their feet suctioned to the windowpane. I know that as the bars shut down and the tourists stagger back to their rooms, the motoremorque drivers will tout for their last fare for the night, and, failing that, whisper “marijuana,” or “you want lady tonight?” But there won’t be any takers. The streets will empty of tourists and the rats will come out from their holes in the walls — I’ve seen them working the shadows behind the line of tuk-tuks and cyclos, scrabbling for remainders of produce dropped throughout the day from the pushcart kitchens. And as the rats begin to feed, the drivers somehow perch themselves for the night on top of their motorbikes and cyclos, swaybacked, reclining, some of them with thin, white blankets covering them, like dead bodies with sheets pulled up over their eyes.

---------------------

Brian Turner served seven years in the Army, most recently in 2004 as an infantry team leader in Mosul with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division. His 2005 book of poems, “Here, Bullet,” has won several awards. He is the recipient of the 2009-2010 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and teaches at Sierra Nevada College.

If Tuol Sleng Documents are fake

Friday, January 22, 2010
Op-Ed By Baphuon

If Tuol Sleng Documents are fake, manipulated, falsified, doctored, and fabricated by Hanoi, it would be an earthquake of tremendous Richter scale which hits Cambodia recent History.

It would change forever the History of Cambodia as we usually knew until these days. Because Cambodia History as we knew until now was written generally by scholars and academic researches that were based on these documents which were provided by Hanoi, and supposed to be Khmer Rouge documents which were collected at Tuol Sleng Prison by the Vietnamese invasion army as the Khmer Rouge fled to save their skin under the hot pursuit of Vietnamese forces.

If the quoted premise is true, that is if Tuol Sleng Documents are fake, manipulated, falsified, doctored, and fabricated by Hanoi, then all the books and scholar researches would be wrong because based on wrong and manipulated facts. In Cambodia History as we usually knew, white would be in reality black, and black would be white, day would be night and vice versa. Vietnamese invasion forces instead of saving Cambodian people, they were coming in reality to destroy Cambodia; Cambodia attacked Vietnam turned out in reality, Vietnam attacked Cambodia in 1978 to swallow Cambodia. And Vietnam became responsible of Cambodia genocide.

Vietnam cannot hide anymore behind a smiling face telling the world that they invaded Cambodia to save Cambodian people from the extermination by Pol Pot armed forces.

If Vietnam invaded Cambodia in order to really save Cambodia people why did Vietnam manipulate, falsify, fabricate, and doctorate Tuol Sleng documents?

Tuol Sleng Documents were deposited at Document Center of Cambodia (DCCam) and Yale University.

The ECCC (Khmer Rouge Tribunal) cannot make verdict of Khmer Rouge leaders without assuring first the authenticity of any document she used for the verdict. So the ECCC must prove the authenticity/falsity of all Khmer Rouge documents provided by Hanoi.

The ECCC cannot trust on expert opinion either because if the expert opinion was based on Khmer Rouge documents provided by Hanoi inevitably, irrefutably the expert conclusion would be wrong because the staple documents provided by Hanoi were manipulated.

A dozen of Cambodian who worked for the Vietnamese invasion Army in 1979 still alive, living around the world, in the USA, Europe and Cambodia, had worked for the Vietnamese invasion Army at that time and under Vietnamese officer order had fabricated, manipulated, falsify Tuol Sleng documents which were later became Khmer Rouge document at Tuol Sleng left by the Khmer Rouge leaders who fled for their life as the Vietnamese invasion army chased them.

These Cambodian witnesses are ready to testify before any international commission, US commission, European commission or any organization set up by any big power commission if some security measures were met because Cambodia is ran by a fascist regime which eliminated all witnesses, judges and investigators and their families members who testified against them.

But if a commission is created to prove the authenticity/falsity of Tuol Sleng documents, finally at the end, it will be “You said, I said”.

Our Witnesses will say this Vietnamese/Cambodian officer was the responsible of the manipulation of Tuol Sleng Documents. The defendant Vietnamese/Cambodian officer would say: No, it was not me. I knew nothing etc...

But still we think there have a way to find the truth. We thought the FBI lab can certainly help to prove the authenticity/falsity of Tuol Sleng Documents.

We urge the world to help Cambodia to render justice to families of million victims of genocide.

We urge the UN, the US and the EU to set up a committee to prove the authenticity/falsity of Tuol Sleng documents. That is the very important key point to discover the truth of Cambodia genocide.

Baphuon

After the killing fields

Photographs of prisoners from the hundreds on display at the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh. Some 14,000 people were killed there by the Khmers rouges

Many former members of the Khmers rouges now occupy important positions in Cambodian public life, including the minister of the interior Sar Kheng, minister of foreign affairs Hor Nam Hong, and prime minister Hun Sen.

Cambodians today are looking for explanations for the disasters that have befallen their country, not least through the trials of former leaders of the communist Khmers rouges, writes David Tresilian from the capital Phnom Penh

Al Ahram Weekly Online (Cairo, Egypt)
29 October - 4 November 2009
Issue No. 970

Foreign visitors to Cambodia today tend to stay in Siem Reap, a small town in the north-west of the country from which they can explore the magnificent temples at Angkor. Built by Cambodian, or Khmer, kings between the 10th and 13th centuries, the temples have long served as symbols of Cambodian nationhood, and they are among the most important monuments in the region.

Siem Reap is reminiscent of Luxor in scale and character, and, like its Egyptian counterpart, it owes its prosperity to monuments and temples that attract tourists from across the world to what is otherwise still a sometimes little-understood and certainly under-appreciated country.

However, few such visitors may be aware that just a few decades ago Siem Reap, like the rest of the country's north-western region, was under the control of the Khmers rouges, Cambodian communist party forces or "Red Khmers", whose period in government in the 1970s made them a kind of by-word for brutality.

From April 1975, when Khmer rouge forces overthrew the US-backed Cambodian government in the capital Phnom Penh, to their own overthrow at the hands of invading Vietnamese forces in 1979, up to 1.7 million people are believed to have died as a result of Cambodian communist party rule of the country then dubbed Democratic Kampuchea.

Some of these people were murdered by the regime, dying on the infamous "killing fields" where anyone suspected of opposing Khmer rouge rule was bludgeoned to death. Others died of starvation or sickness in a country in which forced labour became the norm, and where communist party rule, supposedly aimed at economic self-sufficiency and industrial development, succeeded in turning the country into a kind of vast labour camp.

Communist party authorities carried out a bizarre experiment in social engineering, involving the forced evacuation of urban areas -- two million are believed to have been evacuated from Phnom Penh alone to work on labour camps in the countryside -- the abolition of money, the destruction of the family and the attempted eradication of religion, the aim being to transform the country along Maoist lines and carry out a kind of irreversible revolution.

Anyone visiting Cambodia 30 years later, struck perhaps by the unearthly beauty of the countryside and the grace and friendliness of the people, will want to know how such a nightmare could have descended on this country of some 14 million people and what steps are being taken to bring those responsible to justice.

Such questions have a better chance of being answered today than they have had at any time since the collapse of the Khmer rouge regime in 1979. Starting in February this year after decades of delay, a UN-sponsored mixed tribunal made up of Cambodian and international judges has been trying surviving senior members of the regime that ruled Democratic Kampuchea for crimes against humanity and on other lesser charges.

While the tribunal has attracted criticism, with neither the Cambodian authorities nor the UN nor international human rights agencies apparently always being happy with the results, it has had the effect of opening the events of 30 years ago up to inspection in a country that has sometimes seemed too traumatised by the past to look too deeply into it.

While the former Cambodian communist party leader Pol Pot, "Brother Number One", real name Saloth Sar, died in mysterious circumstances in 1998, other senior members of the regime, including foreign minister Ieng Sary and minister of social affairs Ieng Thirith, the regime's second in command, Nuon Chea, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, all now in their 80s and sometimes in poor health, are in custody awaiting trial in Phnom Penh.

Only a comparatively lowly member of the hierarchy, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, governor of the regime's state security prison of Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, has thus far been put on trial, and a verdict is expected following closing statements in November.

Over the months and years to come, former senior members of the Khmer rouge regime will be brought before the court, it is hoped bringing some measure of explanation and psychological closure to those who suffered so terribly at its hands.

***

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, as the mixed UN-Cambodian court is called, is located just outside Phnom Penh on a site borrowed from the Cambodian military. Getting to the court involves driving from the city centre along roads lined by the kinds of small businesses that seem to make up a large section of Cambodia's economic life.

From six in the morning to 10 or 11 at night, noises of banging and clanking emerge from innumerable small workshops, with food stalls and nondescript-looking shops selling anything from fruit and vegetables, piled up in colourful pyramids as in Egypt, to Buddhist statuary.

Much of Cambodian life seems to be lived in the streets, at least in popular or rural areas, and, as in many Southeast Asian cities, not least in neighbouring Vietnam, motorcycles are favoured forms of transport. The early morning streets in Phnom Penh are packed with traffic, many women riding side-saddle behind their male or female drivers, apparently unperturbed by the sometimes poor state of the roads.

The scene that greets visitors to the mixed tribunal is quite a contrast to the activity in the streets. Having surrendered passports, cameras, mobile phones and recording devices to security and been through an airport-style metal detector, visitors are shown into a curved auditorium done up in pastel colours and air-conditioned against the heat. Facing the banked rows of seats is a glass wall, and behind this, sealing the court off from the public auditorium, are the judges and lawyers making up the mixed tribunal.

The court itself is a kind of compromise between those who wanted greater international involvement -- perhaps a purely international tribunal sitting in a location outside the country where the events under investigation took place, like the international tribunals in The Hague -- and those who wanted the court to be located in Cambodia itself and to be run by the Cambodian judiciary with only minimal international involvement to guarantee legal standards.

In the event, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia represent an experiment in joint UN and Cambodian supervision. Of the five trial chamber judges, three are Cambodian and two are international, with a similar system of joint responsibility being used for the co- prosecutors, one international and one Cambodian, and the co-defence.

Just as important as the trial chamber is the pre-trial chamber, which investigates charges against those suspected of involvement in Khmer rouge atrocities and may recommend prosecution. Under the complex formula worked out between the UN and the Cambodian authorities, this chamber, like the trial chamber itself, operates on a system of "super-majority". Only if the international and Cambodian judges agree by four to one can a prosecution proceed.

Cambodia's newspapers provide a daily digest of the court's activities, which have included disagreements between the international and Cambodian judges over the scope and limits of the tribunal's operations. In a country that is still recovering from decades of civil conflict, with the country's warring forces, including the remnants of the Khmers rouges, only agreeing to join the political process in the 1990s as part of a process of national reconciliation, perhaps neither the Cambodian government nor apparently the Cambodian judges want to delve too deeply into past responsibilities.

Many former members of the Khmers rouges now occupy important positions in Cambodian public life, including the minister of the interior Sar Kheng, minister of foreign affairs Hor Nam Hong, and prime minister Hun Sen. All three defected before the fall of the regime in 1979 in order to escape from ever more bloody internal purges. Anyone over the age of 40 in Cambodia today will have first-hand memories of Khmer rouge rule, and the potential for a witch hunt against those suspected of even limited involvement in atrocities is clear.

While the founding statutes of the court attempt to limit conflicts over who should be prosecuted and why -- only senior leaders of the regime can be indicted and then only for activities carried out between 1975 and 1979 -- there have nevertheless been disagreements over how these should be interpreted. Prime minister Hun Sen has warned, for example, that further indictments could jeopardise national stability and lead to renewed civil war, saying earlier this year that he would "prefer to see the court fail than for war to come back to Cambodia".

Yet, crucial to the court's proceedings though such issues may be, they are likely to be of limited interest to any but the most-dedicated observers. Attending the trial of Duch recently before it adjourned for the closing statements, there was a feeling both that the court was engaged in necessary work, helping to clarify what happened during the years of Khmer rouge rule in Cambodia, and that it could get bogged down, or was getting bogged down, in legal flummery.

A mixed scene meets the eye in the court's public gallery. Aside from a smattering of foreigners -- journalists, NGO workers, tourists -- the vast majority of the audience is made up of Cambodians. Many of these people come from country districts, and on some days recently there were a good many members of the country's Muslim Cham minority present, this having suffered particularly badly under Khmer rouge rule.

Listening to the testimony of character witnesses, which took up two days of the proceedings, and of psychological experts, which took up considerably more, is likely to leave any observer feeling restless. Duch has pleaded guilty to the charges against him, unlike the other defendants, who have all claimed that they were unaware of the atrocities taking place in Cambodia under their rule. How Duch struck contemporaries during his student days, the testimony of one witness, and the "psychological mechanism of splitting" he arguably displays, debated by the psychological experts and the presiding judge, have perhaps at best only academic interest.

However, the court proceedings also throw up details that seem to speak illuminatingly about Cambodian society, then and now, and about the individuals who made up the Khmer rouge regime.

As a foreign observer, one is struck by the elaborate hierarchy governing social relationships in Cambodia, something that the Khmers rouges did their best to sweep away. Many leads were inexplicably ignored or not followed up in cross-questioning at the trial, and Duch himself seemed to be given extraordinary licence to explain his views in what at times became rambling disquisitions larded with faded Marxist slogans.

Yet, when Duch was called upon to speak the atmosphere in the public gallery changed. People stopped fidgeting, sleeping, or doing whatever else they were doing and leaned forward, attentive to every word he had to say, even the silliest and most inconsequential.

This impression was unmistakable, and it seems to indicate a thirst among Cambodians to understand the men responsible for what happened in the country in the 1970s. What do they look like? What do they have to say?

It seems to indicate, too, that the real value of the court may well lie not in the verdicts it will eventually hand down, but in the light it sheds on how the regime operated and the roles played in it by those occupying senior positions. This will doubtless be further clarified once the trials of the former senior Khmer rouge leaders begin next year, starting with that of Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two.

***

The prison over which Duch presided, now a museum in Phnom Penh's southern suburbs, was once a secondary school, and the design of the buildings and their arrangement reflect this original function. Blocks of classrooms a few storeys high face each other across an open area, each block being fronted with open corridors and having access stairs at the corners. A single administrative building occupies the centre of the open space between the buildings facing the main entrance.

When Vietnamese forces entered Phnom Penh in January 1979, driving retreating Khmer rouge soldiers before them, they came upon terrible scenes at Tuol Sleng. In addition to the corpses of a number of people, chained to iron bed frames on the ground floor of one of the buildings having apparently been murdered, they found evidence of mass graves neighbouring the site, and, in the former school's administrative building, thousands of documents, files holding details of the prisoners once held there.

Subsequent study of these documents, mostly typed, some meticulously written out in longhand, revealed that many of them consisted of "confessions", autobiographical accounts by prisoners that often seemed to have been extracted under torture. Photographs were attached to the files, and each prisoner was carefully numbered, his or her admission date scrupulously recorded.

Only later did it become clear that all those who had entered the Tuol Sleng prison, some 14,000 of them, had been bludgeoned to death at the killing fields of Cheong Ek just outside Phnom Penh.

The Vietnamese took the decision to turn Tuol Sleng into a museum, and the Vietnamese designer Mai Lam, also responsible for the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, was invited to find a way of preserving the site and displaying its horrendous collection of documents. A decision was made to leave the buildings untouched, and visitors to Tuol Sleng today can walk through former classrooms crudely divided by Khmer rouge guards into tiny cells in which prisoners were once kept chained.

On the lower levels, photographs of former inmates are displayed, row upon row of them, their expressions strangely blank, presumably terrified, showing men, women, boys and children as young as a couple of months old staring into the recording lens.

Visiting the prison today is an unforgettable experience, and one emerges numbed at such records of brutality. Emerging from the former classrooms into the bright sun of a Cambodian afternoon, one is struck by the shoddiness, the banality, of a regime that not only failed in its larger economic and political objectives, adopting a Marxist rhetoric that even its senior leaders apparently did not bother to understand, but at the same time also instructed some of those who served it to use whatever tools lay to hand -- cart axles and rusting pickaxes are among the objects displayed at Tuol Sleng -- to murder many of its own people.

However, such reflections pale compared to the desolation that descends on visitors to Cheong Ek. Arriving at this site 17km or so from the centre of Phnom Penh early on an autumn morning, one is shown first to the tall, pagoda-like structure that dominates the site. Housed within this, mounted on shelves reaching to the top, are some of the bones and skulls of those killed here from 1975 to 1979, their remains thrown into pits by Khmer rouge guards.

Driving back into Phnom Penh along roads lined by small workshops engaged in varieties of light industry, it is noticeable that the area around Cheong Ek has been left undeveloped despite the growth of the city since the late 1970s and the increasing value of the land. Buddhist ceremonies are regularly performed at Cheong Ek, and the site is dotted by tiny altars piled with offerings.

Who would want to build a house, or start a business, on land haunted by the victims of the Khmers rouges? Yet, perhaps this is the case for Cambodia as a whole, a situation that the mixed tribunal has been set up if not to rectify then at least to try to remedy. It should bring with it a sense that such crimes cannot simply be committed with impunity, their perpetrators allowed to go free and their victims forgotten.

***

Emerging from the tribunal hearings, reflections can naturally arise on the limitations of this form of justice.

Many of those who joined the Khmers rouges, from senior cadres to foot soldiers, were acting from high-minded motives. In the absence of political alternatives, and in the face of an American-backed regime of legendary cupidity, the communist forces in the countryside seemed for many to offer the best hope of renewal. Add to this an American bombing campaign of Cambodia, a spillover from the war in neighbouring Vietnam, that saw US forces drop nearly three million tons of bombs on the country killing between 50,000 and 150,000 civilians, and it may be hardly surprising that many people decided to join the Khmers rouges.

According to Yale University history professor Ben Kiernan, an expert on the Khmers rouges, in its undeclared war against Cambodia "from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped... 2,756,941 tons' worth [of ordnance] on Cambodia, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites." To put this figure into perspective, "the Allies dropped just over two million tons of bombs during all of World War II. Cambodia may be the most heavily bombed country in history."

Reading the biographies of the leaders of the regime, many of whom, like Saloth Sar, studied in Paris in the 1950s, qualifying as teachers and university professors, a common thread of political commitment emerges. While these people were appallingly misled, they nevertheless included some of the best minds of their generation. Perhaps it is the fate of revolutions to eat their own, many of this older generation dying in the purges that swept the regime from 1977 onwards.

In order to find agreement on the court's mandate, it was agreed that only senior members of the regime would be investigated and there would be no examination of events before 1975 or after 1979. The delicate political balancing act that finally brought peace to Cambodia in the 1990s would have been threatened by an investigation of everyone who had had dealings with the Khmers rouges.

However, allowing the court to investigate Khmer rouge activities before 1975 and after 1979 could also have cast unwelcome light both on US actions in Cambodia before the collapse of the US-backed regime and on the international support for the Khmers rouges that allowed the group to pose as the recognised government of Cambodia until the early 1990s and delayed legal action starting against its senior leaders until February this year.

While the UN-sponsored mixed tribunal is exploring what happened in Cambodia under the rule of the Khmers rouges, as a result of its mandate it is unable to investigate the atrocities that took place in the country before 1975 or the international support for the Khmer rouge leaders that allowed them to escape justice for so long.