Showing posts with label CNN video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CNN video. Show all posts
Friday, May 01, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
30 years on, spotlight on Cambodia’s killing fields once more
New Delhi, April 29 (IANS) - The world sat up and took notice when Hollywood director Ronald Joffe captured bloodied images of Cambodia, ravaged by the dread Khmer Rouge militia in his 1981 screen masterpiece “The Killing Fields”.
Now, as a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders face a UN-backed trial 30 years after the fall of the regime, journalist Dan Rivers, the CNN correspondent in Bangkok, has revisited Cambodia’s dark years with his camera crew to re-capture the memories of horror and take stock of the ongoing trial, tainted with allegations of corruption.
His documentary “Killing Field: Long Road to Justice”, will be aired May 1 (at 8.30 a.m. in India).
“The reason why I wanted to explore the Khmer Rouge massacre once more was that the trial was on and after 30 years, I wanted to do an in-depth story. Quite a lot of people don’t know. Perhaps Cambodia is too remote and forgotten,” Rivers told IANS on phone from Hong Kong.
Rivers, in his movie, goes in quest of Ta Chan, the chief interrogator of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious S-21 prison camp. Ta Chan, in the documentary, is shown on a tour of Khmer Rouge jungle prison.
“There were at least 189 torture camps in Cambodia,” says Rivers.
As S-21 commandant Comrade Dutch and four of his Khmer Rouge colleagues currently face the UN-backed trial, Ta Chan continues to live in a remote Cambodian village.
Rivers tracks down the village and talks to Ta Chan’s family as the alleged former torture mastermind ducks the lens. The documentary chronicles details of the torture - that was part of S-21 daily regime. It resulted in 14,000 deaths.
“Many historians like to compare the Khmer Rouge atrocities with the Nazi holocaust. But the scale of killing in Cambodia was incredible. (Between you and me) A lot more people were killed than that officially registered,” Rivers said.
An estimate says the Khmer Rouge killed a greater proportion of its own people - over 1.7 million men, women and children - than any other regime in the 20th century.
Everyone in Cambodia, says Rivers, has a story to tell. “You can’t meet anybody who has not been touched by the violence. Pol Pot’s (the Khmer Rouge leader) legacy continued till the 1990s. The country is still in the process of recovery,” the journalist says.
Pol Pot died in 1998 just before he could be brought to justice.
One of the docu-feature’s most extraordinary moments is when a survivor of S-21 sees himself in an old footage shot on the day he was rescued.
“Nong Champal was nine years old in 1979 when he was rescued from a jungle camp. His mother was killed by the Khmer Rouge,” said Rivers. Even today, the 39-year-old breaks down as he recounts the horrors of the death camp.
Everyone wants Ta Chan to be prosecuted, says Rivers.
“But with the United Nations being forced to accept a hybrid court system with the Cambodian government, corruption is eating into the trial,” he says.
Rivers also probes the allegations of kickbacks at the Phnom Penh trial of Khmer Rouge leaders.
The costs of the proceedings are spiralling out control, according to him. “The trial budget would have swollen to more than $100 million by the end of this year.”
Now, as a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders face a UN-backed trial 30 years after the fall of the regime, journalist Dan Rivers, the CNN correspondent in Bangkok, has revisited Cambodia’s dark years with his camera crew to re-capture the memories of horror and take stock of the ongoing trial, tainted with allegations of corruption.
His documentary “Killing Field: Long Road to Justice”, will be aired May 1 (at 8.30 a.m. in India).
“The reason why I wanted to explore the Khmer Rouge massacre once more was that the trial was on and after 30 years, I wanted to do an in-depth story. Quite a lot of people don’t know. Perhaps Cambodia is too remote and forgotten,” Rivers told IANS on phone from Hong Kong.
Rivers, in his movie, goes in quest of Ta Chan, the chief interrogator of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious S-21 prison camp. Ta Chan, in the documentary, is shown on a tour of Khmer Rouge jungle prison.
“There were at least 189 torture camps in Cambodia,” says Rivers.
As S-21 commandant Comrade Dutch and four of his Khmer Rouge colleagues currently face the UN-backed trial, Ta Chan continues to live in a remote Cambodian village.
Rivers tracks down the village and talks to Ta Chan’s family as the alleged former torture mastermind ducks the lens. The documentary chronicles details of the torture - that was part of S-21 daily regime. It resulted in 14,000 deaths.
“Many historians like to compare the Khmer Rouge atrocities with the Nazi holocaust. But the scale of killing in Cambodia was incredible. (Between you and me) A lot more people were killed than that officially registered,” Rivers said.
An estimate says the Khmer Rouge killed a greater proportion of its own people - over 1.7 million men, women and children - than any other regime in the 20th century.
Everyone in Cambodia, says Rivers, has a story to tell. “You can’t meet anybody who has not been touched by the violence. Pol Pot’s (the Khmer Rouge leader) legacy continued till the 1990s. The country is still in the process of recovery,” the journalist says.
Pol Pot died in 1998 just before he could be brought to justice.
One of the docu-feature’s most extraordinary moments is when a survivor of S-21 sees himself in an old footage shot on the day he was rescued.
“Nong Champal was nine years old in 1979 when he was rescued from a jungle camp. His mother was killed by the Khmer Rouge,” said Rivers. Even today, the 39-year-old breaks down as he recounts the horrors of the death camp.
Everyone wants Ta Chan to be prosecuted, says Rivers.
“But with the United Nations being forced to accept a hybrid court system with the Cambodian government, corruption is eating into the trial,” he says.
Rivers also probes the allegations of kickbacks at the Phnom Penh trial of Khmer Rouge leaders.
The costs of the proceedings are spiralling out control, according to him. “The trial budget would have swollen to more than $100 million by the end of this year.”
Cambodia confronts its bloodthirsty past
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
By Dan Rivers
CNN Bangkok-based correspondent
By Dan Rivers
CNN Bangkok-based correspondent
Cambodia is a country that throws up the most staggering barbed facts that catch the mind and should stick inconveniently in our conscience.
As I put together “Killing Fields: The Long Road to Justice” for CNN, I kept tripping across breathtaking statistics that seemed too incredible to believe. Like, for example, a Yale University history professor's analysis of declassified military data that showed during America's bombing campaign over Cambodia from 1965-1973, the United States dropped more tons of ordnance on this tiny nation than the Allies dropped during the whole of the Second World War. A total of 2,756,000 tons of explosives was dropped on Cambodia, compared with 2 million tons dropped during World War II, worldwide.
It goes some way to explain how and why the vicious, bloodthirsty and unstoppable phenomenon that was the Khmer Rouge came to power. Simply put, faced with utter destruction by the United States or the promised utopia offered by Pol Pot and his ultra-communist henchmen, many Cambodian peasants chose the latter.
But that was before the killing started. Another head-spinning fact: After the Khmer Rouge swept to power in 1975 they killed a greater proportion of their own compatriots than any other regime in the 20th century.
It's facile and pointless to make some sort of genocidal league table, but what happened in Cambodia in just three years, eight months and 20 days was certainly as awful and unfathomable as events in Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Darfur.
I decided to revisit this terrible period, because it's now 30 years since the Khmer Rouge regime fell and finally a handful of its leaders are being put on trial at a special U.N.-backed war crimes trial. It's garnered few headlines internationally. Perhaps Cambodia is just too remote, too forgotten, and too insignificant in many peoples' minds to warrant attention. But that is exactly why I felt it was vital to shine a spotlight on what happened.
Another remarkable fact: Pol Pot's men remained a potent force in Cambodia's power struggle that verged on civil war for almost 20 years after they were forced out of power by the invading Vietnamese — a sinister culture of impunity that has strangled Cambodia while countries around it grew and prospered.
Even more incredible, the Khmer Rouge was backed by the United States, Britain, and other Western powers during the 1980s, despite the nightmarish mass-murder perpetrated by so many of the Khmer Rouge's Cadres. The United States viewed the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge as a useful counterweight to Soviet/Vietnamese influence in Indochina. The U.S. doctrine seemed to follow the maxim “My enemy's enemy is my friend.”
The impunity enjoyed by the top Khmer Rouge leaders is something the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia is trying to address. But it's taking a very long time. And as I found out in making our program, the trial process itself is mired in corruption allegations which some think may mean the entire process may collapse.
The United Nations is in a terrible bind over the issue. It's been forced into accepting a hybrid court system with the Cambodian government, which means the U.N. is not free to alone root out corruption quickly and surgically. Instead, as one defense lawyer told me, the corruption has been allowed to fester like a “cancer” eating away at the credibility of the trial. The prosecution, clearly worried about the courts credibility, also is pushing for the corruption to be addressed.
Already the costs for the proceedings are spiraling out of control: The budget will have swollen to more than $100 million by the end of this year, about US$20,000,000 per defendant. Or to look at it another way: the trial is costing a mere US$59 per victim.
What's also worrying is that the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a junior figure in the Khmer Rouge, has said that the trial should be limited to the current five defendants - and no more. He's said that expanding the circle of prosecution risks the stability of the country. But that means in practice that many of those involved in the slaughter during the Khmer Rouge period would remain unpunished.
The most notorious camp in Phnom Penh, called S21 or Tuol Sleng, was set up in a former school. The camp was designed to extract confessions from internal enemies of the regime, using whatever means deemed necessary. The result, according to meticulous Khmer Rouge records and survivor accounts, was the most brutal and sadistic torture camp imaginable: More than 14,000 prisoners were killed after enduring horrendous torture.
The chief interrogator at S21 was a man called Ta Chan, who led a team of interrogators. He has never officially been charged with any crime.
After quite some effort, we found out where Ta Chan lives. When we arrived at his modest wooden house in the far west of Cambodia, I got a glimpse of him. But he was apparently too scared to face our cameras, leaving his son to do the talking. His son said Ta Chan was old and his health was bad and that none of the family wanted to talk about the past.
By a stroke of luck we obtained and salvaged an old, barely functioning tape, shot by a Thai cameraman 10 years ago, that had never been broadcast. It contained the grinning image of Ta Chan showing off another prison he ran for the Khmer Rouge after they'd been forced to abandon S21. Here he was — one of the most notorious figures of one of the most bloody regimes in the world — and after twenty years, he was still in the prison business.
Now, finally Ta Chan's face will be known to the world. The question is, will he ever face trial for the heinous crimes survivors say he committed?
Dan Rivers is CNN's Bangkok-based correspondent reporting for 'WORLD UNTOLD STORIES: KILLING FIELDS: LONG ROAD TO JUSTICE' airing on CNN International May 1 at 1100, May 2 at 1630, May 3 at 0100, 0630 & 2230 and May 4 at 1030 Taipei Time. For more info visit www.cnn.com/worldsuntoldstories.
As I put together “Killing Fields: The Long Road to Justice” for CNN, I kept tripping across breathtaking statistics that seemed too incredible to believe. Like, for example, a Yale University history professor's analysis of declassified military data that showed during America's bombing campaign over Cambodia from 1965-1973, the United States dropped more tons of ordnance on this tiny nation than the Allies dropped during the whole of the Second World War. A total of 2,756,000 tons of explosives was dropped on Cambodia, compared with 2 million tons dropped during World War II, worldwide.
It goes some way to explain how and why the vicious, bloodthirsty and unstoppable phenomenon that was the Khmer Rouge came to power. Simply put, faced with utter destruction by the United States or the promised utopia offered by Pol Pot and his ultra-communist henchmen, many Cambodian peasants chose the latter.
But that was before the killing started. Another head-spinning fact: After the Khmer Rouge swept to power in 1975 they killed a greater proportion of their own compatriots than any other regime in the 20th century.
It's facile and pointless to make some sort of genocidal league table, but what happened in Cambodia in just three years, eight months and 20 days was certainly as awful and unfathomable as events in Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Darfur.
I decided to revisit this terrible period, because it's now 30 years since the Khmer Rouge regime fell and finally a handful of its leaders are being put on trial at a special U.N.-backed war crimes trial. It's garnered few headlines internationally. Perhaps Cambodia is just too remote, too forgotten, and too insignificant in many peoples' minds to warrant attention. But that is exactly why I felt it was vital to shine a spotlight on what happened.
Another remarkable fact: Pol Pot's men remained a potent force in Cambodia's power struggle that verged on civil war for almost 20 years after they were forced out of power by the invading Vietnamese — a sinister culture of impunity that has strangled Cambodia while countries around it grew and prospered.
Even more incredible, the Khmer Rouge was backed by the United States, Britain, and other Western powers during the 1980s, despite the nightmarish mass-murder perpetrated by so many of the Khmer Rouge's Cadres. The United States viewed the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge as a useful counterweight to Soviet/Vietnamese influence in Indochina. The U.S. doctrine seemed to follow the maxim “My enemy's enemy is my friend.”
The impunity enjoyed by the top Khmer Rouge leaders is something the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia is trying to address. But it's taking a very long time. And as I found out in making our program, the trial process itself is mired in corruption allegations which some think may mean the entire process may collapse.
The United Nations is in a terrible bind over the issue. It's been forced into accepting a hybrid court system with the Cambodian government, which means the U.N. is not free to alone root out corruption quickly and surgically. Instead, as one defense lawyer told me, the corruption has been allowed to fester like a “cancer” eating away at the credibility of the trial. The prosecution, clearly worried about the courts credibility, also is pushing for the corruption to be addressed.
Already the costs for the proceedings are spiraling out of control: The budget will have swollen to more than $100 million by the end of this year, about US$20,000,000 per defendant. Or to look at it another way: the trial is costing a mere US$59 per victim.
What's also worrying is that the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a junior figure in the Khmer Rouge, has said that the trial should be limited to the current five defendants - and no more. He's said that expanding the circle of prosecution risks the stability of the country. But that means in practice that many of those involved in the slaughter during the Khmer Rouge period would remain unpunished.
The most notorious camp in Phnom Penh, called S21 or Tuol Sleng, was set up in a former school. The camp was designed to extract confessions from internal enemies of the regime, using whatever means deemed necessary. The result, according to meticulous Khmer Rouge records and survivor accounts, was the most brutal and sadistic torture camp imaginable: More than 14,000 prisoners were killed after enduring horrendous torture.
The chief interrogator at S21 was a man called Ta Chan, who led a team of interrogators. He has never officially been charged with any crime.
After quite some effort, we found out where Ta Chan lives. When we arrived at his modest wooden house in the far west of Cambodia, I got a glimpse of him. But he was apparently too scared to face our cameras, leaving his son to do the talking. His son said Ta Chan was old and his health was bad and that none of the family wanted to talk about the past.
By a stroke of luck we obtained and salvaged an old, barely functioning tape, shot by a Thai cameraman 10 years ago, that had never been broadcast. It contained the grinning image of Ta Chan showing off another prison he ran for the Khmer Rouge after they'd been forced to abandon S21. Here he was — one of the most notorious figures of one of the most bloody regimes in the world — and after twenty years, he was still in the prison business.
Now, finally Ta Chan's face will be known to the world. The question is, will he ever face trial for the heinous crimes survivors say he committed?
Dan Rivers is CNN's Bangkok-based correspondent reporting for 'WORLD UNTOLD STORIES: KILLING FIELDS: LONG ROAD TO JUSTICE' airing on CNN International May 1 at 1100, May 2 at 1630, May 3 at 0100, 0630 & 2230 and May 4 at 1030 Taipei Time. For more info visit www.cnn.com/worldsuntoldstories.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
'Crime against humanity': A CNN Video
Youk Chhang takes CNN's Christiane Amanpour to the secured vault where thousands of Khmer Rouge documents are kept.
Decoding the Khmer Rouge: A CNN Video
Francois Ponchaud describes how he monitored radio broadcasts to understand the Khmer Rouge philosophy.
CNN Documentary Sheds new light on Khmer Rouge Atrocities
April 24, 2009Media News International
In a groundbreaking new documentary CNN’s Dan Rivers goes on the hunt for Ta Chan, the chief interrogator of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious S-21 prison camp. For the program, CNN obtained exclusive and previously unseen footage of Ta Chan giving a tour of another Khmer Rouge jungle prison. CNN’s Rivers also details corruption allegations at the Phnom Penh trial of Khmer Rouge leaders, reporting on prosecution and defense fears that the trial will be tainted by the allegations.
As S-21 commandant Comrade Duch and four Khmer Rouge colleagues currently face justice in the UN-backed trial, Ta Chan (left) continues to live in a remote Cambodian village. While he has not been charged with any crime, survivors say Ta Chan played a key role at S21. Rivers talks with Chan’s family as the alleged former torture chief hides from cameras. In exclusive footage from 1996, uncovered by the program’s editorial team, Ta Chan gives a guided tour of what he said at the time was a recently closed Khmer Rouge prison in the jungle. The documentary chronicles in painful detail how torture was part of S-21’s daily regime, resulting in up to 14,000 deaths.
Among the program’s extraordinary moments, a survivor of S21 sees himself on film shot the day he was rescued. At the time, Norng Champhal was a young child, whose mother was among those executed. More than 30 years later, he breaks down in tears, (left) as he sees the images and recounts the horror of the death camp, describing how he survived by hiding in a pile of discarded clothes.
This program also features rarely seen footage from 1998 of the last known TV interview with ailing Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot (left) who led the country into the horrors of genocide. The Khmer Rouge killed a greater proportion of their own people - more than 1.7 million men, women and children - than any other regime in the twentieth century.
Thirty years on, five Khmer Rouge leaders are in court facing the most serious charges imaginable, but both defence and prosecution lawyers tell Rivers that the credibility of the UN-backed war crimes tribunal is being jeopardized by the corruption allegations.
While there are no suggestions the judges or lawyers are involved, employees of the court’s Office of Administration described pressure to to provide kickbacks to supervisors to keep their jobs. The employees say the combined amounts of the kickbacks were large: “Thousand dollars. 30 or 40 thousand US dollars a month.”
The Chief of Defence Section of the trial, Richard Rogers, adds: “It (the trial collapsing) is becoming a real possibility…the victims who’ve been waiting for 30 years for these trials deserve justice…peace…closure.” The UN’s internal affairs body confirmed to CNN it has investigated the alleged corruption in the court administration, but would not share the results of the investigation. The Cambodian government also confirmed an investigation, but says no evidence of corruption was found.
Airtimes:
Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Singapore and Taipei
Friday, May 1 at 1100
Sunday, May 3 at 0100, 0630 & 2230
Monday, May 4 at 1030
Bangkok and Jakarta
Saturday, May 2 at 1000 & 1530
Sunday, May 3 at 0000, 0530 & 2130
Monday, May 4 at 0930
As S-21 commandant Comrade Duch and four Khmer Rouge colleagues currently face justice in the UN-backed trial, Ta Chan (left) continues to live in a remote Cambodian village. While he has not been charged with any crime, survivors say Ta Chan played a key role at S21. Rivers talks with Chan’s family as the alleged former torture chief hides from cameras. In exclusive footage from 1996, uncovered by the program’s editorial team, Ta Chan gives a guided tour of what he said at the time was a recently closed Khmer Rouge prison in the jungle. The documentary chronicles in painful detail how torture was part of S-21’s daily regime, resulting in up to 14,000 deaths.
Among the program’s extraordinary moments, a survivor of S21 sees himself on film shot the day he was rescued. At the time, Norng Champhal was a young child, whose mother was among those executed. More than 30 years later, he breaks down in tears, (left) as he sees the images and recounts the horror of the death camp, describing how he survived by hiding in a pile of discarded clothes.
This program also features rarely seen footage from 1998 of the last known TV interview with ailing Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot (left) who led the country into the horrors of genocide. The Khmer Rouge killed a greater proportion of their own people - more than 1.7 million men, women and children - than any other regime in the twentieth century.
Thirty years on, five Khmer Rouge leaders are in court facing the most serious charges imaginable, but both defence and prosecution lawyers tell Rivers that the credibility of the UN-backed war crimes tribunal is being jeopardized by the corruption allegations.
While there are no suggestions the judges or lawyers are involved, employees of the court’s Office of Administration described pressure to to provide kickbacks to supervisors to keep their jobs. The employees say the combined amounts of the kickbacks were large: “Thousand dollars. 30 or 40 thousand US dollars a month.”
The Chief of Defence Section of the trial, Richard Rogers, adds: “It (the trial collapsing) is becoming a real possibility…the victims who’ve been waiting for 30 years for these trials deserve justice…peace…closure.” The UN’s internal affairs body confirmed to CNN it has investigated the alleged corruption in the court administration, but would not share the results of the investigation. The Cambodian government also confirmed an investigation, but says no evidence of corruption was found.
Airtimes:
Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Singapore and Taipei
Friday, May 1 at 1100
Sunday, May 3 at 0100, 0630 & 2230
Monday, May 4 at 1030
Bangkok and Jakarta
Saturday, May 2 at 1000 & 1530
Sunday, May 3 at 0000, 0530 & 2130
Monday, May 4 at 0930
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