Khmer Rouge prison chief charged

AP on Yahoo ^ | 7/31/07 | Ker Munthit - ap

[NormsRevenge]

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia:

http://www.eccc.gov.kh/

[NormsRevenge]

In this photo from the Cambodian Documentation Center shows Kaing Khek Iev, left, also know as Duch, and his aid Sok in Phnom Penh in 1976. Duch, who ordered the torture and killing of at least 14,000 men, women and children, in the late 1970's has been take to the Cambodian genocide tribunal headquarters Tuesday, July 31, 2007, to be questioned by judges. On July 18, 2007, prosecutors submitted to the investigating judges the cases of five former Khmer Rouge leaders recommended to stand trial. The names of the five suspects have not been revealed. (AP Photo/Documentation Center, File)

[dfwgator]

Nice to see they got around real quick to prosecuting these guys. /s

[NormsRevenge]

10 years? Yeah. pretty quick for the UN.

[SargeK]

The democrats need their noses rubbed in this - especially now - so that all are reminded of the consequences of not finishing what you have started.

[Al Gator]

Dear Janie Fondle, and Johnny Boy Kerry,

These were the thugs who YOU said didn’t exist.

They did the killings YOU said wouldn’t happen.

In your stupid words, these commies were PEACEFUL PEOPLE.

I still boil. Hope the whole bunch rots in hell.

[SargeK]

"Like many senior Khmer Rouge, Duch had an academic background. A student who excelled in math, he was a schoolteacher and then deputy principal of a provincial college.:

It takes a well trained mind to commit these sorts of atrocities. This sort of training is going on everyday in OUR academic institutions.

[dfwgator]

To them, the definition of peace is “The end of all opposition to Communism.”

[353FMG]

“..the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion.”

Going from worse to bad.

[Uncle Miltie]

"An estimated 1.7 million people died from hunger, disease, overwork and execution when the Khmer Rouge was in power in 1975-79."

"We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn't happen," (John) Kerry said.

Source: John Kerry for Senate Website:

http://www.johnkerry.com/2007/7/23/Kerry-fights-battle-he-finds-all-too-familiar

[LibWhacker]

I would have died if I disobeyed

So he decided his life was worth more than thousands upon thousands of innocents. I understand the urge for self-preservation is a powerful one, but you have to be one soulless SOB to do what this guy did.

Can't believe it's been 30 years.

[NormsRevenge]

There are mindless twits and then there are purposeful agents and occasionally you get one that is both. ;-)

[Al Gator]

Really, as I remember it, the population at large were ambivalent about that invasion. Some were downright thankful.

The rouge were pushed deep into the frontier jungle where they died mostly of disease.

[Logophile]

Duch claimed he was not a "cruel" man, but "an individual with gentle heart caring for justice ... since childhood."

Of course.

[sageb1]

Maybe Chomsky will pay for his defense.

[NormsRevenge]

Ramsey Clark can probably squeeze him in too.

[angkor]

Duch thought he’d have been killed, eh? Well, he’s right, they would have strapped him down on the electrified bedframe just like he did to hundreds if not thousands of his victims. Then a 9 mile ride down to Choeng Ek, “The Killing Fields”.

The thing is, the KR was absolutely as brutal if nor moreso to its own “leaders”. As recently as 1998 Pol Pot ordered the murder of Son Sen - “Brother Number 4”, IIRC - for collaborating to end the KR’s 18 years in the jungles of Anglong Veng near Thailand. Oh, don’t forget to kill his entire family too. And once you’ve done that, throw their bodies into the middle of the main road and run them over with a 1/4 ton truck, until their remains are made one with the dirt (”smashing” being a KR pastime and also one of Duch’s favorite terms). That’s the KR way, right up to the bitter end. “To have you is no benefit, to lose you is no loss.”

And after all that, Pol Pot’s cronies injected him in the heart with poison, fearing that he might be angry at his own toppling from the KR throne and spill the beans on everyone else. They called his murder “a heart attack”, but a guard confessed to the injection a year after Pol Pot’s death.

So now we have Duch, one of the more notorious but not the only genocidal murderer in Cambodia, and he’s crying “they made me do it.” Well, maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But S-21 was a pretty darned effective and efficient abatoire for someone under such pressure.

A sane person might wonder how Duch could go three years, killing 18 thousand innocents in the process, and live with himself for even one brief moment after the KR was run out of town. But maybe he’s lying, and maybe he embraced the torture and the killing as much as his 12 and 14 year old executioners down at The Killing Fields. Maybe he liked it.

But he became a “Christian missionary” in his later years, and lived in obscurity working for various church groups. You might think that would cleanse him of any blaming or minimization of his unspeakable crimes against his fellow Cambodians (by the way, hs is of Chinese and not Khmer descent). Not so. Like all good KR, he remains blameless: “someone else did it”. Like Brother Number 3, Khieu Samphan, who’s still alive and under amnesty, and who snickers and snorts when asked about the atrocities, “they never happened”. In 1998 Pol Pot himself said “there were excesses”, but nothing like the 2 to 3 million murdered, starved, and worked to death. Nope, it’s a big exaggeration (despite hundreds and thousands of other Killing Fields all across Cambodia, some excavated, some not).

Personally I think Duch should be sentenced to excavate every single last bone and tooth and strip of clothing still on and in the ground down at Choeng Ek. Make him work there, live there, eat there, and sleep there, among the souls of his 18 thousand victims. And don’t let him leave the site for even one single minute until his dying day.

The man deserves execution, but it seems too quick and too trivial, and it couldn’t possibly be made any more gruesome than what he did to his own prisoners, at least by any half-civilized society.

[angkor]

It takes a well trained mind to commit these sorts of atrocities.

Most of the KR leadership was educated in Paris under various colonial scholarships.

Khieu Samphan presented his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, and it detailed the exact agricultural program to be enacted by the KR 30 years later (the program that killed several million Cambodians from starvation).

Most of them also became communists in Paris, leading us to the delightful historical footnote that the French Communist Party was founded by Ho Chi Minh during his 30+ year self-exile from Vietnam.

The KR maintained their cozy relationship with Bac Ho and the Viet Minh as they built their own version of communism in Cambodia in the 50's and 60's.

[angkor]

..the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion.

IMO the KR relationship with Vietnam proves that it was some kind insane death cult.

The second secret agenda item of the KR (after destroying Khmer society) was to retake Kampuchea Krom (Little Cambodia), which is that part of Vietnam from about Tay Ninh/Saigon all the way down to the the tip of the country at Ca Mau. The territory had been lost by Cambodia several hundred years before, and the KR believed it still belonged to Cambodia (hmmm.... sounds just like the Muslims of today).

Anyway after multiple midnight attacks on Vietnamese border villages - in one case wiping out an entire town of about 1,500 by hand and knife - the KR made the big mistake of launching a rocket attack on the border town of Chau Doc.

That was the final straw, and the Vietnamese turned on the rather hardened war machine one more time, taking Phnom Penh in less than one week.

Pol Pot and his cronies ran into the jungle and conducted a useless insurgent campaign for the next 10 years.