Khmer Rouge prison chief charged

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Cambodia's international genocide tribunal charged the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center with crimes against humanity on Tuesday, a historic first indictment against a top figure in the communist regime that created Cambodia's infamous killing fields.

The suspect, Kaing Guek Eav, has acknowledged heading the S-21 prison, where the Khmer Rouge's suspected enemies were tortured before being taken to killing fields near the capital. An estimated 1.7 million people died from hunger, disease, overwork and execution when the Khmer Rouge was in power in 1975-79.

The 62-year-old, also known as Duch, was one of five top Khmer Rouge figures whose indictments were recommended by prosecutors of the tribunal, which is a mixed body of Cambodian and international jurists. The judges have not yet released the names of the other four.

His prison in Phnom Penh kept meticulous records of victims, which are likely to serve as key evidence in any trial.

According to a transcript of a 1999 government interview obtained by The Associated Press, Duch claimed he was not a "cruel" man, but "an individual with gentle heart caring for justice ... since childhood."

Like other former Khmer Rouge figures, has said he was simply following orders from the top to save his own life.

"I was under other people's command, and I would have died if I disobeyed it. I did it (duty) without any pleasure, and any fault should be blamed on the (Khmer Rouge leadership), not me," he told a government interrogator after his arrest.

Some 16,000 people were imprisoned at S-21, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Only about a dozen of them are thought to have survived when the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion.

Chum Mey, a 77-year-old prison survivor, said he was delighted to hear that Duch had been brought to the tribunal.

"I want to confront him to ask who gave him the orders to kill the Cambodian people," he said.

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.

He was jailed for his leftist sympathies and opposition to the corrupt leadership of mid-1960s Cambodia. By 1970, he had fled to the jungle to join the Khmer Rouge.

Even before the Khmer Rouge came to power, he ran a prison for the group in the jungle, where suspected enemies were held and executed.

After the Khmer Rouge were forced out, Duch disappeared for almost two decades, living under various names in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia, where he converted to Christianity under the influence of missionaries.

His chance discovery by a Western photojournalist led to his arrest in May 1999.

Cambodia first sought U.N. help in 1997 to set up a tribunal, but it took years of tough negotiations before the two parties signed a pact in 2003 agreeing to hold trials. With further delays since then, the first trials are not expected until early next year.

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.

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.

..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.

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