Posted on 08/01/2007 9:32:13 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The former chief of a Khmer Rouge prison is willing to testify about the communist regime's atrocities that led to an estimated 1.7 million deaths in the 1970s, Cambodia's genocide tribunal announced Wednesday.
Duch, 64, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, on Tuesday became the first top Khmer Rouge figure to be indicted for offenses committed when the Khmer Rouge held power from 1975-79. He was charged and detained by order of the U.N.-backed international tribunal's foreign and Cambodian judges.
Duch headed the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where some 16,000 suspected enemies of the regime were tortured before being taken out and executed on what later became known as the "killing fields" near the city. Only about a dozen prisoners are thought to have survived. The site is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
The judges' detention order, posted on the tribunal's Web site Wednesday, said Duch had acknowledged that he headed S-21 and was "ready to reveal the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge."
It also cited prosecutors' allegations that he presided over abuses against civilians including "arbitrary detention, torture and other inhumane acts, (and) mass executions."
"He is implicated by many documents and several witnesses," the detention order said.
The tribunal also announced that one of the two lawyers expected to defend Duch is Francois Roux, a human rights activist from France best known for being on the defense team of Zacarias Moussaoui, a Moroccan-born Frenchman convicted in the U.S. of conspiring to commit terrorism and kill Americans in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Roux also defended four cases of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Duch, who said he could not afford to pay for legal representation, selected Roux and a Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth, from a list compiled by the tribunal. Kar Savuth has represented Duch for the past eight years while he was detained at a Phnom Penh military prison on separate war crimes charges.
The tribunal, officially known as Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, is expected to start conducting trials early next year.
Cambodia's holocaust saw as many as one-fifth of the country's citizens die as a result of the radical policies of the Khmer Rouge and their leader, Pol Pot.
Pol Pot died in 1998, but three of his senior-level colleagues are living freely in Cambodia, though in declining health: Nuon Chea, the movement's chief ideologue; Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state.
Prosecutors have recommended that five Khmer Rouge leaders be indicted, and all three are widely believed to be on their list, although no names besides Duch's have been released.
According to a transcript of a 1999 government interview obtained by The Associated Press, Duch said "Nuon Chea (also) had direct command over S-21."
"I was under other people's command, and I would have died if I disobeyed it. I did it without any pleasure, and any fault should be blamed on the (Khmer Rouge leadership), not me," he told the government interviewer soon after his arrest in May 1999. Prior to that he had spent decades under an assumed name.
Nuon Chea, the right-hand man to Pol Pot, has consistently denied any responsibility for the mass brutality.
"I was president of the National Assembly and had nothing to do with the operation of the government," he told the AP in an interview last month. "Sometimes I didn't know what they were doing because I was in the assembly."
"I will go to the court and don't care if people believe me or not," he said.
The judges' detention order for Duch cited prosecutors' allegations that "under his authority, countless abuses were allegedly committed against the civilian population."
The abuses included "arbitrary detention, torture and other inhumane acts, mass executions, which occurred within a political context of widespread or systematic abuses and constitute crimes against humanity," it said.
It said one of Duch's lawyers had challenged the detention on the basis "that the other suspects remain at liberty," and requested his client be released on bail.
The judges denied the request, saying granting him freedom could provoke public anger.
Duch's current provisional detention will last up to one year and can be extended for another year if the investigating judges uncover new crimes in which he was implicated, said tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath.
According to tribunal rules, the maximum penalty for conviction of crimes is life imprisonment.
A memorial stupa filled with more than 8,000 skulls of victims of the Khmer Rouge is pictured on display at Choeung Ek, a "killing fields" site located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh August 1, 2007. Chief Khmer Rouge inquisitor Duch was charged with crimes against humanity on Tuesday, the first of Pol Pot's henchmen to be formally accused over the deaths of 1.7 million people in Cambodia's "Killing Fields". REUTERS/Chor Sokunthea (CAMBODIA)
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia:
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7/31/-07
Khmer Rouge prison chief charged
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1874329/posts
But...but...John Kerrey said it didn’t happen.
The same thing would happen if we leave Iraq before it is secure
bump
As if that's not enough, so did Noam Chomsky.
2-3 million people lost in SE Asia after we left pales in comparison to the 100 million total that were killed by Communists in the 20th century.
When someone tells me that “more people have been killed by Christianity (yadda, yadda)” I ask them for a number who have been killed. They guess “I dunno, a few million probably.” At that point, I point out that 100 million documented deaths were caused by atheists (Communists) in the 20th century alone. Usually the hip young lib walks away at that point.
And their slogan is...
“Who are you going to believe?...Me?... or your lying eyes?”
This is the organization that ran the reeducation camps that Senator Kerry says, “...weren’t so bad...”?
We left Europe after WWI and Germany started trouble again within 20 years.
We stayed after WWII and Western Europe stayed at peace and prospered, Eastern Europe under the Soviets became one big slum, we eventually won the cold war, and now Eastern Europe is at peace and prospering.
We stayed in S. Korea after the Korean conflict and S. Korea stayed at peace and prospered, and North Korea became one big slum.
We left Vietnam, millions lost their lives in a blood bath.
We left Iraq the first time, Saddam started trouble again, thousands were murdered for opposing him, and he re-started his WMD programs. (I don’t believe for a second that he didn’t) and we had go back in.
If we leave this time.......
Does anyone but me see the pattern???
I wonder if the dems are proud of themselves.
Yeah, and he should know - President Nixon sent him on a secret mission to Cambodia on Christmas of '68, dontcha know. I have yet to hear him explain just how Nixon managed that.
Did Brad and his wife visit there?
Kerry, Obama, Clintoon, Reid, and Pelosi are not finished rewritting history!
Give 'em another coupla decades and they'' be found press-scent!(push them on the stomach and the scent will whelm you!)
LBJ was the fisrt in a long line of Dimocrap lie-mongers!
More accurately, “Senator rewrites history”: “Opponents of the (surrender) proposal argue that Iraq would be left in chaos and that genocide would occur as a result. ‘We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn’t happen,’ Kerry said, dismissing the charge out of hand as he argued that the American presence only makes the situation worse every day” (our emphasis).
As pointed out by opinionjournal.com, after “the liberation of Vietnam” for which John Kerry fought so diligently, 1 million Vietnamese were imprisoned without formal charges or trials, some for as long as 17 years. 165,000 perished in “re-education camps,” a pseudonym for tropical gulag; untold thousands were tortured; tens of thousands of refugees were relocated to collective farms in malaria-infested jungles. This only scratches the surface of the suffering and death inflicted on the freedom-loving South Vietnamese by those Sen. Kerry lionizes today.
He should call John Kerry as a defense witness. After all, Kerry says “it didn’t happen.”
Perhaps now’s the time to add another term to our vocabulary:
Swiftboating
Stockholm Syndrome
Khmer Rouge Effect
Very timely. I have an acquaintance who opposed the war in the beginning, but now he says that we cannot yet leave Iraq on humanitarian grounds.
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