Posted on 02/26/2008 12:45:42 PM PST by NormsRevenge
CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia (Reuters) - The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims.
Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979.
"I saw Duch kneel in front of the trees where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed children to death," a policeman told reporters after the four-hour tour.
"He cried and apologized to the victims" in the former rice fields outside Phnom Penh, he said.
Stacks of excavated skulls mark the area.
Some of the victims were from the regime's S-21 prison at the former Tuol Sleng high school in Phnom Penh run by Duch, now 66.
About 14,000 people -- including a few foreigners accused of being CIA spies -- went into the jail to be tortured into confessing to working against a regime deemed responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people.
Only a handful emerged alive.
"Duch expressed his sadness and shed tears two to three times," tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said. "He held his palms together to pay respect to the victims in front of the shrine of skulls."
Duch, the first senior Khmer Rouge official to be detained, was to lead court officials on a tour of Tuol Sleng on Wednesday.
"This is just one more piece in building a case file. It can be very useful in court to have a visual representation of the site in question," Australian court official Helen Jarvis said.
Tuol Sleng is now a shrine to those killed by the Khmer Rouge, who also eradicated potential opponents of their back to "Year Zero" revolution to produce an agrarian utopia through overwork, starvation and disease.
Detained in 1999 and now a Christian, Duch is expected to be a key witness in the trials of "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's right hand man, Khieu Samphan, president under the regime, Ieng Sary, its foreign minister, and his wife.
"He could not have committed those crimes alone," Duch lawyer Kar Savuth said. "He took orders from the top leaders."
Many Cambodians want to hear what Duch will have to say in trials expected to start in July. The defendants face a maximum of life in prison.
"I still do not understand why Duch jailed me, killed my wife and our baby," said Chum Manh, 78, one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng.
Nuon Chea is accused of playing a central role in atrocities by the Khmer Rouge during their 1975-1979 rule, which they began by driving everyone out of the cities with whatever they could carry.
He was arrested last year along with Ieng Sary and his wife, lifelong friends of Pol Pot.
Pol Pot died in 1998 in the final Khmer Rouge redoubt of Anlong Veng.
Good, now will someone please take him by the legs and smash his brains out on the nearest tree?
The NYT a reliable source on the crimes of Communism? Go ask Walter Duranty and 6 million dead Ukranians.
Btw, the whole focus of the Khmer was to be the very best Communists the world had ever seen. Given the short time of their bloody regime, they may have earned the title; though they have stiff competition with the Stalinists and the Maoists.
Take a good look at the skulls Ted.You get to answer for this in the next life.
Liberalism and socialism always lead to the same things: oppression, economic failure, and eventually (or sometimes not so eventually, rather right away) mass death for enemies of the “state,” defined as the libscum in charge.
And then other liberals deny, obsfucate, and outright lie, claim the “wrong” liberals were in charge (i.e., not them), and then try to blame “the right.” What do I mean about that last part? Just look how blame for the National SOCIALISTS in Germany has been successfully placed at the feet of the right/conservatives. (If there are any left-wing lurkers here who don’t know who the National SOCIALISTS were, why don’t you yahoo or google it? I know freepers are famaliar with who they really were.)
BTW, hope I didn’t break Godwin’s Law there, but I really think the comment is on-topic...
This monster should be slowly dipped into a vat of acid at the rate on one inch every hour.
The liberals/radicals have a hole in their memory that there were very drastic consequences from our withdrawal.
For gosh sakes, you can’t expect the liberals/radicals to remember everything it’s not like they were on dope or something.
A larger trial is looming for this creep - and there will be no appeal .....
When you become a Christian, God wipes out your sins, glory to His Name.
However, you are still responsible before your secular authority for what you have done. Remember Karla Faye Tucker?
Time to pay the Piper.
The strange fruit of the socialist tree ...
Now, they’re all on Prozac!!
Walter Duranty. According to the Wikipedia article, the return of his Pulitzer is in the hands of the Pulitzer board.With “apologies” being all the rage, I can’t recall whether the NYT has apologized.
Hey, Reuters. Listen up. Pol Pot was a communist dictator and the Khmer Rouge were a communist outfit and the government that carried out these atrocities was a communist government.
Just thought you'd like to know.
"Senator John Kerry hired a former [Marxist IPS / Institute for Policy Studies] fellow, Gareth Porter, to be his legislative aide. Porter...defend[ed] the bloody [Marxist] Pol Pot regime in Cambodia long after the evidence of its genocide [classocide] of its own people had become overwhelming." [_Communists in the Democratic Party_-Concerned Voters] ... 20 posted on 02/11/2004 7:10:23 PM PST by mrsmith
Even in 1979, when the world was aware of the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians murdered and starved to death by their communist victors, when even Joan Baez protested the Khmer Rouge slaughter, Jane Fonda refused to join in. As she then told the National Press Club, she was unable to confirm the accuracy of the charges. --- "Jane Fonda is to be pitied," AUGUSTA FREE PRESS ^ | APRIL 5, 2005 | BRUCE KESLER
(snip)...Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in what is now the province of Kompong Thong, Cambodia in 1925. He came from a prosperous farming family that in 1931 moved to the capital, Phnom Penh, where the young Pol Pot learned some of the rudiments of Buddhism and was subsequently educated in a series of French language schools. In 1946 he joined Ho Chi Minhs Indochinese Communist Party and three years later was awarded a scholarship to study radio engineering in Paris.
While in Paris, Pol Pot joined with other Cambodian students to create the Paris Student Group, forerunner to the Khmer Rouge. He also authored the pamphlet Monarchy or Democracy, in which he openly challenged the legitimacy of Prince Norodom Sihanouks Cambodian government and pledged to someday institute a democracy "pure as a diamond."[3]
In 1952 he joined the French Communist Party, a move that would prove to have a profound influence on the rest of his political life. Nearly all of his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders of the 1970s were educated in France and were members of the French Communist Party.[4] The professed goal of these leaders was to bring "real socialism" to Cambodia.[5] Vietnamese Communism exerted an even greater influence on the Khmer Rouge during its formative years; the CPK was originally part of the Vietnamese-controlled Indochinese Communist Party.[6]...
...In November 1970, President Nixon asked the U.S. Congress to provide the Cambodian government of Lon Nol with $155 million in aid, of which $85 million would be earmarked for military assistance to help prevent the Khmer Rouge from taking power. American leftists, however, were adamantly against this proposal. One opponent of the policy was Anthony Lake, who in 1969 had become an aide to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but who because he opposed Nixons bombing raids (designed to support Lon Nol against Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge) in Cambodia soon parted political company with Kissinger and the President.
By 1972 [Anthony] Lake was an activist in the McGovern presidential campaign, whose platform was founded upon the axiom that the military conflicts of Southeast Asia were rooted in the "arrogance of American power" rather than in Communist aggression.[10]...
...During this period, many American leftists openly supported a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia. Among the most notable spokespeople of this position was the popular actress Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, whose public comments were unambiguous in their expressions of contempt for America and sympathy for the Communists. On November 21, 1970, Fonda told a large University of Michigan audience, "If you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become Communist."[11] At Duke University, she elaborated, "I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to Communism." The dual villains of Southeast Asian conflicts were, in her view, "U.S. imperialism" and "a white mans racist aggression."[12]
Fondas husband Tom Hayden in the early 1970s organized an "Indo-China Peace Campaign" (IPC) to lobby Congress to cut off American aid to the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Assisted by radical Democrats in Congress like Ron Dellums, Bella Abzug, Robert Drinan, Elizabeth Holtzman, Pat Schroeder, and David Bonior, Hayden established a caucus in the Capitol, where he lectured and agitated for an end to anti-Communist efforts in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The IPC worked tirelessly to help the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge emerge victorious. Hayden and Fonda took a camera crew to Hanoi and to the "liberated" regions of South Vietnam to make a propaganda film called Introduction to the Enemy, whose purpose was to persuade viewers that the Communists were going to create an ideal new society based on justice and equality, when the Americans left.[13]...
(/snip)
------ "Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot," by John Perazzo, Front Page Magazine, August 8, 2005
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