Forgive but not forget

The Strait Times

The trial of a feared Khmer Rouge leader is creating an uneasy truce between the past and the present as Cambodians are forced to revisit the insanity and bloodshed that overtook their country more than 30 years ago.

By Sim Chi Yin
		PICTURES BY SIM CHI YIN

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ANLONG VENG DISTRICT (NORTH-WEST CAMBODIA): The men ate in silence, downing a hearty breakfast of pork vermicelli soup and chicken drumstick rice, their bleary eyes glued to the television set mounted on the coffee shop's wall.

A news bulletin showed former Khmer Rouge chief executioner Duch lifting his arms repeatedly, telling a rapt courtroom how torturers at the notorious S-21 prison he ran in the 1970s dipped a woman detainee headfirst into a water jar.

Such revelations have been coming thick and fast over the weeks as Duch, or Kaing Guek Eav, gave chilling evidence of how around 16,000 men, women and children were tortured at his prison before being sent to their deaths. Just seven survived.

Yet in the coffee shop in Anlong Veng, a far-flung border town near Thailand that was the Khmer Rouge's last jungle holdout until the late 1990s, there is an uneasy mood, an air of professed disinterest in the first-ever war crimes trial of one of their own.

Former Khmer Rouge soldier Van Nuel, 56, seemed to speak for many when he shrugged and said: 'The court will do whatever it wants. We're not really bothered.'