Duch in court.By Marwaan Macan-Markar
Asia Times Online
BANGKOK - The torturer-in-chief of a notorious prison during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia will finally learn what price he has to pay for the almost mathematical precision with which he carried out his duty to torment and kill nearly 14,000 people.
In the first international trial of a surviving Khmer Rouge leader, the verdict hearing on July 26 will be a groundbreaking moment for the Southeast Asian nation, coming 31 years after the genocidal regime led by Pol Pot was driven out of power.
The 77-day trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, at the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, began on March 30, 2009.
Duch, who came into court after spending eight years in a military prison, had initially pleaded guilty and asked for his victims' forgiveness. However, in the last days of his trial he did an unexpected u-turn, requesting an acquittal as he said he was just following orders.
Last week fired his French lawyer Francois Roux, and is seeking a Chinese lawyer, according to the Phnom Penh Post. "The reason that Duch wants a Chinese lawyer is because China is a communist country and during the Pol Pot regime [Cambodia/Kampuchea] was also a communist country," his Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth, told the newspaper. "He doesn't want a lawyer from a free country to judge the communist people."
The prosecution in this hybrid war crimes tribunal, which includes international and domestic jurists and lawyers, has pushed for a 45-year sentence for the 67-year-old chief jailer of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Duch faces charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and torture.
Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as the extremist Maoist group called it, was a former high school where Duch and other jailers interrogated and tortured civilians, including children, who were considered enemies of the Khmer Rouge. Only 11 people came out alive from the estimated 12,380 to 14,000 people imprisoned in Tuol Sleng. It was one of nearly 200 detention centers the Khmer Rouge maintained across the country during its rule from April 1975 to January 1979.
Over this period, close to 1.7 million people, or nearly a quarter of that country's population at the time, were executed or died due to forced labor or from starvation as the reclusive Pol Pot pushed to create an agrarian utopia.
Among those who survived the Khmer Rouge's "Killing Fields" is Vann Nath, for whom the Duch trial has been a personal matter because he was among the 11 prisoners of Tuol Sleng who walked out alive. Duch was "the butcher of Tuol Sleng" Vann Nath wrote in a book about the horrific period he spent in the Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison.
It was his talent as a painter that kept him alive. Vann Nath was ordered to produce regular portraits of Pol Pot, a man he hardly knew apart from the black-and white photographs he was shown. There was little room for error in making the initial black-and-white and subsequent color portraits of the Khmer Rouge leader.
"I will go to the court to hear the verdict if my health is good," the now 63-year-old Vann Nath said in a telephone interview from Phnom Penh, where he is recovering from surgery on his left arm. "I hope the court will be fair and provide justice in its verdict."
Other Cambodians like Youk Chhang, director of the Phnom Penh-based Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), are more demanding of Duch's judgment. A long sentence for Duch spending the rest of his years in a prison where "he will be fed daily" and "do nothing more" may not "satisfy all the people who followed his trial and learnt of all the horror that took place", Youk said.
"He should be made to read the confessions of what he did to the victims in Tuol Sleng every day in prison as a reminder of his actions," said Youk, whose center has recorded the accounts of nearly one million victims and identified the presence of 20,000 mass graves. "Some people want him to get a life sentence so that he could never be a free man."
Whatever the judgment, the significance of the Duch trial has not been lost on a country still struggling to recover from nearly two decades of conflict, from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s.
After Duch, four powerful surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge are headed for the tribunal. They include Nuon Chea, who was Pol Pot's deputy, Khieu Samphan, the country's president during the Khmer Rouge years, Ieng Sary, the foreign minister at the time, and his wife, the former social affairs minister Ieng Thirith.
Beyond the legal importance of its work, the tribunal has also been helping in fulfilling the broader objective of helping Cambodians reach closure in a painful part of their history. The national broadcasts of its proceedings serve as a court-sanctioned narrative of a dark period that had not been subject to official scrutiny.
"The court's outreach has had a measure of success in informing the public about what was going on at the Duch trial," says Rupert Abbot, a lawyer at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. "The process has had a role in people understanding what happened and why things happened."
"The trial will help bring some closure," he said in an interview from Phnom Penh. "It will help draw a line about a period in Cambodian history, especially since you have a new generation."
However, with the upcoming verdicts on the cases of aging Khmer Rouge leaders, the question is how much support the tribunal will receive from the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was
himself a low-ranking Khmer Rouge member.
Just last week, an international organization monitoring the tribunal warned that “corrosive” government interference could bring it down. The Open Society Justice Initiative said Cambodian government officials were attempting to influence the court, citing two examples. "Troubling evidence exists that the Cambodian government is improperly attempting to limit what the court can and cannot do," the group said.
"The government has not been playing ball," says Abbot. "The Duch trial was easy, because he was willing to admit to what he did, and it was just at S-21. In the next cases, the crime scene is the entire country."
(Inter Press Service)
Asia Times Online
BANGKOK - The torturer-in-chief of a notorious prison during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia will finally learn what price he has to pay for the almost mathematical precision with which he carried out his duty to torment and kill nearly 14,000 people.
In the first international trial of a surviving Khmer Rouge leader, the verdict hearing on July 26 will be a groundbreaking moment for the Southeast Asian nation, coming 31 years after the genocidal regime led by Pol Pot was driven out of power.
The 77-day trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, at the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, began on March 30, 2009.
Duch, who came into court after spending eight years in a military prison, had initially pleaded guilty and asked for his victims' forgiveness. However, in the last days of his trial he did an unexpected u-turn, requesting an acquittal as he said he was just following orders.
Last week fired his French lawyer Francois Roux, and is seeking a Chinese lawyer, according to the Phnom Penh Post. "The reason that Duch wants a Chinese lawyer is because China is a communist country and during the Pol Pot regime [Cambodia/Kampuchea] was also a communist country," his Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth, told the newspaper. "He doesn't want a lawyer from a free country to judge the communist people."
The prosecution in this hybrid war crimes tribunal, which includes international and domestic jurists and lawyers, has pushed for a 45-year sentence for the 67-year-old chief jailer of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Duch faces charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and torture.
Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as the extremist Maoist group called it, was a former high school where Duch and other jailers interrogated and tortured civilians, including children, who were considered enemies of the Khmer Rouge. Only 11 people came out alive from the estimated 12,380 to 14,000 people imprisoned in Tuol Sleng. It was one of nearly 200 detention centers the Khmer Rouge maintained across the country during its rule from April 1975 to January 1979.
Over this period, close to 1.7 million people, or nearly a quarter of that country's population at the time, were executed or died due to forced labor or from starvation as the reclusive Pol Pot pushed to create an agrarian utopia.
Among those who survived the Khmer Rouge's "Killing Fields" is Vann Nath, for whom the Duch trial has been a personal matter because he was among the 11 prisoners of Tuol Sleng who walked out alive. Duch was "the butcher of Tuol Sleng" Vann Nath wrote in a book about the horrific period he spent in the Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison.
It was his talent as a painter that kept him alive. Vann Nath was ordered to produce regular portraits of Pol Pot, a man he hardly knew apart from the black-and white photographs he was shown. There was little room for error in making the initial black-and-white and subsequent color portraits of the Khmer Rouge leader.
"I will go to the court to hear the verdict if my health is good," the now 63-year-old Vann Nath said in a telephone interview from Phnom Penh, where he is recovering from surgery on his left arm. "I hope the court will be fair and provide justice in its verdict."
Other Cambodians like Youk Chhang, director of the Phnom Penh-based Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), are more demanding of Duch's judgment. A long sentence for Duch spending the rest of his years in a prison where "he will be fed daily" and "do nothing more" may not "satisfy all the people who followed his trial and learnt of all the horror that took place", Youk said.
"He should be made to read the confessions of what he did to the victims in Tuol Sleng every day in prison as a reminder of his actions," said Youk, whose center has recorded the accounts of nearly one million victims and identified the presence of 20,000 mass graves. "Some people want him to get a life sentence so that he could never be a free man."
Whatever the judgment, the significance of the Duch trial has not been lost on a country still struggling to recover from nearly two decades of conflict, from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s.
After Duch, four powerful surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge are headed for the tribunal. They include Nuon Chea, who was Pol Pot's deputy, Khieu Samphan, the country's president during the Khmer Rouge years, Ieng Sary, the foreign minister at the time, and his wife, the former social affairs minister Ieng Thirith.
Beyond the legal importance of its work, the tribunal has also been helping in fulfilling the broader objective of helping Cambodians reach closure in a painful part of their history. The national broadcasts of its proceedings serve as a court-sanctioned narrative of a dark period that had not been subject to official scrutiny.
"The court's outreach has had a measure of success in informing the public about what was going on at the Duch trial," says Rupert Abbot, a lawyer at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. "The process has had a role in people understanding what happened and why things happened."
"The trial will help bring some closure," he said in an interview from Phnom Penh. "It will help draw a line about a period in Cambodian history, especially since you have a new generation."
However, with the upcoming verdicts on the cases of aging Khmer Rouge leaders, the question is how much support the tribunal will receive from the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was
himself a low-ranking Khmer Rouge member.
Just last week, an international organization monitoring the tribunal warned that “corrosive” government interference could bring it down. The Open Society Justice Initiative said Cambodian government officials were attempting to influence the court, citing two examples. "Troubling evidence exists that the Cambodian government is improperly attempting to limit what the court can and cannot do," the group said.
"The government has not been playing ball," says Abbot. "The Duch trial was easy, because he was willing to admit to what he did, and it was just at S-21. In the next cases, the crime scene is the entire country."
(Inter Press Service)
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