The guide had escaped death after Pol Pot and his government seized power in Cambodia, crossing the border into Vietnam and hiding in a village, a child alone, until the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea liberated Cambodia and gave the country back to its people.
For the past 17 years, she has served as a tour guide at Toul Sleng, providing visitors with heartbreaking details about the systematic torture and murder of her family, friends and neighbors. She asks that her name not be used in print for fear of retribution, deferring to a lifetime mistrusting her government.
Cambodians by nature seem to accept their circumstances, whether present or past. There’s a local saying that embodies the overriding sentiment about the Khmer Rouge’s role in Cambodia’s history: “Transform the river of blood into a river of reconciliation.” A brochure for tourists at Toul Sleng supports this notion in describing the museum’s raison d’etre: “…making the crimes of the inhuman regime of Khmer Rouge public plays (a) crucial role in preventing (a) new Pol Pot from emerging in the lands of Angkor or anywhere on Earth.”
But as an eager nation awaited word on Duch’s long-awaited verdict, there has been anything but consensus on what most feel is appropriate punishment for the man convicted of directing the deaths of as many as 16,000 fellow Cambodians. Public opinion also varies widely on the best way to help Cambodia recover its lost generation and create opportunity for its people through infrastructure improvements, economic development and educational initiatives.
What is universally embraced, though, is the idea that for Cambodia to move forward the nation first needs to heal. And the Duch verdict is regarded as a crucial tonic for a nation still very much in recovery.
Stark reminders
Cambodia is often an afterthought in Southeast Asia. A poorer and smaller neighbor to Vietnam dwarfed as well by other neighboring countries, it is distinctly rural, agrarian and poor. Its population of nearly 15 million has a per capital GDP of $800 (2009), $300 less than Vietnam and a quarter of neighboring Thailand. The average daily wage for a rural Cambodian is $2.
Recent preliminary discoveries of oil, gas and coal reserves offer hope for the nation’s economy, but as multinational companies begin exploration and extraction, even that potential windfall poses a complex series of challenges in a country where little seems to go smoothly.
Cambodians are accustomed to hardship, so Toul Sleng’s presence in the middle of bustling Phnom Penh is treated as a fact of life. So is the killing field at Cheung Ek, which is promoted in the majority of tuk tuks and taxis that swarm the city’s streets, and which remains one of Cambodia’s top tourist destinations.
As one sits in the courtyard at Toul Sleng, it is easy to imagine the terrors of the 16,000 people who either died here or spent between two and seven months here before being transferred to the killing fields for extermination.
Inside the barbed-wire walled compound, four three-storey buildings with mottled concrete exteriors remain. Each has its own story.
Building A was where politically-connected prisoners were tortured, and the rooms are preserved in their original state as stark reminders of what humans are capable of doing to one another when an extremist leader is left unchecked.
A single rough cot rests on the tiled floor in the middle of the room. Atop the cot rest an empty steel ammunition case which was used as a toilet by prisoners, and a broken garden hoe which was used a torture implement, grim reminders of the horrors and hardships the room’s inhabitants were forced to endure. On the wall of each room is a photo of what Vietnamese soldiers found when they swarmed the compound in 1979: rotting corpses, mutilated and tortured, twisted in agony in their final moments of life.
In Buildings B and C there are row after row of 4-by-7 photographs of the tormented, which Pol Pot’s staff meticulously documented as part of the routine of Toul Sleng prisoner intake. Their faces stare solemnly ahead as visitors walk past, and most have the haunting, hopeless eyes of the condemned and forgotten. They are of all ages, representing both genders. No one was spared persecution by the Khmer Rouge, whose priority was to purge Cambodian society of the educated, influential and wealthy, many of whom were charged with being CIA spies.
In another room there are gruesome photographs of the victims — haunting reminders of the unspeakable atrocities that occurred here.
Much of these two buildings were also converted into tiny cells for prisoners barely two feet wide by six feet long. Six-foot holes were punched into walls separating what were once classrooms for Phnom Penh’s students so guards could easily access one row of holding pens from another. The walls still bear crudely scrawled numbers of the individual cells.
Building D was hastily converted into a mass holding area, and thick rows of barbed wire were installed across the façade of the open-air corridor running along the front of the building to keep prisoners from committing suicide by leaping to their deaths.
No detail was overlooked when Pol Pot’s charges created Toul Sleng, and the hopelessness leaves most visitors sallow-faced and speechless, rendering needless the graphic signs that remind visitors not to smile while touring the facility.
Outside in the courtyard, trash and litter blows about here and there, but it feels irrelevant to a passerby who makes note of the mess. It seems impossible to further sully this tainted ground where pain and suffering were the order of the days and mercy never granted.
Sacrifice for the truth
Throughout his trial Duch was at once apologetic and contrite, then defiant and unremorseful. And in a bizarre twist after the trial concluded, he abruptly announced that he was changing his lawyers.
He begged for mercy in his final statement to the International Tribunal and sought lenience for his actions, referring to his stature as a weakened old man who bears little resemblance to how he appeared in his days as one of Pol Pot’s chief lieutenants.
“I ask for your forgiveness — I know that you cannot forgive me, but I ask you to leave me the hope that you might,” he said in a statement before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the tribunal established to conduct the trial.
Unlike Westerners, Cambodians do not typically react with anger when they face confrontation or difficulty. Some say their affability is the numbing effect of generations of hardship; others point to the presence of Buddhism as a guiding force of peacefulness and acceptance (the country is 94 percent Buddhist.)
But Duch’s trial has reopened wounds that are as yet unhealed more than 30 years after the horrors ended.
It is impossible to contemplate Duch’s guilt without considering in great detail the enormity of the horrors he is convicted of creating for his fellow countrymen. As the international tribunal completed its work on the Duch trial, many people here are already focusing on the next — and, in most opinions, far more complicated — trials of four more senior Khmer Rouge officials, which is expected to start next year.
And while most Cambodians are preoccupied with the challenges of daily life here, many surviving family members of those killed by the Khmer Rouge look to the trials as an important step toward reconciliation and closure.
One such man — Thet Sambath, one of Cambodia’s best investigative journalists whose family was wiped out in the killing fields — created a Sundance Film Festival-winning documentary about his quest to undercover the truths about his family’s deaths. “Enemies of the People,” in which Sambath over three years coerced Nuan Chea — “Brother Number Two” in the Pol Pot regime — to confess for the first time to his role in the genocide, had its Asian premiere at the Meta House German Cambodian Cultural Center last week, opening to a packed house for three nights.
Sambath and co-director Rob Lemkin were on hand for the openings and fielded questions about their work and the response it has generated in the international community.
The opening, which was not sanctioned by the Cambodian government, was timed to coincide with the Duch verdict. Another film, “The Duch Verdict, We Want (U) To Know,” was shown the night before the verdict was announced.
Back at Toul Sleng, the guide explains what motivated her to seek employment at the facility that was the source of such horror for her family, friends and countrymen.
“It was important to me,” she said. “For the first year I would cry all day, it was so hard to think about it all. But now the pain is not so much.”
She turns to make her way back to the guardhouse that now serves as a ticket booth for the museum, her rounded shoulders stooped from a life of hardship, sadness and loss. She must prepare for the next tour group that stands ready for their own walk into Cambodia’s tragic history.
Sambath says that for Cambodia to move forward it first must face its grim past.
“Some may say no good can come from talking to killers and dwelling on past horror, but I say these people have sacrificed a lot to tell the truth,” he says on his website. “In daring to confess they have done good, perhaps the only good thing left.
“They and all the killers like them must be part of the process of reconciliation if my country is to move forward.”
Frank Yetter is a former North Shore newspaper editor and publisher who is living and volunteering in Cambodia with his wife.
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