The Spectacle Blog
Khmer Rouge Survivors Speak
The trial of Comrade Duch, or Kaing Guek Eav, continues this week with the three known survivors of Tuol Sleng (or S-21) who are still alive testifying. Stats are impossible to nail down, but most who paid attention estimate that about 17,000 passed through those torture chambers and only seven survived.
The trial of Comrade Duch, or Kaing Guek Eav, continues this week with the three known survivors of Tuol Sleng (or S-21) who are still alive testifying. Stats are impossible to nail down, but most who paid attention estimate that about 17,000 passed through those torture chambers and only seven survived. Two — Vann Nath and Bou Meng — were artists kept alive by Duch because of their skill in painting or illustrating pictures of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. The third, Chum Mey, survived because he could repair equipment and vehicles for the regime. Reuters reports:
“I saw about 20 men with long hair, looking very sick and emaciated. The cell was like hell on earth,” Meng told the court.
The prisoners were kept in chains with empty bullet boxes and plastic bottles to use as toilets.
“I saw a lizard and hoped it would drop on me so I could catch it and eat it,” Meng said. “They kept whipping me and asked me when I joined the CIA.” (the paranoid regime extracted confessions from all suspected opponents — that they were agents of the CIA, KGB, or Vietnam — before torturing and executing them)
For the first time in three decades, Meng had the chance to question Duch, the first of five Pol Pot cadres indicted by the tribunal.
He never saw his wife again after they entered S-21 and he asked his torturer what had happened to her.
“I expect she was killed by my subordinates,” Duch replied.
Chum Mey’s testimony was equally chilling:
(He) told the judges on Tuesday his toenails were torn off and that he, too, was held in a dark cell, his legs shackled. He received hardly any food and expected to die at any moment.
“I will never forget my suffering at S-21, as long as I live,” he said, his voice breaking, tears rolling down his face.
“When I entered the room, I didn’t expect to survive. I just laid on my back, waiting to be killed.”
Mey’s wife and four children were among the 1.7 million Cambodian’s who died under Pol Pot’s ultra-Maoist revolution, which ended in the 1979 invasion by Vietnam.
He too was accused of being a spy for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Can’t help but imagine political prisoners in today’s dictatorial regimes aren’t any better off.
Alan Brooks| 7.1.09 @ 2:43PM
btw Pol Pot was worse than Hitler in scope but not in scale.
Stalin was worse as a person than either Pot or Hitler, but Stalin's best ally was Hitler.
Alan Brooks| 7.1.09 @ 2:46PM
....Hitler was to be Stalin's enabler, as Pol Pot was to be for the Vietnamese.
BBFmail| 7.1.09 @ 3:22PM
Extra! January/February 2008
A Million Iraqi Dead?
The U.S. press buries the evidence
By Patrick McElwee
The Iraq War was sold to Americans in part as an intervention that would benefit Iraqis, "liberating" them from the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein. In retrospect, after no weapons of mass destruction were found and the alleged links to Al-Qaeda were debunked, this supposed humanitarian mission became the central justification for the invasion. Today, it is a major pillar of what support remains among the U.S. public for continuing the occupation.
If Americans are to make informed judgments not only about the invasion of Iraq and whether the occupation should continue, but also about future wars our government may wish to start, then we need to have good information about the war's impact on Iraqis.
But the major U.S. press rarely considers a most basic measure of that impact: how many Iraqis have been killed. When they do mention the toll, they consistently ignore or malign two major statistical studies, the first conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and published in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet (10/11/06), and the other released by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (9/07). Both indicate that over a million Iraqis have now been killed. Yet an Associated Press poll in February (2/24/07) that asked Americans how many Iraqis have died received a median response of less than 10,000.
The Johns Hopkins study estimated that, as of July 2006, 655,000 Iraqis had been killed, about 600,000 of them violently and at least 30 percent directly by coalition forces. It updated an earlier study (Lancet, 10/29/04) that estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died during the first year of the war. An extrapolation of the Johns Hopkins estimate of violent deaths done by Just Foreign Policy (9/18/07) currently stands at over 1.1 million.
Both Johns Hopkins estimates of Iraqi deaths have been largely ignored by the U.S. media, as FAIR has noted (FAIR Action Alert, 3/21/05, 3/21/07; FAIR Media Advisory, 12/16/05).
ChuckD| 7.8.09 @ 9:57PM
To BBFmail
New Estimate of Violent Deaths Among Iraqis Is Lower
By David Brown and Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 10, 2008; Page A18
"A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country. Roughly 9 out of 10 of those deaths were a consequence of U.S. military operations, insurgent attacks and sectarian warfare."
I don't see the media hiding anything. Maybe the media are being careful not to report inaccurate lies. Maybe sometimes people believe anything negative about the US because it reinforces their preconcieved notion that the US is an evil force.
Notice the report says the causes of the Iraqi civilian death toll were insurgents (terrorists), sectarian violence (muslim extremist killing Kurds and Christians), and US military operations.
US military operations were mainly defensive, not offensive. Troops were commanded to hold and secure territory so that a just and open election could occur. Many thousands of Americans died for the same. Blood has been and always will be the price of freedom. Slavery is always the price of peace.
Seems very Chomskian; i.e., idiotic, to assert that the all the deaths incurred by Iraqis during the war were the result of a concerted effort on the part of the US military to exterminate innocent civilians. And then of course compare this to the murderous rampage of the Khmer Rouge. Moral equivalency ad nauseum ad absurdum.