I've tried to post
updates the last several weeks about the trial of Kaing Guek
Eav, or Comrade Duch, as it has provided a rare open window into
the brutality and evil conducted by despotic regimes like that of
Cambodia's Pol Pot. Even though outlets like AP and Reuters (and
the New York Times, a little) have covered the hearings that
detail the acts of the former S-21 jailer, I have seen none of
their dispatches carried by any U.S. media Web sites or
publications.
I've tried to post
updates the last several weeks about the trial of Kaing Guek
Eav, or Comrade Duch, as it has provided a rare open window into
the brutality and evil conducted by despotic regimes like that of
Cambodia's Pol Pot. Even though outlets like AP and Reuters (and
the New York Times, a little) have covered the hearings
that detail the acts of the former S-21 jailer, I have seen none
of their dispatches carried by any other U.S. media Web sites or
publications. I guess genocide and a Nuremburg-type trial about
crimes committed in Southeast Asia thirty years ago is too
distant a subject to be newsworthy.
This week saw the testimony move from the experiences of those
few who survived the torture chamber that was S-21, a school the
Khmer Rouge converted to eliminate its "enemies" (almost none of
whom were a threat), to that
of a security guard for the regime who witnessed the victims'
final hours at the mass gravesite that was Choeung Ek:
A senior Khmer Rouge prison guard on Thursday told a war
crimes tribunal he was forced to send thousands of detainees to
an execution site, where they were brutally killed and their
bodies thrown into mass graves.
Him Huy, 54, a guard at Phnom Penh's notorious S-21 prison,
said he was ordered by Pol Pot's chief jailor to transport
prisoners to a rice field where they were stripped naked and
beaten with clubs as they bled to death.
"All prisoners were blindfolded so they did not know where
they were taken and their hands were tied up to prevent them
from contesting us," Huy told the joint United
Nations-Cambodian tribunal.
"They were asked to sit on the edge of the pits and they
were struck with stick on their necks," he said, his voice
breaking as he gave his harrowing account of the Choeung Ek
executions.
"Their throats were slashed before we removed their
handcuffs and clothes, and they were thrown into the
pits."
As I've reported (secondhand) before, Duch is the only one in the
regime who has expressed remorse and apologized to his victims.
There is evidence he may have become a born-again Christian,
although understandably many are skeptical about that.
Regardless, the trial has been remarkable in that Duch has
repeatedly corrected (or at least disagreed with) testimony in
ways that reflect even more poorly on him. Khmer Mekong Films
has been videotaping the trial and segments of the fascinating
exchanges can be viewed at YouTube, with a sampling below.
