Another astounding confession came from Khmer Rouge jailer Kaing
Guek Eav (nicknamed “Comrade Duch,” pronounced “Doik”) yesterday,
during the first of an expected handful of trials of
officials who served under Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in the late
1970s. Agence France-Press
reports:
Duch said he had his brother-in-law locked up at the
notorious Tuol Sleng detention centre to protect himself and
his family, adding that the man was later killed by the
hardline communist movement.
“I vouched for my younger sister and I vouched to educate
her, but I could not do that for my brother-in-law,” said Duch,
who acknowledges overseeing the extermination of some 15,000
people at the jail.
“As a principle, when the husband was arrested the wife was
arrested as well. But my younger sister was not arrested and
she is still alive today,” he added.
“Educate” meant to retrain the minds of all Cambodians to swear
loyalty only to the government — not family, not God, not anyone
or anything else. The megalomaniacal Pol Pot eliminated all
individuals who showed evidence of wealth or an education, even
if they wore eyeglasses, for fear of an intellectual rebellion.
Families were divided and driven far from their home provinces.
What was left was an agrarian peasant society, as desired by the
dictator’s vision for a communist utopia.
He said that after his arrest (actually a second time), his
brother-in-law tried to protect the rest of the family from the
Khmer Rouge’s spiralling paranoia, which involved witchhunts
for suspected agents for the CIA, KGB and Vietnam and other
groups.
“What he was afraid of was that when he was arrested and
handcuffed, he wanted to know whether I would be arrested.
Because if I was arrested, then the whole family would be
gone,” Duch said.
Yesterday also brought the first outside testimony, by
Cambodian-American minister Christopher LaPel, about Duch’s
conversion to Christianity in the 1990s. This was while Duch was
still in hiding and had not yet been discovered as a Khmer Rouge
criminal. From
the Phnom Penh Post:
The pastor said he only learned Duch’s real name when an
Associated Press reporter contacted him in April 1999 for a
story on the former prison chief.
“That was a surprise for me,” LaPel said, though he added
that it was evidence of God’s ability to change someone “from
the killer to the believer”.
LaPel, a character witness appearing for the defence, said
he had no trouble forgiving Duch despite the fact that he lost
family members to the Khmer Rouge as well as close friends who
were sent to Tuol Sleng.
“When I met Duch in June 2008, I told him that I love him
and I forgive him for what he had done to my parents, my
brothers, my sister and my close friends at S-21,” he said. “I
speak for myself – as a Christian, as a believer in Jesus
Christ.”
Of course this is
still deemed not newsworthy by most of the American media
(TIME
had a story recently, mostly about Cambodian television
coverage of the trial).
Finally, to update
my last post about the corruption of the court trying these
cases, Belgian academic Raoul Marc Jennar called Duch a
“scapegoat” for the government and said his crimes were surpassed
elsewhere during the regime’s reign. From
The Straits Times:
There were nine centres where there were more victims than
(Tuol Sleng). And from those centres, no one is before the
court,’ Mr Jennar, an expert on Khmer studies who has advised
the current Cambodian government, told the court.
‘My concept of justice is not to have scapegoats. It’s to
treat everyone the same way… There are a number of directors
from those centres that are still alive - I want to emphasise
that,’ he added, refusing to name the suspects.
He cited researchers from the Documentation Centre of
Cambodia to support the claim….
Jennar, who interviewed Duch in custody, said there was no
hierarchy among the 196 Khmer Rouge detention centres around
Cambodia, refuting prosecution claims that Tuol Sleng served as
the regime’s main jail.
Just like there was no “main” mass grave — they still pockmark
the entire country.
