manilatimes.net
Thursday, February 28, 2008
PHNOM PENH: The Khmer Rouge leader who ran the regime’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison returned there Wednesday for the first time in nearly 30 years, where he was to confront some of the very few who survived.
Only around a dozen of the estimated 16,000 people who were blindfolded, bound and herded into one of the Khmer Rouge’s most horrific killing machines are known to have lived through the ordeal.
One of them, Chum Mey, said he was ready to face his chief tormentor, prison boss Duch, who returned to the former school turned torture center, which he ran with brutal efficiency during Cambodia’s genocide in the 1970s.
Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders facing UN-backed trials for atrocities allegedly committed under the communists’ rule.
Judges were to ask Duch, a 65-year-old former math teacher, to walk them through Tuol Sleng’s dilapidated classrooms, re-enacting for them the daily routine that helped shape his alleged crimes, officials said.
“This is to clarify the situation,” tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath told Agence France-Presse, adding that a number of survivors and former guards would also be present at the proceeding, held under heavy security and closed to the public.
Police patrolled the streets around Tuol Sleng, now a museum in the middle of a cramped residential neighborhood in the capital Phnom Penh, ordering people to close their windows and stay inside, according to witnesses.
“An on-site investigation or ‘reconstruction’ is a normal investigative action,” the tribunal said in a statement.
But it will be anything but normal for Chum Mey, a mechanic who like other Tuol Sleng survivors was spared only because he possessed a skill that was useful to his captors. For decades, the terror of the Khmer Rouge years has invaded his quiet life on the outskirts of the capital. On Wednesday, that bitter black shadow was to take form again.
“I want to talk to him. I want the judges and prosecutors to see where I was tortured,” he told AFP late Tuesday, anticipating his meeting with Duch. “If they do not see that this place is real, then anything I say to them is meaningless.”
Duch, a Christian who was seized by Cambodian authorities in 1999 and held at a military prison until his transfer to the tribunal on July 31, is charged with crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the brutal upheaval that engulfed Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.
Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed by the Khmer Rouge, which dismantled modern Cambodian society in its effort to forge a radical agrarian utopia.--AFP
Thursday, February 28, 2008
PHNOM PENH: The Khmer Rouge leader who ran the regime’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison returned there Wednesday for the first time in nearly 30 years, where he was to confront some of the very few who survived.
Only around a dozen of the estimated 16,000 people who were blindfolded, bound and herded into one of the Khmer Rouge’s most horrific killing machines are known to have lived through the ordeal.
One of them, Chum Mey, said he was ready to face his chief tormentor, prison boss Duch, who returned to the former school turned torture center, which he ran with brutal efficiency during Cambodia’s genocide in the 1970s.
Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders facing UN-backed trials for atrocities allegedly committed under the communists’ rule.
Judges were to ask Duch, a 65-year-old former math teacher, to walk them through Tuol Sleng’s dilapidated classrooms, re-enacting for them the daily routine that helped shape his alleged crimes, officials said.
“This is to clarify the situation,” tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath told Agence France-Presse, adding that a number of survivors and former guards would also be present at the proceeding, held under heavy security and closed to the public.
Police patrolled the streets around Tuol Sleng, now a museum in the middle of a cramped residential neighborhood in the capital Phnom Penh, ordering people to close their windows and stay inside, according to witnesses.
“An on-site investigation or ‘reconstruction’ is a normal investigative action,” the tribunal said in a statement.
But it will be anything but normal for Chum Mey, a mechanic who like other Tuol Sleng survivors was spared only because he possessed a skill that was useful to his captors. For decades, the terror of the Khmer Rouge years has invaded his quiet life on the outskirts of the capital. On Wednesday, that bitter black shadow was to take form again.
“I want to talk to him. I want the judges and prosecutors to see where I was tortured,” he told AFP late Tuesday, anticipating his meeting with Duch. “If they do not see that this place is real, then anything I say to them is meaningless.”
Duch, a Christian who was seized by Cambodian authorities in 1999 and held at a military prison until his transfer to the tribunal on July 31, is charged with crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the brutal upheaval that engulfed Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.
Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed by the Khmer Rouge, which dismantled modern Cambodian society in its effort to forge a radical agrarian utopia.--AFP
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