Cambodia's Khmers Rouges on trial; Evil and the law

The Economist

Feb 23rd 2009
PHNOM PENH

From The Economist print edition

Thirty years after he was put out of business, a Cambodian torturer gets his day in court

JUSTICE moves slowly in Cambodia, even—or perhaps especially—where genocide is concerned. Thirty years after a Vietnamese invasion toppled the Khmers Rouges, and nearly ten years after he was detained, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, last week became the first leader to face trial at a UN–backed “hybrid” tribunal on the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh, set up to achieve justice for survivors of a regime that killed perhaps 2m people.

Duch ran Tuol Sleng or S-21, a notorious Phnom Penh prison (now museum), where more than 14,000 men, women and children were tortured and killed. For two days of procedural hearings the 66-year-old Christian convert sat attentively. At each adjournment he stood, touched his clasped hands to his forehead, and bowed to the crowded court. “Now he is just an old man. Before, he was the absolute man,” says Vann Nath, who survived S-21 because Duch let him paint a portrait of the Khmers Rouges’ leader, Pol Pot. “Whether someone lived or died hinged on him.”

Duch is being tried separately from four other detainees, all, unlike him, central-committee members. His systematic interrogations in S-21 left a damning trail of evidence, and he is vital to the effort to understand the regime. “He alone has admitted his deeds and will almost certainly point the finger to implicate others,” says Alex Hinton, of Rutgers University’s Centre for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights.

Last week lawyers proposed witnesses and noted arguments. François Roux, the defence lawyer, from France, was expected to condemn Duch’s prolonged detention, and Robert Petit, the main international prosecutor, to claim that Duch was part of a joint criminal enterprise—an attempt to implicate the other defendants in the S-21 atrocities. The court also debated whether a child survivor of S-21 could register as a victim despite missing the deadline, or if a husband could represent his dead spouse.

The success of the court remains in doubt. Elderly victims and the defendants themselves (the others are over 75) may thwart it by dying. It took ten years of talks between Cambodia and the UN before the court opened in July 2007. In March the court’s Cambodian side will run out of money. In December the international prosecutor publicly disagreed with his Cambodian co-counsel’s refusal to seek other defendants. This raised questions about political interference. Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, among others, is a former Khmer Rouge cadre.

Yet Duch seems likely to get the trial he and his victims seek. Mr Petit requested 40 days for questioning his witnesses. The defence witnesses include Duch himself, who, according to his lawyer, intends to apologise to victims and answer their long-held questions about the torture prison. Mr Roux worries that no amount of candour by Duch could fully explain the horrors of S-21: “I’m not sure that a human being can explain something inhuman.”