Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Survivor of Khmer murder camp relives horrors of childhood in jail

NEWS.scotsman.com
17 February 2009
By Sopheng Cheang in Phnom Penh

A CHILD survivor of Cambodia's S-21 prison camp has spoken publicly of his ordeal for the first time, telling of how he and his brother hid in a pile of rags as captors who killed his mother fled approaching Vietnamese troops 30 years ago.

Camp commander Kaing Guek Eav goes before a UN-backed tribunal today for the start of his trial for crimes against humanity. Better known as Duch, he will be the first of five former Khmer Rouge leaders to do so.Norng Chan Phal, now a 38-year-old father of two, was eight when the Vietnamese stormed into Phnom Penh to end the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. He was held at the notorious S-21 prison where some 16,000 men, women and children were tortured and executed.

Mr Phal said at a news conference yesterday he and three other children, including his brother, lived through the ordeal, but that his mother was killed. Earlier, only 14 adults were believed to have survived incarceration.

Mr Phal's story surfaced last week when previously unseen footage was shown of Vietnamese troops entering the prison, also known as Tuol Sleng. It showed living children and many adult corpses, some decapitated.

Duch is accused of having committed or abetted a range of crimes including murder, torture, rape and persecutions on political grounds.

The charges stem from the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 rule over Cambodia, during which at least 1.7 million people died of disease, starvation or execution.

Mr Phal, who grew up in an orphanage, said his father was arrested and taken to Tuol Sleng in 1978. Six months later his mother was arrested, and he and his brother were sent to the prison with her.

His mother was put in a cell on the second floor while he and his brother were sent to the prison kitchen. They helped tend the vegetable garden.

"I saw my mum look through the window at us. I never saw my mother again," he said.

Mr Phal broke down in tears as he described revisiting Tuol Sleng, which is now a genocide museum. "I look at the place where I saw my mother through the window and I still pity her for being kicked and pushed by the Khmer Rouge," he said.

Mr Phal said he and other children hid in a pile of discarded prisoners' clothing in January 1979. The prisoner guards shouted at them to come as they loaded the prisoners into lorries to take them away before the arrival of Vietnamese forces.

The Vietnamese soldiers gave them food and later took them to the hospital.

Two of the Vietnamese photographers who shot the films – Ho Van Tay and Dinh Phong – were also at the news conference. They said they arrived at Tuol Sleng and found five children who had been hiding. One of them later died.

"They were all naked. Their bodies marked by mosquito bites," Phong, 70, told reporters.

Ho Van Tay, who led the Vietnamese film crew, said the 16mm footage showed the axes, spades and electrical wires used to torture and later kill inmates."We had to step around swollen, worm-infested corpses with shackles on their ankles."

They filmed a room where inmates were forced to make sculptures of the Khmer leader Pol Pot, who died in 1998.


Population devastated by zealot's brutal social experiment

WHEN the Khmer Rouge overran Phnom Penh on 17 April, 1975, the besieged city's residents welcomed them with open arms, hoping it meant the end of Cambodia's civil war, a tragic sideshow to the US anti-communist war in neighbouring Vietnam.

Little did they know, the real nightmare was about to begin.

Within hours of occupying the capital, nestled on the banks of the Mekong and dripping in French colonial grandeur, Pol Pot started "Year Zero", one of the most violent social experiments in human history.

Towns and cities were emptied as the entire population was forced out into the fields. By some accounts, the population of Phnom Penh went from two million to 25,000 in just three days.

Money was banned and the central bank was blown up. Cars were piled up at Phnom Penh airport as a monument against modernity.

Then the killing started.

Those with glasses, those who spoke a foreign language, those with soft hands were all marked out as "educated" or "bourgeois" and thus deemed to be enemies of Pol Pot's peasant revolution. Many were sent to Duch's S-21 – Security Prison 21 – never to emerge.

Some have doubts that the other four senior Pol Pot cadres detained by the court will ever face trial.

Unlike Duch, who confessed to his crimes after becoming a born-again Christian, the others insist they did nothing wrong.

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