A foreign tourist looks at portraits of victims of the Khmer Rouge regime at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh. — AFP picturesNew Straits Times
http://www.nst.com.my
2009/05/18
LOOKING across the Phnom Penh courtroom where he is on trial for crimes against humanity, the chief Khmer Rouge torturer cannot avoid seeing an artist and a mechanic who sit watching him but mostly avoiding his gaze.
One short and forceful, his feet dangling just above the floor, the other melancholy and drooping a bit, they are rare survivors of Tuol Sleng prison, where at least 14,000 people were sent to their deaths three decades ago.
In the weeks ahead, the two survivors will take the stand to testify against their torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who commanded the prison, and both have terrible stories to tell about a place of horror from which almost no one emerged alive.
Bou Meng, 68, the short one, survived because he was a painter and was singled out from a row of shackled prisoners to produce portraits of the Khmer Rouge chief, Pol Pot.
The other, Chum Mey, 78, was a mechanic and was spared because the torturers needed him to repair machines including the typewriters used to record the confessions -- very often false -- that they extracted from prisoners like himself.
Duch, now 66, is the first of five arrested Khmer Rouge figures to go on trial in the United Nations-backed tribunal here. His case began in February and is expected to last several more months.
Bou Meng and Chum Mey are living exhibits -- like a third survivor, Vann Nath -- from the darkest core of the Khmer Rouge atrocities. They are tangible evidence, like the skulls that have been preserved at some killing fields, or like hundreds of portraits of their fellow prisoners that are displayed on the walls of Tuol Sleng.
The photographs were taken at the moment detainees were delivered to the prison, before they were stripped and fettered and tortured and sent to a killing field. Those ordered killed at Tuol Sleng are among 1.7 million people who died during the Communist Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, disease and overwork, as well as from torture and execution.
Duch is accused of ordering the kinds of beatings, whippings, electric shocks and removal of toenails that Bou Meng and Chum Mey describe; indeed, he admitted in the courtroom to ordering the beating of Chum Mey.
Both men endured torture that continued for days, Chum Mey said: "At that time I wished I could die rather than survive." But both men did survive, and in interviews they now describe scenes that almost none of their fellow prisoners lived to recount.
"Every night I looked out at the moon," Bou Meng recalled. "I heard people crying and sighing around the building. I heard people calling out, 'Mother, help me! Mother, help me!'"
It was at night that prisoners were transported out to a killing field, and every night, he said, he feared that his moment had come. "But by midnight or 1am I realised that I would live another day."
Though many Cambodians have tried to bury their traumatic memories, Bou Meng and Chum Mey have continued to return to the scene of their imprisonment and torture, as if their souls remained trapped there together with the souls of the dead.
During the first few years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Bou Meng returned to work in an office at Tuol Sleng, which was converted into a museum of genocide. Now he uses it as a rest stop, spending the night there on a cot when he visits Phnom Penh from the countryside, where he paints Buddhist murals in temples.
Chum Mey, retired now from his work as a mechanic, spends much of his time wandering among the portraits, telling and retelling his story to tourists and their guides, as if one of the victims on the walls had come to life. An eager and passionate storyteller, he will show a visitor how he was shoved blindfolded into his cell during 12 days of torture, and he will drop to the floor inside a small brick cubicle where he was held in chains.
"As you can see, this was my condition," he said recently as he sat on the hard concrete floor, holding up a metal ammunition box that was used as a toilet.
Like many other Khmer Rouge victims, both men say they have no idea why they were selected for arrest or why they were tortured to admit to unknown crimes. Both men lost their wives and children in the Khmer Rouge years, and although both have rebuilt their families, the past still holds them in its grip.
Bou Meng does not wander like his friend among the Tuol Sleng pictures, but he does keep one in his wallet: a snapshot-size reproduction of the prison portrait of his wife, Ma Yoeun, who was arrested with him but did not survive.
The picture shows a small woman, dressed in black like the others, looking forlorn and lost, her hair tousled -- a record of the last time her husband saw her alive.
"Sometimes when I sit at home I look at the picture and everything seems fresh," he said. "I think of the suffering she endured, and I wonder how long she stayed alive."
Bou Meng said he hoped that testifying against Duch and seeing him convicted would free him from the restless ghosts and let him live what is left of his life in peace. "I don't want to be a victim," Bou Meng said. "I want to be like everybody else, a normal person."
But he said he knew that this might be asking too much of life. "Maybe not completely normal," he said. "But at least 50 per cent." -- NYT
2009/05/18
LOOKING across the Phnom Penh courtroom where he is on trial for crimes against humanity, the chief Khmer Rouge torturer cannot avoid seeing an artist and a mechanic who sit watching him but mostly avoiding his gaze.
One short and forceful, his feet dangling just above the floor, the other melancholy and drooping a bit, they are rare survivors of Tuol Sleng prison, where at least 14,000 people were sent to their deaths three decades ago.
In the weeks ahead, the two survivors will take the stand to testify against their torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who commanded the prison, and both have terrible stories to tell about a place of horror from which almost no one emerged alive.
Bou Meng, 68, the short one, survived because he was a painter and was singled out from a row of shackled prisoners to produce portraits of the Khmer Rouge chief, Pol Pot.
The other, Chum Mey, 78, was a mechanic and was spared because the torturers needed him to repair machines including the typewriters used to record the confessions -- very often false -- that they extracted from prisoners like himself.
Duch, now 66, is the first of five arrested Khmer Rouge figures to go on trial in the United Nations-backed tribunal here. His case began in February and is expected to last several more months.
Bou Meng and Chum Mey are living exhibits -- like a third survivor, Vann Nath -- from the darkest core of the Khmer Rouge atrocities. They are tangible evidence, like the skulls that have been preserved at some killing fields, or like hundreds of portraits of their fellow prisoners that are displayed on the walls of Tuol Sleng.
The photographs were taken at the moment detainees were delivered to the prison, before they were stripped and fettered and tortured and sent to a killing field. Those ordered killed at Tuol Sleng are among 1.7 million people who died during the Communist Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, disease and overwork, as well as from torture and execution.
Duch is accused of ordering the kinds of beatings, whippings, electric shocks and removal of toenails that Bou Meng and Chum Mey describe; indeed, he admitted in the courtroom to ordering the beating of Chum Mey.
Both men endured torture that continued for days, Chum Mey said: "At that time I wished I could die rather than survive." But both men did survive, and in interviews they now describe scenes that almost none of their fellow prisoners lived to recount.
"Every night I looked out at the moon," Bou Meng recalled. "I heard people crying and sighing around the building. I heard people calling out, 'Mother, help me! Mother, help me!'"
It was at night that prisoners were transported out to a killing field, and every night, he said, he feared that his moment had come. "But by midnight or 1am I realised that I would live another day."
Though many Cambodians have tried to bury their traumatic memories, Bou Meng and Chum Mey have continued to return to the scene of their imprisonment and torture, as if their souls remained trapped there together with the souls of the dead.
During the first few years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Bou Meng returned to work in an office at Tuol Sleng, which was converted into a museum of genocide. Now he uses it as a rest stop, spending the night there on a cot when he visits Phnom Penh from the countryside, where he paints Buddhist murals in temples.
Chum Mey, retired now from his work as a mechanic, spends much of his time wandering among the portraits, telling and retelling his story to tourists and their guides, as if one of the victims on the walls had come to life. An eager and passionate storyteller, he will show a visitor how he was shoved blindfolded into his cell during 12 days of torture, and he will drop to the floor inside a small brick cubicle where he was held in chains.
"As you can see, this was my condition," he said recently as he sat on the hard concrete floor, holding up a metal ammunition box that was used as a toilet.
Like many other Khmer Rouge victims, both men say they have no idea why they were selected for arrest or why they were tortured to admit to unknown crimes. Both men lost their wives and children in the Khmer Rouge years, and although both have rebuilt their families, the past still holds them in its grip.
Bou Meng does not wander like his friend among the Tuol Sleng pictures, but he does keep one in his wallet: a snapshot-size reproduction of the prison portrait of his wife, Ma Yoeun, who was arrested with him but did not survive.
The picture shows a small woman, dressed in black like the others, looking forlorn and lost, her hair tousled -- a record of the last time her husband saw her alive.
"Sometimes when I sit at home I look at the picture and everything seems fresh," he said. "I think of the suffering she endured, and I wonder how long she stayed alive."
Bou Meng said he hoped that testifying against Duch and seeing him convicted would free him from the restless ghosts and let him live what is left of his life in peace. "I don't want to be a victim," Bou Meng said. "I want to be like everybody else, a normal person."
But he said he knew that this might be asking too much of life. "Maybe not completely normal," he said. "But at least 50 per cent." -- NYT
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