KRouge prison chief held 'self-criticism' meetings

Skulls of victims are piled up on display at the Choeung Ek memorial where the Khmer Rouge executed thousands of people



PHNOM PENH (AFP) — A former jungle prison camp guard told Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court Tuesday how he was forced to attend "self-criticism" sessions to improve his work for Khmer Rouge jailer Duch.

Chan Khorn, 53, said he was so terrified of Duch that he "could not look him in the face" when he worked under him at the communist movement's M-13 prison in the early 1970s.

Duch -- whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav -- regularly told comrades that they would be punished if they failed to perform their duties, and held several "self-criticism" meetings over the course of a year, the witness said.

"These self-criticism meetings were designed to criticise one another. I myself, for example, revealed my mistakes and then received criticisms from other guards," Chan Khorn told the court.

"No one would dare criticise (Duch). None. Because he was the most important chairperson of the place, who would risk criticising him?"

Last month Duch apologised at the start of his trial, accepting blame for overseeing the extermination of 15,000 people who passed through the regime's main prison, Tuol Sleng.

But he has maintained that he never personally executed anyone and has only admitted to abusing two people.

The court has been hearing evidence about M-13, a secret jungle camp which Duch ran during the 1971 to 1975 Khmer Rouge insurgency against the then US-backed government, to better understand Tuol Sleng's organising structure.

The Khmer Rouge were in power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, when Duch is accused of supervising Tuol Sleng prison and sending thousands of people to their deaths in the so-called "Killing Fields."

The former mathematics teacher has denied prosecutors' claims that he played a central role in the Khmer Rouge's iron-fisted rule.

He faces life in jail at the court, which does not have the power to impose the death penalty.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998, and many believe the UN-sponsored tribunal is the last chance to find justice for victims of the regime, which killed up to two million people.