pussyasiangirl: Khmer Rouge trial

Showing posts with label Khmer Rouge trial. Show all posts

Showing posts with label Khmer Rouge trial. Show all posts

Cambodians Told Khmer Rouge Security Camps Designed to Kill

By Luke Hunt
Voice of America
Phnom Penh
23 April 2009

In Cambodia, the trial of one of Pol Pot's surviving henchmen has been told how security camps designed by the Khmer Rouge and operating as early as 1971 were designed from the outset to torture and kill.

More than 200 villagers who lived around camp M13 attended the court to hear evidence from Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, on how their district was used as a prototype for death camps that would later be constructed by the Khmer Rouge.
MI3 was built in a communist-controlled area in 1971 while the Khmer Rouge were still fighting the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government. Four years later Pol Pot and his ultra-Maosists came to power and established 196 death camps across the country, including the dreaded S21.

Duch initially ran M13, and is on trial for crimes against humanity after overseeing the extermination of more than 16,000 people while at the helm of S21 between 1975 and 1979.

Seventy-year-old Khai Sorn lived near M13, but as a result life was tough and her days on the family farm were numbered.

She says during the Pol Pot regime life was very hard because the people were not allowed to stay at home and she was forced to live in the jungle.

Duch described the camps as a security office. He said each one, including S21 and M13 had a duty to detain, to torture, to interrogate, and finally to smash and kill.

Tribunal spokesperson Helen Jarvis said the villagers were trucked in as part of broader attempts to open the legal process to the public and the victims of Khmer Rouge regime. But she says they may have gotten more than they bargained for.

"... that has to be shocking for anybody," Jarvis said. "Indeed, I think the villagers probably did not expect they would hear something quite that straight forward when they arrived here today."

About two million people, or a third of Cambodia's population, died under the Khmer Rouge. But ongoing conflicts and international politics meant efforts to find some kind of justice were delayed until earlier this year.

Duch is the first senior Khmer Rouge figure to face trial. He is the only one of five in custody to acknowledge responsibility for his actions. The others are likely to be tried in the next year or two.

Khmer Rouge torturer says Jesus helped find him in hiding

Wed, 22 Apr 2009
DPA

Phnom Penh - The Khmer Rouge's former chief torturer told Cambodia's UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal Wednesday that Jesus Christ had ordained his discovery by a journalist a decade ago when he was a fugitive with an assumed identity living in a remote village. Kaing Guek Eav, known by his revolutionary name Duch, faces charges of crimes against humanity, premeditated murder, torture and breeches of the Geneva Conventions allegedly committed while he was the warden of the S-21 torture prison in Phnom Penh.

In the third week of the tribunal's first trial, Duch said Jesus led journalist Nic Dunlop to find him in a town near the Thai border in 1999.

"I spoke to Nic Dunlop and said, 'It was Christ who brought you to meet me,'" he said. "Nic Dunlop quoted those words, and those are the words that I told him."

The 66-year-old born-again Christian recounted an interview he gave to Dunlop and fellow journalist Nate Thayer shortly before he was arrested and detained in a military prison.

He said he told Dunlop that Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's claim that S-21 was fabricated by Vietnam after it invaded Cambodia in 1979 was a lie.

"I was chief of S-21," he said. "All the crimes there were under my responsibility."

Duch is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders facing trial for their roles in the deaths of up to 2 million people through overwork, starvation or execution during the Maoist group's 1975-79 reign.

At least 15,000 men, women and children are believed to have been imprisoned, tortured and interrogated at S-21 before being sent to be murdered at the Cheoung Ek "killing fields" outside the Cambodian capital.

Duch earlier in the trial apologized to his victims, their families and the country but maintained that he was simply following orders.

On Wednesday, he maintained that he was mostly acting on the orders of fellow detainee and former Khmer Rouge chief ideologue Nuon Chea.

Duch's trial was expected to run into mid-June, and he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The Khmer Rouge trial is inadequate

April 22, 2009
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
Pacific Daily News (Guam)

"Small countries have littlepower to alter the region, let alone the world," said Singapore Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew in his April 9 address on "The Fundamentals of Singapore's Foreign Policy: Then and Now."

He expressed, in an eloquent and easy to remember way, the nature of national interest in international relations: "Friendship ... is not a function of goodwill or personal affection. We must make ourselves relevant so that other countries have an interest in our continued survival and prosperity as a sovereign and independent nation."
In this space on June 18 of last year, I wrote, in "Lessons of Hartford, Laos, Cambodia," about a streetlight surveillance camera that captured the scene of 78-year-old Angel Torres "tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver" on a busy street in Hartford, Conn., "left unattended by dozens of passers-by," and I quoted Alexander Green of spiritualwealth.com -- "Without compassion, there really isn't much to separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom."

Tying the story in a domestic environment to politics on the world stage, where politics can get ugly as a country acts to promote its national interest, I quoted Mao Zedong's "Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed," and Nikita Krushchev's "Politicians are the same all over the world. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." I wrote, too, about Americans' exit from Laos and Cambodia.

Thirty-four years ago, in April 1975, Cambodian Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, one of the "seven traitors" earmarked for death by the victorious Khmer Rouge, responded to U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean's offer to evacuate him from Phnom Penh: "I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me to freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.

"You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well," continued Matak, "if I shall die on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad, because we all are born and must die (one day). I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans."

Six days after Dean was evacuated by helicopter from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge entered the capital. According to Dean's "oral history" of events in Cambodia deposited at the Jimmy Carter Library, Matak "was executed publicly" near Phnom Penh's Grand Hotel.

Dean claimed that in "message after message" sent to Washington, he pleaded: "If the Khmer Rouge take control of the country, there was going to be a bloodbath."

As many in the world had enough of the United States' war and the destruction and suffering in the former French Indochina, American national interest dictated a U.S. withdrawal from the region. The chant around the globe then was, "Let Peace Have A Chance!"

From April 17, 1975, when Chinese-backed Pol Pot took control of Cambodia, to Jan. 7, 1979 -- when some 200,000 Vietnamese regular troops, supported by tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft, spearheaded a breakaway Khmer Rouge faction that knocked Pol Pot out of power -- an estimated two million Cambodians and some foreigners died under Khmer Rouge rule as a result of starvation, forced labor, torture and arbitrary killings.

It is believed that hardly a Cambodian family anywhere had not had at least one member fall victim to the Khmer Rouge's atrocities.

Among those who were part of that Khmer Rouge faction that allied itself with the Vietnamese invasion of 1979 were Heng Samrin, currently Cambodia's National Assembly Chairman, current Prime Minister Hun Sen, and current Senate President Chea Sim, among others in the current Cambodian leadership.

But the No. 1 Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, most wanted for Khmer Rouge's crimes against humanity, died in 1998, the year the United Nations pressured Cambodians to create a special court to try the Khmer Rouge leadership.

In 2001, a law to create a court of Cambodian judges (to be in the majority) and international judges under Cambodian jurisdiction was passed, and finally a joint tribunal was set up in 2006.

The Christian Science Monitor reported the United Nations at first opposed the arrangement "because of widespread concerns over the notoriously corrupt Cambodian judiciary, and its lack of independence." But on Feb. 17 this year, the tribunal known as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia began its hearing of its first accused -- former math teacher Kaing Khek Eav, alias Duch, commandant of the gruesome S-21 Tuol Sleng torture center.

Four other defendants -- Nuon Chea, chief ideologue next to Pol Pot; Khieu Samphan, former president of Khmer Rouge Cambodia; Ieng Sary, foreign minister; Ieng Thirith, Sary's wife and minister of social affairs -- all in poor health, are to be next on the stand.

With the objective to put the accused before the victims or their families and the media for each to explain his or her actions, and the ultimate goal to "achieve justice, promote peacebuilding, encourage reconciliation, and begin healing," as Radio Free Asia Web site says, the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal ought to help put a much-needed end to Cambodia's dark history and unleash a "national reconciliation" process.

The trouble is, the trial of a mere five Khmer Rouge leaders for the death of about two million people in 1975-1979 is far from adequate to bring justice and national reconciliation to Cambodians, to begin healing and promote peacebuilding in the country.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.

KRouge prison chief killed and tortured: witness

20 April 2009
AFP

PHNOM PENH - A witness at Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes court wept Monday as he testified that the former prison chief for the Khmer Rouge regime executed his uncle at a secret jungle camp.
Chan Veoun, 56, said he saw the jailer, known as Duch, kill his uncle while he himself was collecting food at the prison camp, M-13, in the early 1970s.

“He was my uncle. He was shot by Duch. He killed him in front of my eyes,” Chan Veoun said, weeping. He did not give a reason for the slaying.

Duch—whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav—charged in response that the testimony was fabricated.

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.

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

Chan Veoun told the court Duch regularly beat prisoners and once stripped a woman to her waist to burn her breasts with a torch soaked in gasoline.

Once, he added, prisoners kept shackled in pits were once left to drown in rainy season floods.

Duch denied his accounts, saying he recognised Chan Veoun but the witness had never worked under him.

“This is a complete fabrication—probably of what he heard and (he) added something on top,” Duch told the court.

“About the crimes committed at (M-13) I cannot forget it. It is a serious matter that affects me psychologically.”

The court has been hearing evidence about M-13, which Duch ran during the 1971 to 1975 Khmer Rouge insurgency against then 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 assertions by prosecutors 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.

Pol Pot's shoes up for sale [-Nhem En tries to cash in on Khmer tragedy?]

Nhem En

April 20, 2009
AFP

PHNOM PENH - A PHOTOGRAPHER for the Khmer Rouge said on Monday he is putting leader Pol Pot's sandals up for auction along with a pair of cameras used to picture life under his brutal regime.

Nhem En, who photographed inmates at the notorious S-21 torture centre and also snapped pictures at official ceremonies for the Cambodian regime, told AFP bidding for the items would open at US$500,000 (S$750,000)

'Now I offer for auction a pair of Pol Pot's sandals and my two cameras that I used to shoot Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders, as well as those who died and were victimised at S-21,' Nhem En said.

The sandals belonging to Pol Pot, who died in 1998, were made of car tyre, while the two cameras were manufactured in Germany and Japan, he added.

Nhem En, now a deputy governor of northwest Anlong Veng district, said he hoped to use the money to construct a museum to showcase photographs and items from the Khmer Rouge period, including Pol Pot's old toilet.

'I call for an auction of the items because I need the money to build a big museum in Anlong Veng,' he said.

Up to two million people died of starvation, execution, overwork or torture as the Khmer Rouge, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, dismantled society in a bid to forge a communist utopia.

The former chief of S-21 prison, Kaing Guek Eav - better known as Duch - is currently on trial for crimes committed during the regime. Cambodia's UN-backed court also plans to try four other senior Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

KR victims in the US let their voice heard

Houng Poeuv, center, and Nin Poeuv, right, survivors of Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia, join other activists in a call for President Obama's attention in saving victims of genocide in Darfur at a rally in Lafayette Park across from the White House in Washington, Sunday, April 19, 2009. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

From Killing Fields to Tennis Courts

STILL PLAYING: Former champion Yi Sarun.

NEXT GENERATION: Tennis is slowly making a comeback in Cambodia as the survivors of the Khmer Rouge get back teaching young people the sport they love.

BASICS: Cambodia still lacks courts and equipment, but not enthusiasm.

DEDICATED: Many give their time to coach young people.

Cambodia's tennis playing survivors of the Khmer Rouge are trying to pick up the pieces and rebuild a once proud tennis nation

19/04/2009
By Robert Davis
Bangkok Post

Former champion Yi Sarun reaches into his tennis bag, takes out an old wrinkled plastic bag filled with black and white photographs and sets the stack on the table. He carries them everywhere he goes, for they are reminders of when life was good to be a Cambodian tennis player.
In one photograph Yi is seen wearing a coat, tie and trousers and carrying an armload of wood tennis racquets while disembarking from a plane. Another one shows him on the court at the Cambodian Sports Club right after an epic five-set match against a Vietnamese opponent. Yi's arms are raised in victory and an exhausted smile spreads across the face of a young man in the prime of his life. One after another, Yi passes photos around, studying each one as if he were seeing it for the first time. Suddenly, the photographs stop. For it is 1975, the year the Maoist group of soldiers called the Khmer Rouge came to power. And then all hell broke loose.

Phnom Penh was once considered one of the most beautiful cities in Southeast Asia. Now with the Khmer Rouge in power it would become a town of terror. It was the upper class who would pay the heaviest price; doctors, teachers, lawyers, and even tennis players. Throats were slit, skulls crushed with a whack of a shovel and babies tossed from windows. Those who were not killed or tortured to death were force-marched to the countryside to develop an agrarian utopia immortalised by the film The Killing Fields.

Life as Cambodians knew it stopped. A new era began and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot called it "Year Zero". In Year Zero, marriages were dissolved and families were banned. Parents were separated from their children. Even children's toys were thrown away, because there would be no time to play.

Two popular slogans of the new regime were "To spare you is no profit. To destroy you is no loss". And, "Better to kill an innocent person, than to leave an enemy alive". With that mantra, the Khmer Rouge went on a blood-thirsty hunt for anyone associated, even remotely, with the bourgeois. Some was just plain ridiculous, like anyone wearing eye-glasses were considered intelligent and must be executed. And if you happened to play tennis, you must be an elitist and were marked for death. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge would go on to commit one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century, killing an estimated 1.7-2 million people.

Rewind a few years earlier, on a sunny spring day in Phnom Penh where a young Prince Sihanouk is sitting by the tennis courts at Le Cercle Sportif, an exclusive country club. He is watching the national champion of Cambodia and Davis Cup player Tep Kunnah train. Children are gathered around too, all watching the man called affectionately "Mr Tennis". It was not unusual for the Prince to regularly attended Tep Kunnah's matches.

"In the '60s and early '70s, tennis was considered as an elitist sport worldwide and Cambodia was no exception," explains Rithi Tep, the Secretary-General of the Cambodia Tennis Association and a son of Tep Kunnah. "Cambodian tennis at the time was at its prime, dominating all regional countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Burma and Laos."

Little could anyone imagine then that those neatly manicured lawns and private tennis courts of the Le Cercle Sportif would be the setting for political executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge. Most notably that of Lon Nol and other government figures. In 1968, Yi Sarin - a team-mate of Yi Sarun - was the number one junior ranked player in Cambodia. Like Yi Sarun, he was ordered to Takeo province to labour in the fields.

"I was so scared that they [the Khmer Rouge] would find out I was a tennis player," Yi Sarin admits. "So many tennis players were killed because they were considered upper-class. I refused to even think about tennis."

Both Yi Sarun and Yi Sarin survived the Khmer Rouge, but at least 37 other tennis players did not. Cham Prasidh, the present Minister of Commerce and President of the Tennis Federation of Cambodia, is a survivor of the killing fields. He remembers when they were forced to eat anything that crawled.

"We were allocated only one kilo of rice per 50 people," Cham Prasidh recalls. "I remember counting the number of rice grains in my bowl. Obviously, with the impossible hours and workload each day we could not survive with only that. So we ate whatever we could. Even earthworms were dug up and pounded into a paste to mix with mother's milk to try and keep the babies alive. We thought the protein would help them survive."

After Vietnamese forces removed the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, slowly life began to resume some sort of normalcy. It would take a few years for tennis to return to Cambodia, as all the equipment had been destroyed. But thanks to expats and diplomats, racquets, balls and nets were donated to the former players and clubs. Then goodwill sporting tours inspired by the Soviet Union sent athletes all over the world to play games.

Tennis was back again. Yi Sarin must have thought his life something of a wild roller-coaster ride. Now he is on a flight rumbling over the Aral Sea en route to Moscow. There he will board a train and back track for 17 hours in the freezing snow where he will eventually arrive in Lithuania to play tennis.

He and Yi Sarun would travel to other parts of the Soviet Union like Estonia and Kiev to play tennis matches. Today, Yi Sarin is the national coach of Cambodia.

But the driving force in the effort to return Cambodian tennis to glory is Rithi Tep.

"It is a legacy that I feel I have to perpetuate on behalf of my family," he says. "Because of not only what tennis meant to my father and uncle, but also what they did for tennis too. My family believes that such a legacy has to be carried on by my children to continuously remind of the greatness of a Cambodian athlete and their grandfather and uncle."

With only eight public courts and a handful of private ones in the entire country, tennis has a long way to go in Cambodia before it regains its former status. But at the 2007 Southeast Asia Games in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, Cambodia showed it is ready to challenge again.

When Nyssan Tan captured the bronze medal in the men's individual singles category his team-mates and coaches erupted in celebration as if he had just won the gold, not the bronze. For a country that has seen so much death and destruction, and suffered so many hardships, any medal is something to be cheered. A visibly shaken, but jubilant Rithi Tep, is crying tears of joy.

"We have waited over 30 years for this," he says while hugging the kids and coaches. "Finally!"

Suresh Menom, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Development Officer for Asia, feels Cambodia only needs a little help to get going again. Already the ITF has sent equipment and is considering an Olympic Solidarity Fund financial grant to Cambodia for coaching expertise.

"Despite their lack of facilities and tennis infrastructure development," Mr Menom says, "Cambodia has managed to achieve some remarkable success in the Southeast Asian tennis arena in recent years. The SEA Games bronze medal and 14 and under juniors that were selected on the ITF teams is a demonstration of the tenacity and determination of the Cambodian players in achieving success despite facing insurmountable hardships.

"If the Tennis Federation of Cambodia can have a centre of its own to develop players, the future is going to be much brighter for Cambodian tennis."

At 63, former champion Yi Sarun still gets paid to play tennis. People working for NGOs and expatriates slip him a couple of dollars per hour to play a set or two at Phnom Penh's VIP Club. Yi Sarun's skin is sunburned a dark walnut colour and his face is gaunt with high cheekbones.

A hearing aide dangles from his ear and a shy smile reveals that only a few teeth remain. While his strokes have become as stiff as his stride, he can still beat most of his younger clients, although he lets them win just enough to keep them coming back. From a nearby court, Yi Sarin is watching him play.

"Still, after all these years he never learned to volley," he says with a laugh, just as Yi Sarun dumps a backhand into the net.

Yi Sarun might not have learned to volley, but just like other tennis playing survivors and their descendants of the Khmer Rouge, he has not given up trying to improve either.

April 17 Memorial for the victims of the KR regime in Choeung Ek

Cambodian Buddhist monks sit at Choeung Ek memorial complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, April 17, 2009, during a ceremony marking the 34th anniversary of the start of the Khmer Rouge regime. Hundreds of Cambodians joined the ceremony, bringing foods for monks, to dedicate to those who died during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-1979 regime, Kampuchea Democratic. On Monday, April 20, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as 'Duch,' will go on trial for crimes against humanity. 'Duch' was a commander of the Toul Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge where thousands were tortured and killed. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodian Chan Kim Soung, 63, weeps as she talks about her history during the Khmer Rouge time at Choeung Ek memorial complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, April 17, 2009, in a ceremony marking the 34th anniversary of the start of the Khmer Rouge regime. Hundreds of Cambodians joined the ceremony, bringing foods for monks to dedicate to those who died during the Khmer Rouge 1975-1979 regime, Kampuchea Democratic. On Monday, April 20, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as 'Duch,' will go on trial for crimes against humanity. 'Duch' was a commander of the Toul Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge where thousands were tortured and killed. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

A Cambodian woman prays Buddhist monks at Choeung Ek memorial complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, April 17, 2009, in a ceremony marking the 34th anniversary of the start of the Khmer Rouge regime. Hundreds of Cambodians joined the ceremony, bringing foods for monks, to dedicate to those who died during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-1979 regime, Kampuchea Democratic. On Monday, April 20, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as 'Duch,' will go on trial for crimes against humanity. 'Duch' was a commander of the Toul Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge where thousands were tortured and killed. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

A Cambodian man and a boy walk in front of human skulls that are displayed in a stupa of Choeung Ek memorial on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, April 17, 2009. April 17 marks the 34th anniversary that the Khmer Rouge defeated the Cambodian government in 1975. On Monday, April 20, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as 'Duch,' will go on trial for crimes against humanity. 'Duch' was a commander of the Toul Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge where thousands were tortured and killed. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

A Cambodian Buddhist nun, left, reads a sign for a grave at Choeung Ek memorial on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, April 17, 2009. April 17 marks the 34th anniversary that the Khmer Rouge defeated the Cambodian government in 1975. On Monday, April 20, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as 'Duch,' will go on trial for crimes against humanity. 'Duch' was a commander of the Toul Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge where thousands were tortured and killed. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodian Buddhist nuns contribute their donations in front of the human skulls that are displayed in a stupa of Choeung Ek memorial on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, April 17, 2009. April 17 marks the 34th anniversary that the Khmer Rouge defeated the Cambodian government in 1975. On Monday, April 20, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as 'Duch,' will go on trial for crimes against humanity. 'Duch' was a commander of the Toul Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge where thousands were tortured and killed. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodian Buddhist monks walk through the former Khmer Rouge victim graves with a stupa in the background, are loaded hundreds of the human skulls of Choeung Ek memorial in outskirt of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, April 17, 2009. On Monday, April 20, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as 'Duch' will go on trial for crimes against humanity. 'Duch' was commander of the Toul Sleng prison under the Khmer Rouge where thousands were tortured and killed. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Khmer Rouge trials will not bring justice

April 15, 2009
By Chak Sopheap
Guest Commentary
UPI Asia Online

Niigata, Japan — It is not surprising that many foreigners know the details of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979, while the young generation of Cambodians may not even know that this inhuman regime ever existed. Cambodian schoolchildren are taught almost nothing about this dark period of their country’s history. Even 30 years after the Khmer Rouge committed its atrocities against the Cambodian people the subject is still sensitive among political groups.

Fortunately, “A History of Democratic Kampuchea,” written by Cambodian author Khamboly Dy and published in 2007, helps to fill in the gap and educate the nation about the murderous regime. The Education Ministry has approved the book as a "core reference" for history classes, but not as part of the core curriculum.

Still, the scope of the textbook is limited and it is controversial in its naming of only certain individuals involved in the regime, its characterization of the massive movement against the Khmer Rouge, and its unclear interpretation of a long-standing political debate in Cambodia over whether Vietnam “liberated” or “invaded” the country when it ousted the Khmer Rouge. Therefore, the young generation is still skeptical about the truth concerning the Khmer Rouge.

When the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, popularly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, was established, many Cambodians hoped it would bring justice, truth and reconciliation for the victims and survivors of the regime. This new hybrid, national-international tribunal was expected to accomplish three things:

* First, it should bring justice to those who died and help those who survived to release their suffering.
* Second, it should strengthen the rule of law by judging and punishing the criminals in fair and open trials. It should be a model marking the end of impunity and the beginning of law enforcement in Cambodia, and serve as a deterrent to all who contemplate such inhuman behavior in Cambodia or in the world.
* Third, it should educate the people of Cambodia and raise awareness about this darkest chapter in the country's history, especially among the young generation. Ultimately, this would lead to the reconstruction of the society as a whole.

However, it is questionable whether these expectations will be met. The claim that the Khmer Rouge Tribunal will benefit Cambodians could turn out to be merely a myth – such a tribunal may not be the best option for national reconciliation.

For one thing, the scope of the tribunal is limited to senior regime leaders who planned its actions or gave orders, as well as those most responsible for committing serious crimes. The foreign countries that supported the Khmer Rouge, or acted as the main catalyst for the emergence of this cruel regime, will not be brought to court. The tribunal’s regulations indicate clearly that only individuals who committed crimes will be tried. This court is not mandated to sentence countries or organizations.

Therefore, only local leaders and a few high-level leaders that were directly involved in the genocide will be sentenced, while many others will go unpunished. It is doubtful if justice and the rule of law will prevail.

Those who support the tribunal may say it is better than nothing, that it is better to accept justice in a narrow sense than to have none at all. But real justice would only be achieved if all who are accused are treated fairly by the court. If the trial procedures do not reveal the root cause of the problem, it is unacceptable.

It is also unclear to what extent these trials can serve as a model for an independent court system in Cambodia, as corruption and nepotism are so widespread, even within this court. Moreover, it is unlikely that the whole truth about the Khmer Rouge regime will emerge through the proceedings of the tribunal. If this tribunal is to be the final page in the Khmer Rouge history, it will be unjust and misleading for future generations.

There are better alternatives to this court setup if justice and national reconciliation are the goals. The funds allocated for the court, which have already exceeded the original budget, should have been used for restorative justice – a healing process – rather than this imperfect retributive justice.

For Cambodian society, real reconciliation will be found only when trust returns between individuals; when they can smile at and trust each other again. Thus, a national dialogue or truth commission should be set up so that people, especially the victims, can fully participate to address their suffering and their needs.
--
(Chak Sopheap is a graduate student of peace studies at the International University of Japan. She runs a blog, www.sopheapfocus.com, in which she shares her impressions of both Japan and her homeland, Cambodia. She was previously advocacy officer of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights.)

Cambodians seek closure from trial

Many Cambodians hope the tribunals will deliver justice to those killed by the Khmer Rouge [AFP]

Wednesday, April 15, 2009
By Tom Fawthrop in Phnom Penh
Al Jazeera

"The tribunal is important step to ending the culture of impunity" - Mouen Chean Nariddh, Cambodian writer

Three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge from power, a joint United Nations-Cambodian tribunal has finally begun the first trial of former regime officials.
Based in the outskirts of capital Phnom Penh, the court was established in 2006 to indict senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and bring some accountability for the 1.7 million Cambodians who died under the regime.

Many pundits had forecast that the tribunal would never happen, following years of delays and wrangling.

In the years following the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 that forced the Khmer Rouge from power, Western governments blocked attempts to organise an international effort to prosecute the perpetrators.

Many, including the US and Britain, even supported a Khmer Rouge-led coalition and backed the group's guerrilla war against Vietnamese troops defending the new Phnom Penh government.

The first to go before the joint panel of Cambodian and international judges was Kaing Guek Eav - also known as Duch - the former director of the S21 interrogation centre where more than 14,000 prisoners were detained, tortured and executed.

Four other former senior regime officials are expected to go before the court in 2010.

When Duch's trial began in late March, live coverage of the proceedings was followed closely by hundreds of thousands of Cambodians on television and radio.

"We have been waiting for a long time. Now our hopes have become a reality," Thun Saray, chairman of Cambodian human rights group ADHOC and a veteran activist, told Al Jazeera.

The failure to punish or account for the biggest crimes in the country's history means that many Cambodians today have little respect for the law, he says.

Like many Cambodians over the age of 40, painter Hen Sophal vividly remembers the horrors of forced labour, pitiful rations and the constant fear of death under the Khmer Rouge regime.

He had all but given up hope of ever seeing any justice.

"I didn't expect that it would happen. But even after 30 years it is not too late," he says.
Culture of violence

The three decades without any closure on the national trauma has left Cambodia's deep scars open and unhealed, undermining the ethical foundations of normal society and spawning a culture of violence, lawlessness and impunity.

"The Khmer Rouge shadow looms over Cambodia to this day," says Hen Sophal. "There is still a Khmer Rouge influence in Cambodian society, still lots of violence and lack of human respect."

He is also worried about the slow pace of progress.

"I am concerned about many delays because the Khmer Rouge leaders are getting older and could die before their trial starts."

The start of the trial, he hopes, "can lessen the suffering of the victims and provide lessons for the young generation".

Sin Putheary is a recent graduate from Phnom Penh University who now works for Youth for Peace, an NGO attempting to bring information about the tribunal to people in the countryside.

Even today, she says, many accused murderers brought before Cambodian courts see no reason why they should be punished.

Citing police reports, she quotes one suspect telling investigators recently: "I only killed one person, but Khmer Rouge leaders killed so many and they were never punished."

Mouen Chean Nariddh, a local writer and journalist, has been making the same link for years.

"The tribunal is an important step to ending the culture of impunity," he told Al Jazeera, adding that he hopes the trials will act as a model and help establish the foundations of a proper justice system for Cambodia.

Local courts are known to be mired in corruption but, with the eyes of so many Cambodians and the international media on the Khmer Rouge tribunal, he notes that the Cambodian lawyers "show much more integrity working in the tribunal".

"Cambodian judges and lawyers will use the tribunal model, and transfer from the KRT the example to a fair trial and rights of the accused to the local courts."

Collective grief

Another common theme is that by bringing a sense of closure to the darkest chapter of Cambodian history, the tribunal will help to address the collective grief of a nation.

On the opening day of Duch's trial, all 500 seats in the public gallery were taken and 80 per cent were Cambodians.

But far from everyone is gripped by the most important trial of all time for Cambodians.

More than two thirds of the population is under the age of 30 and have no recollection of life under the Khmer Rouge.

With little or no teaching of recent history in Cambodia's schools, most Cambodian youth have little knowledge of Pol Pot's regime or its alleged crimes.

The single nationwide survey about the tribunal, published by the University of California, showed that more than a third of respondents had no knowledge of the trials.

That is not the case with Nong Visoth, who works as a travel consultant in Phnom Penh. He lost 15 relatives on his mother's side of the family to the Khmer Rouge.

Closely following the tribunal every day, he says the tribunal is important to his family "because it can reduce our pain and suffering".

But for him and many other survivors of the Khmer Rouge, the most pressing concern is that real justice may still be thwarted - not by political meddling, but by the simple passage of time.

Pol Pot, the former supreme leader of the regime, died more than 10 years ago.

His deputy, Nuon Chea, and the regime's foreign minister, Ieng Sary, are now both in their 80s and in poor health.

"I worry they will die before the verdict, before they are sentenced," says Nong Visoth.

"If the leaders die before justice, before their trial is completed, Cambodian people will still suffer for the rest of their lives."

Portrait of KRouge prison chief emerges at trial

Wed, Apr 15, 2009
By Patrick Falby
AFP

PHNOM PENH - As his trial began at a UN-backed war crimes court, the former Khmer Rouge prison chief apologised for the atrocities he committed - but few Cambodians are likely to grant him forgiveness.
Duch, 66, told the court trying him for crimes against humanity that he felt "regret and heartfelt sorrow" for the murders of around 15,000 people between 1975 and 1979 at Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21.

"I would like to emphasise that I am responsible for the crimes committed at S-21, especially the torture and execution of people there," said Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav.

Duch, who became a born-again Christian before his arrest in 1999, went on to add that he would like to leave "an open window to seek forgiveness".

Few Cambodians have said they will grant that wish, and even though Duch accepts the allegations against him, lawyers spent the first two weeks of his trial sparring over how much responsibility he bears for atrocities.

The tribunal, established in 2006, resumed last last month in the Cambodia capital, and is seen as a last chance to bring the Khmer Rouge's leaders to justice.

The joint trial of four other Khmer Rouge leaders being held with Duch is set to start later this year after his case is complete.

The former maths teacher's apology came after prosecutors described him as central to the Khmer Rouge's iron-fisted rule, which disastrously enslaved the country in collective farms as it attempted to enforce a communist 'Year Zero'.

"The policy was that no one could leave S-21 alive," co-prosecutor Robert Petit told the court as he laid out his case that prisoners were tortured "under the accused's direct orders and sometimes by his own hand".

Inmates had toenails and fingernails pulled out, had plastic bags tied over their heads, were stripped naked and had electric shocks administered to their genitals, Petit said.

Most prisoners were killed by a blow to the base of the neck with a steel club, then had their bellies sliced open, he added.

A former Tuol Sleng guard is expected to later testify that many prisoners were drained of their blood.

"Victims would be strapped to a bed, hooked up to an IV and literally have their life drained out of them," Petit said.

Duch is charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, premeditated murder and torture. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in jail.

But he has denied personally executing anyone, and has only admitted to torturing two prisoners.

Duch told the court he feared for his life and his family, and acted under orders from superiors in the Khmer Rouge - a regime which killed up to two million people through starvation, overwork, torture and execution.

His defence team has indicated it thinks judges could go easier on him after his demonstration of contrition and cooperation. Yet it will be hard pressed to counter the emerging image of him as an exacting executioner.

To better understand Tuol Sleng's organising structure the court last week heard about M-13, which Duch ran during the 1971-1975 Khmer Rouge insurgency against the then US-backed government.

Francois Bizot, a French anthropologist who was nabbed by Khmer Rouge fighters in 1971 and accused of spying for the CIA, told the court Duch was terrified of his superiors but admitted to torture.

Bizot, who wrote the best-selling book 'The Gate' about his experiences at M-13, said: "Until then I thought I was in the right part of humanity, that there were monsters (like Duch) whom I would never resemble."

The next witness, 72-year-old Ouch Sorn, said he was arrested in 1974 on suspicion of espionage and held shackled in a pit at M-13 for two months before being released to work there sweeping and digging graves.

"I dared not to have any contact with (Duch). I was so afraid of him I dared not to look into his face," the former rice farmer said, adding that at least three prisoners died every day in the year he was at the jungle prison.

He described dogs carrying away prisoners' remains as well as multiple beatings and executions, including one in which a woman was buried alive. Duch, however, disputed the testimony.

"When I interrogated women, I never let a detainee see it. Number two, I never beat any female detainees and third, when detainees were beaten, no one else was helping me to beat that person," Duch said.

The trial is due to continue on April 20, and is expected to last several months.

Khmer Rouge survivors give voice to their 'silent suffering'

Born Pach, 40, survived a Khmer Rouge work camp in Cambodia and made it to Long Beach in 1989. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

Um Sath, left, at a Cambodian New Year celebration, lost her sons and husband. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

Um Sath, 89, at home in Long Beach, shares her story. She and her husband were farmers and merchants along the Mekong River. In the middle class, they were targets when the Khmer Rouge swept into power in 1975. (Ann Johansson / Los Angeles Times)

Veasna Cragn, 58, recalls the executions, the dead bodies, the screaming — and how soldiers killed children with clubs to save bullets. (Ann Johansson / Los Angeles Times)

Cambodian Americans who survived the brutal regime have long buried their nightmares. Some spoke out recently in Long Beach.

April 12, 2009
By Joe Mozingo
Los Angeles Times

At night, the old woman hears the voices of her children crying out for her. She knows they will never stop.
Um Sath is 89, and it has been three decades since the Khmer Rouge laid waste to Cambodia. But she shuts her eyes and furiously taps her temples to show exactly where the genocidal regime still rules with impunity. "We miss you, Mama," the voices cry.

Sath spends much of her day sitting in silence and fighting her mind. For years she rarely left her old clapboard house in central Long Beach. Though she now finds slivers of peace chatting with the other haunted figures at her senior center, she has mostly kept the caroming echoes of the "killing fields" sealed tightly inside her head.

One bright spring morning last month, she let them out -- joining dozens of survivors at a recreation center in Long Beach to face their memories head-on. They wanted to see just a bit of reckoning for the perpetrators of one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

Since February, a United Nations-backed tribunal in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh has been trying the first of five Khmer Rouge leaders charged with crimes against humanity, for the brutal experiment in communism that took at least 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979.

Activists in the United States are trying to get refugees outside Cambodia to submit their testimonies to the tribunal, in an effort to spur a judicial process beset by delays, limited funds and allegations of corruption. They hope, along the way, that they can relieve the emotional torture of survivors who rarely speak about what happened.

"I'm hoping it will allow them to tell the world what happened 34 years ago," said Leakhena Nou, an assistant professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach, who is leading the outreach effort in Southern California, home of the largest Cambodian refugee community in the world. "The Khmer Rouge leaders are getting old, the victims are getting old. This is their chance to have their voices be heard before it's too late."

Nou has found that survivors of the Khmer Rouge era living in Cambodia and the U.S. have endured what she calls a prolonged "silent suffering."

"What we're seeing with Cambodians is anomie -- a state of hopelessness and helplessness and this feeling of being disconnected from society."

In a children's day-care room at the rec center in McBride Park, Nou explains to Sath and other victims the importance of submitting their written testimony to the tribunal.

Nou understands this tribunal has huge problems. She knows it won't touch even a small fraction of the era's killers. She knows political forces in Cambodia are trying to limit the tribunal's reach. She knows survivors' memories are fragmented and muddled by trauma and time. And she knows that asking them to condense incomprehensible horrors of that time -- the irrevocable turning point in all of their lives -- into a few quotidian lines in tiny boxes on a government form borders on cruel farce.

Description of crime. Date. Who do you believe is responsible for these crimes and why do you believe this?

And Nou hasn't even been assured that prosecutors will read the forms.

But she still hopes this could be a starting point for Cambodians around the world to rally for justice.

She asks the survivors whether, before filling out the forms, they want to get their stories out into the open and tell them to the group.

A slight, pale figure in a checkered coat stands up. Sath's eyes crinkle before she speaks.

She and her husband were farmers and merchants in the rich land along the Mekong River, south of Phnom Penh. In the middle class, with enough money to own a modest brick house, they were targets when the Khmer Rouge swept into power in 1975, brutally turning the country into a collective society of farm peasants. Intellectuals, teachers, doctors, businessmen, government bureaucrats and army soldiers were executed en masse.

Khmer Rouge soldiers showed up at Sath's home with rifles, took her husband away and told her to start walking with her eight children. "Just walk," she recalls. Mother and children had nothing but their clothes.

The countryside was crowded with people treading the rutted roads. Sath held her 6-year-old boy's hand. Everyone was silent.

For days they wandered, following orders. Anyone who complained or asked questions was dismissed by a bullet to the back of the head.

The soldiers barked questions about her husband at Sath: Why did he travel to Phnom Penh so often? Did he work for the national police?

She told them they were just poor people, doing nothing.

They let her and her children return to where she had lived. The family reunited with her husband and stayed for a month. Their house had been burned to the ground -- just a pile of bricks and the skeleton of a stairway. They slept on the ground. There was no food, and they nearly starved, eating only watery rice soup.

The soldiers forced them back on the road, this time to a work camp near Pursat, where they lived on the dirt floor of a straw hut. The family was emaciated, working to exhaustion in the rice fields day after day.

There were no clocks or calendars, just a malignant silence. Time was elastic and unmoored, like in a nightmare.

The smell of death

One day, soldiers came and locked Sath in chains and took her husband away. She said nothing. Days later she overheard soldiers casually mention his execution. She reeled, but kept it inside for her children.

They came again, in the rice paddy. They asked the children all sorts of questions about their parents. They were kids; they didn't know what they needed to lie about. They said their dad traveled back and forth. They said they had had servants.

The soldiers took her three sons -- two in their late teens, and the 6-year-old.

Some time later, Sath heard that other villagers had seen the boys' clothes in the plowed-up dirt where bodies were routinely buried.

They came for her next. They took her to the same field and beat her unconscious. She woke up naked, amid decaying bodies and the smell that, decades later, could bring every fine grain of this horror back to life. She made it back to her hut, surviving several more near-death moments before Vietnamese soldiers ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

So now she stands in this children's playroom, with its drawings of Cookie Monster and Nemo the clown fish, and the words pour out too fast for the translator to keep up. Sath's eyes are fixed on the middle distance.

"I lost my sons, my grandson. They took my husband away right in front of me. They killed my husband. They took my brothers and sisters away. They were all killed by the Khmer Rouge."

The anguish in her face tells of the unspeakable loss in her heart. A man in a gray suit pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his eyes. Another takes his glasses off and pinches the bridge of his nose. Women choke back sobs.

Sath thanks everyone profusely for listening.

A stout little woman in a red floral dress and white sandals takes the microphone next. Her face is swollen with emotion before she can speak.

Born Pach, now 40, was a child when the black-clad soldiers came for her parents. They told her they needed to be "re-educated."

They sent Pach to a camp in the province of Battambang to cut rice. She begged to see her parents. But they shouted at her, no, she would not see them again.

One day, the guards accused her of stealing a rooster and beat her. Another time, when she was ill, they accused her of being lazy and sliced the top and side of her head with a knife, and then stuck a burning piece of metal in her rectum.

She saw them slit other children's throats, or club them to death.

Dreams, nightmares

Pach survived the Khmer Rouge and made it to Long Beach in 1989. She lives alone in a tiny Section 8 apartment, watching Cambodian karaoke shows behind a steel security screen door, venturing out mostly just to collect cans. She had a boyfriend for several years. They had a wedding ceremony in Las Vegas, but they never made it official and he left her for someone else years ago. The photos of his family hang on her wall. They're all she ever had.

On her mini-fridge, she has a small shrine for her parents, with Buddhist statuettes, incense she keeps burning and cans of soda for them to drink. She dreams that her mother is talking to her, telling her to take care of herself. She can still see her face.

Pach has sought counseling for depression, but never kept up with it. She has nightmares that she is being burned alive. She thinks Khmer Rouge spies live in her building and record her every word.

But she says she is not afraid of them. She wants her torturers to go to prison.

"The Khmer Rouge killed my parents when I was 5 or 6 years old," she cries at the rec center. "I wanted to see my parents so much, but the Khmer Rouge wouldn't let me. They tied me up. They said, 'No, you can't see your parents.' "

She recounts her injuries, in between shallow breaths, and sits down.

Viasnah Cragn, 58, steps up and tells how the Khmer Rouge shot her sister-in-law in the head as she begged for her husband's life. Her story follows no chronology, just the messy onslaught of images in her head.

She recalls someone executed for complaining about mosquitoes. She tells of giving birth twice, being forced into the rice paddies immediately and coming home to find the newborns unfed -- and dead. She remembers dead bodies left unburied for the dogs to eat, and the carnivores' otherworldly howling at night. She remembers the ghostly silence of daylight.

She describes her husband, starving, falling off a footbridge into the water while carrying a bag of rice.

"I asked for him to be rescued," she says. "They said, 'Why are you so possessive? Your husband is no longer your husband! Your children are no longer your children! You just need to focus on your work.' "

She describes how they killed children with clubs to save bullets. The adults quickly learned to be silent. The children couldn't help themselves. Cragn constantly hears their screaming -- Mommy, Daddy, help me! -- to this day.

Cragn looks at everyone, desperate, beseeching, alone.

"I live here," she says. "I walk around. But I feel like I'm a person living without a soul."

Digging deep

The levee is broken and the stories are pouring out. One woman gets a roll of paper towels to hand around to wipe the tears.

When they get to the forms, 21 people fill them out. No one remembers dates. Places are vague. Only one victim names an alleged perpetrator. The rest do not remember their tormentors' names, never knew them, or are still scared.

A week later, Cragn says she feels that a great pain -- a physical pressure she carried in her chest -- has been lifted by telling her story that day.

"Ever since I did what I did Friday, I feel like there's nothing left of it," she says. "I don't know where it all goes."

But pain has its own strata, and some layers are too deep to unearth. She didn't tell everything that day. She told of other people getting tortured. When asked about her own torture, tears stream down to her jaw before her face is wrung in agony.

"I can't talk about that," she cries.

joe.mozingo@latimes.com

Escaping the Khmer Rouge --- and building a new life

St. Anthony parishioner Mara Doung.

Friday, April 10, 2009
By Doris Benavides
Tidings Online (Los Angeles, California, USA)

To Mara Doung it seems it was yesterday when he told God he was not ready to die, but in reality 33 years have passed.

"It was 7 p.m.," Doung clearly recalls. The then-15-year-old boy had been hiding for three days at a coconut farm in his native Cambodia. He was separated from his family by the Khmer Rouge, the communist forces led by Pol Pot that took over in April 1975.
Doung's great grandmother Prak Him, with whom he lived from the ages of 5 through 12, had taught him that there is only one God --- and he was not Buddha, as most Cambodians believed.

Doung is one of a very small number of Catholic Cambodians. Most of his countrymen practice Theravada Buddhism, their country's state religion before Pol Pot's rule. He is a parishioner of St. Anthony Church in Long Beach, a city that is home to the largest Cambodian community outside Southeast Asia (more than 100,000, including about 17,000 Cambodian-American).

Thousands of Cambodians, including Doung, fled to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, escaping a communist regime that oversaw what is regarded as one of the worst genocides in human history. Its victims included Doung's father and a sister.

Growing community

About 95 percent of Cambodia's population of 12 million is Theravada Buddhist. Only 19,000 are Catholic. But though most immigrants to the U.S. adhere to the Theravada Buddhism of their homeland, the percentage of Christian (and Catholic) Cambodians is growing.

The genesis of this conversion locally took place in the 1970s, as Sister of Charity Lucille Desmond led an effort to establish an outreach program to newly-arrived Cambodians who settled in Long Beach. With the growth of this immigrant community, in 1992 a group of Catholic lay men and women started Our Lady of Mount Carmel Cambodian (parochial) Mission, to provide spiritual support to Southeast Asian citizens.

The majority of these refugees had arrived in Long Beach with nothing more than what they were wearing. They had been drawn here by family and friends, the potential for jobs, the coastal climate, and the Port of Long Beach's Asian imports.

Most of them, like Doung, had lost at least one close relative during the four years of the Khmer Rouge's genocide, and after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 (by which time an estimated 2 million people had died).

Today, at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a few blocks away from St. Anthony Church, recently-arrived Cambodians learn to adjust to the American way of life. Mary Blatz, the mission's coordinator and one of its cofounders, helps them navigate through the immigration, health and educational systems, and teaches English as a Second Language.

Blatz, a Columbia University graduate in International Education Development, helped begin the parochial mission in Long Beach at the request of Cambodian Bishop Yves Ramousse (whom she had met in previous years while he was living as a refugee in New York,) and with the sponsorship of the late San Pedro Region Auxiliary Bishop Carl Fisher.

Blatz had started working with refugees in 1979, training teachers who taught English to other refugees. In the early '80s she traveled to Hong Kong and Indonesia, where she continued working with refugees.

She still teaches ESL, advises on employment and refers people to a network of employers and attorneys she has built throughout the years. Her services, she said, are available to everyone, regardless of their faith.

But her main task is to provide spiritual and emotional support to the people with whom she has a special bond.

"It is my concern they know about God and the faith," Blatz said. "Most of the Cambodians, especially the elderly, fell in a strong depression as a result of the atrocities against them by the Khmer Rouge and during their stay in refugee camps in Thailand or Indonesia."

To help alleviate their burden, Blatz let the elderly build a Cambodian-style vegetable garden in the mission church's backyard that keeps them busy and helps them with their tight household budget.

Since its 1992 founding, the mission has grown, funded through grants, fundraisers and financial support of parishioners of St. Mary Church, Blatz's home church in her native Colts Neck, New Jersey.

Traumatic memories

Many times Blatz has also served as an intermediary between the oldest generations and the younger generations, Cambodian-Americans who only speak English and only know about the genocide through the stories told by their parents or grandparents. Some others barely remember their stay at the refugee camps.

"A vast majority of Cambodians lost a close relative, which left them with emotional wounds difficult to heal," Blatz noted. Many children lost one or both parents from the genocide which targeted religious people, professionals and intellectuals, those considered threats to the government.

Those who were not assassinated left the country and established in Long Beach, Boston, Virginia, Texas, Rhode Island and Washington. (A smaller percentage settled in Canada, France and Australia.) Locally, Catholic Cambodians are scattered in Long Beach, San Diego, Santa Ana, Pomona, San Bernardino and Los Angeles.

David Hort, now 33, arrived in the U.S. with his parents when he was 8 years old after living in a refugee camp in Thailand for several months. The family was among the few Cambodian Catholics.

Now a parishioner at Our Lady of the Rosary in Paramount, Hort recently married Sothea Keov, in her 20s, a Cambodian Buddhist he met in his native country. Marrying her fulfilled a dream, he says. Another is his desire to maintain Cambodian values and traditions, including close family relationships and respect for the elderly, values he fears may be vanishing among the younger generations.

Better days?

Today's Cambodian immigrants celebrate the church's "restart" in Cambodia, which began in the early 1990s, thanks to a youth wave that is changing the face of the church. There are struggles: the majority of catechists are between the ages 18-35, and they do not have any formal catechetical certification, because the local church has no official catechism school. But the situation is better overall.

Mara Doung has observed the change in trips he has made to his homeland, and is trying to help it along. With the support of his family in Cambodia, the businessman (he is a former owner of two restaurants and an importing sports business) started a nonprofit that helps the poor in Cambodia and helps law students to stop corruption, which is high in the Southeast Asian country.

He says he learned this from his great grandmother, who woke him up early every weekend to go feed the poor in a neighbor village.

"She woke early to cook noodles and rice," he said. "I used to ask her 'Why do you do this for no money?' She would answer me, 'When you grow up you will understand.'"

The father of five is now trying to instill the same values and beliefs on his children. Three of them attend St. Anthony Elementary School.

Still, the scars left from his years of hiding and escaping the communists affect on him. He remarried after two divorces, but had to quit his job due to sporadic panic attacks for which he is receiving psychological treatment.

In the meantime he went back to culinary school. He started Bible study with other Cambodians. And he hopes, he says, to become a deacon.

For more information about Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Cambodian Mission, call Mary Blatz at (562) 394-2216.

Khmer Rouge confessions 'rarely true' admits Duch

April 7, 2009
Anne Barrowclough
Times Online (UK)

Confessions extracted under torture in the Khmer Rouge's brutal prisons were rarely true, the regime's prisons chief admitted today.

Kaing Guek Eav, or 'Duch' the director of the Khmer Rouge's most infamous prison S-21, told a Cambodia war crimes tribunal he took part in torture sessions and ordered his subordinates to beat prisoners who were to be 'smashed' to death with an iron bar.
Duch was renowned for reading every confession brought to him from the interrogation sessions, often correcting them in red pen. However, he said today, he rarely believed them.

"I never believed the confessions I received told the truth. At most, they were about 40 percent true," he told the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.

The 66-year-old former school-master is in the second week of a hearing at the UN-backed tribunal, charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and homicide.

He has already accepted responsiblity for the atrocities committed at S-21 under his command, and apologised to his victims but he maintains that he was a scapegoat of Pol Pot's genocidal regime which presided over the death of 1.7 million Cambodians during its 1975 - 1979 rule.

The former school-master is answering questions about M-13, a secret security centre in the jungle he ran from 1971-1975 during the Khmer Rouge insurgency against the US-backed military government.

He was posted to S-21 after impressing his superiors with his fanatical devotion to the communist cause, and his brutally meticulous directorship of M-13.

He told the court M-13 was surrounded by a bamboo fence and shackled prisoners were often held in two-metre deep pits, both to prevent escape and to protect them from US warplanes carpet-bombing the area

He claimed he personally tortured only two people but admitted: "The burden is still on me - it's my responsibility. I would like to apologise to the souls of those who died," he said.

The ECCC is questioning him over M-13 to get a better understanding of the structure of S-21.

The killing fields' torturer in chief: 30 years after the downfall of Pol Pot, the commander of a secret jail finally goes on trial

Kaing Guek Eav, the former chief of the S-21 prison, is seen during the court case in Phnom Penh this week

03rd April 2009
By Tony Rennell
Mail Online (UK)

Former maths teacher Kaing Guek Eav is accused of the murder and torture of 14,000 Cambodians

When Pol Pot, one of history's undoubted monsters, died in his sleep in a remote jungle corner of Cambodia 11 years ago, he left us a mystery about the depths of human depravity that will never be resolved.

With the violent deaths of two million of his own people on his conscience, how could he possibly ever have slept at night?

His Khmer Rouge communist guerillas took control of one of Asia's most beautiful lands and, in four years from 1975 to 1979, turned it into a charnel house. A quarter of the population died from starvation and overwork, or were executed as 'enemies of the revolution', many of them on their knees and staring into a mass grave as their brains were bashed out with a hoe.

An ancient kingdom would ever after be associated with piles of human skulls and the stench of death. A chilling new phrase entered the lexicon - 'the killing fields'.

The dictator responsible for all this was never brought to justice, nor in the 30 years since their overthrow were any others from the close clique of murderous fanatics who surrounded 'Comrade Number One', as he insisted on being called.

Until now. This week in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, the first of Pol Pot's henchmen went on trial before a United Nations court for crimes against humanity, murder and torture.

It will take three months to hear the evidence against 66-year-old Kaing Guek Eav. Dressed in a white shirt, this seemingly mild-mannered old man, a former maths teacher, bowed politely to the redrobed judges and acknowledged that he understood the 45 pages of charges against him.

It was a courtesy he never extended to the thousands of victims who arrived in the dead of night at the secret police interrogation centre he was in charge of three decades ago.

Blindfolded and bound, they were thrown off lorries to be abused, assaulted and, almost without exception, slaughtered. At least 14,000 prisoners passed through his hands. Only a dozen are thought to have lived to tell the tale.

Known then as 'Comrade Duch', he was the commandant of a top-secret facility called S-21, housed in a former high school in Phnom Penh. Its existence was unknown to the outside world - and indeed to all except the very top echelons in his own country - until Vietnamese forces liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge in January 1979.

Driving along the empty streets of the deserted capital, two journalists came upon a compound surrounded by corrugated iron topped with barbed wire. An evil smell was coming from inside.

They pushed through the gates and in the first of four white-washed buildings found the bodies of 14 men. They were chained to metal beds and their throats had been cut so recently that the blood on the floor was still wet.

Other buildings were full of tiny, cramped cinder-block cells, some just six feet in length and three feet wide. In one room were piles of shackles, handcuffs and whips.

There were administrative offices too, crammed with filing cabinets in which the details of each inmate, a mug- shot photograph and his (or her) interrogation and confession were stored.

These showed that some prisoners were held for months, others for just days or even hours but their fate was always the same. Their files were marked 'discarded' or 'smashed' - euphemisms for murdered. Not for nothing did workers in a nearby factory call this, in hushed tones, 'the place where people went in but never came out'.

The secret of S-21 was in the paperwork. Out in the Cambodian countryside, millions of men, women and children were dying but no one was counting numbers or logging names. But this facility, overseen by the feared and merciless Duch, was different.

Its inmates were members of the Khmer Rouge denounced as traitors in the purges that - just as in Stalin's Soviet Union - were a constant feature of a totalitarian communist regime steeped in paranoia.

Their 'confessions', some just a few words, others running to hundreds of pages, were crucial evidence for their accusers. The politically-correct (in Khmer Rouge terms) Duch read and vetted every one before passing it on to his superiors.

Innocence was out of the question at S-21. The line taken by the 60 interrogators working for Duch was the ultimate in George Orwell's 'Big Brother' logic.

Terrified and bewildered new arrivals were told they must be guilty of something or they would not have been sent there because the party never made mistakes. It was now down to them to confess, and the more they denied they had done anything wrong, the guiltier they must be.

Torture loosened their imaginations and their tongues. Some who had never even heard of the CIA, America's Central Intelligence Agency, owned up to being in its pay. Others described sexual affairs with their own daughters.

A woman who cooked for Pol Pot admitted trying to poison him, another to preparing a bad meal for some Chinese diplomats in order to embarrass 'Comrade Number One'.

More than one prisoner begged to be killed 'because I have betrayed the revolution'.

Factory workers confessed to sabotaging machinery, agricultural workers to rustling livestock. Even some S-21 guards found the tables turned on them and, having been denounced, owned up to imaginary crimes. The revolution was eating its own children.

In style, the interrogations were a throwback beyond even the show trials of the Stalin and the black arts of the KGB to the Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago. American academic David Chandler, who took it on himself to sift through the acres of documents left behind at S-21, listed the tortures used there.

They included beating by hand, with a heavy stick, with branches and with bunches of electric wire; cigarette burns; electric shock; forcing inmates to eat their own excrement and drink their urine; hanging upside down; holding up arms for an entire day; fingernails pulled out; suffocation with plastic bag; immersion in water and water dripped onto the forehead.

Electric shocks were administered to prisoners so commonly, Chandler said, that a list of instructions was drawn up for prisoners included a request not to scream when the shocks were applied. The penalty for disobeying was ten strokes of a whip or five more electric shocks.

One of the very few S-21 survivors later described his interrogator tying an electric wire around his handcuffs and connecting the other end to his trousers with a safety pin.

'Then he asked me: "Who collaborated with you to betray the Khmer Rouge leadership?" I couldn't think of anything to say. He connected the wire to the electric power, plugged it in, and shocked me.

'I passed out. I don't know how many times he shocked me, but when I came to, I could hear a distant voice asking over and over who my connection was. I couldn't get any words out. I collapsed on the floor, my shirt completely drenched with sweat. To this day I don't understand why they arrested me.'

That this particular prisoner did not die was an unexplained anomaly. Most S-21 inmates were dead men and women from the moment they were dumped at its gates.

Their pleadings and 'confessions' made no difference. In the early days of the facility they were taken to a field next to the compound, battered to death and buried. But as this makeshift cemetery filled up and the number of prisoners rocketed, the prisoners were taken instead to a village named Choeung Ek in the country 15 miles away.

Trucks loaded with the condemned were driven there at night, sometimes as many as 300 in a single batch. The only eye-witness account of what happened next came from a former guard, who described how they were taken in batches to pits already dug in the ground, ordered to kneel at the edge and then hit on the neck with the iron axle from an ox cart.

One blow from the experienced executioners - there were eight listed on the S-21 staff list - was usually enough but their throats were then slit for good measure.

Duch, it seems, was not himself a killer, though he was seen at Choeung Ek watching the executions from underneath a tree. He may not have been a torturer either - he left that to others.

But he did preside over this production line of brutality and death for year after year, even collaborating in the killing of members of his own family. Two of his brothers-in-law were processed through S-21 and he did not lift a finger to save them.

He saved himself, however. The night before the Vietnamese arrived, the last throats were slit and he walked away from S-21, not to be seen for 20 years.

He was thought to be dead when he was discovered and arrested in 1999, working among Christian groups in refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, in what appears to have been a belated attempt to assuage his guilt.

But, for all that his regime at S-21 was a living hell, the diabolical activities there were just the tip of a terrible iceberg.

In the rest of Cambodia, one hundred times as many people fell victim to the lethal excesses of the Khmer Rouge. And these were not party members who had fallen from grace and were purged, but ordinary people whose only crime was that they had been city-dwellers, middle class and educated.

The day in April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power, the population of the capital was force-marched into the countryside, never to return. The horrors they were subjected to defy belief. Starvation was routine, work on the land crippling, execution a constant threat.

Loung Ung was a little girl who survived to write down her memories 20 years later in a book she simply called First They Killed My Father.

She lost brothers, sisters and both parents. She saw children die of hunger and adults go crazy with grief. She watched as her father was led away by boys with rifles, never to be seen again.

For Haing Noor, a doctor, survival depended on concealing his origins. In Pol Pot's mad domain, professionals were exterminated as class enemies, even those with the medical skills to benefit others.

A visitor to the killing fields memorial contemplates the unimaginable horrors that took place under Pol Pot's rule

Three times he was arrested by the Khmer Rouge and tortured within an inch of his life in an attempt to get him to incriminate himself. The treatment he received was sub-human. With a dozen others, he was lashed by ropes to an upright cross and a fire was lit beneath his feet. 'Are you a doctor?' they demanded but he stuck to his story that he had been a taxi driver in Phnom Penh before the revolution. Then they pulled him down and put a plastic bag over his head.

Next to him a crucified woman was slit open, disembowelled and mutilated. 'It was nothing for them to cut someone open,' he wrote later. 'Just a whim.'

On another occasion, his head was clamped in a vice and water dripped on to his skull for a whole day until he nearly went mad.

He survived all these ordeals and more, only to see his father taken away one evening, hands tied, roped to others in a procession of the doomed. Noor was helpless, unable to intervene.

'As he came close he lifted his head and looked at me with immense sadness. From where he was going there was no coming back.' His father would end up in the sort of mass execution site that Noor once stumbled on in the forest, 'a hillock piled high with corpses, the victims killed by blows to the head. Vultures plucked at them. The smell was awful.'

Noor would go on to be a Hollywood star in the United States, winning an Oscar for his part as Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran in the 1984 film, The Killing Fields. He never understood what possessed the Khmer Rouge to make them so cruel.

'It was just something they did,' he concluded, 'a craving they could not satisfy. They created enemies to devour, which increased their appetite for enemies.' It was the ultimate in vicious circles.

Whether the trial now under way in Cambodia will go anyway to squaring that circle, to find explanation or redemption, remains to be seen.

The case against Duch is strengthened by the documentary evidence that he and his staff at S-21 were so assiduous in keeping. His handwriting is on many of the records. A born-again Christian, he is said to have confessed his part in the atrocities and asked the families of his victims for forgiveness.

A survivor, aged 78, plans to confront him in court. 'I want to ask him why he killed his own people and why his men tortured me,' said Chum Manh. 'What motivated them to commit such heinous crimes?'

At the end of the trial, the deaths at S-21 may well be accounted for. But this is just the beginning. What about the many hundreds of thousands of others that took place during Cambodia's holocaust?

Four more of Pol Pot's henchmen have been indicted and are due to face their accusers once Duch has been dealt with, all of them more senior than him and, observers think, more culpable. It is claimed he plans to give evidence against them.

But for 'Comrade Number One', Pol Pot himself, on whose behalf such barbarism was carried out, there will be no judgment in this world.

The verdict of history will have to suffice for him - and that will be that he was a 20th-century monster on a par with Hitler and Stalin, a murderer on a grand scale and a genocidal maniac who made a heavenly land into a hell on earth.

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