Chief Duch, his real name Kaing Guek Eav, was yesterday sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment for his role in the murder of 16,000 people at the notorious S-21 jail facility in Phnom Penh – he is likely to serve 19 years, if he lives that long.
Duch was the notoriously cruel master of Tuol Sleng prison, and is one of five senior former Khmer Rouge members who are facing UN backed war crimes tribunals in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was a Moaist regime led by Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot – Brother Number One.
The regime ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Religion, schools and currency were abolished and the whole population was evacuated to live in the countryside, to create an agrarian utopia. Up to two million people are believed to have died as a result of starvation, overwork, beatings, shootings and executions. They were finally defeated and overthrown in a 1979 invasion by Vietnam. Many of the leaders, including Pol Pot and Duch escaped to the countryside and lived in relative peace and harmony until they were discovered. Pol Pot remained free until 1997 and spent only one year in captivity before he died. Duch remained free until 1999.
People were summarily executed, and others were put through long torture at the S-21 prison. Only about a dozen people who were jailed there are known to have survived.
Duch did not have much of a defence. He said he was following the orders of his superiors. But the evidence brought in front of the tribunal showed differently. He was responsible for devising barbarous acts of torture to extract ‘confessions’ from ‘enemies’ of the state.
He also kept meticulous records of those he had ordered tortured and killed. In one memo he kept, a guard asked him what to do with six boys and three girls accused of being traitors. He replied: “Kill every last one.”
Many Cambodians believe that Duch is not getting enough for his role in mass murder. Voices have begun to emerge from Cambodia, all telling the sorry tale of their whole family having been wiped out in the mass killings.
One would do well to watch the documentary movie The Killing Fields which tells the tale of the Khmer Rouge from the point of view of a local correspondent who was not allowed amnesty with the rest of his foreign colleagues at the embassies which organised their passages home. He survived and told the tale of the killing fields where thousands and thousands of people were shot and left to rot in rice paddies.
The killings which took place in Cambodia are particularly bad as they were perpetrated by their own; Cambodians killing their fellows – all in the name of terror, power and a warped vision of an agrarian utopia.
It is a reminder of the depths of depravity that human beings can descend into. The killings in Cambodia must go down as one of the worst atrocities committed by man in recent history. It was not the first mass killing and it will certainly not be the last. The Holocaust, the Killing Fields, Rwanda, Darfur, Congo… the list is certainly longer. We must, no matter where we are from, or what we believe in, continue to discuss such killings and keep them on the agenda. It is only by doing so that we can ever hope to avoid a repetition of death on such a scale.