Comrade Duch – doesn’t sound too bad does it? And yet it’s the alias of a man responsible for more human suffering and misery than most of us could ever imagine.
Comrade Duch’s real name is Kaing Geuk Eav and during the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, Duch was in charge of the Phnom Penn facility known simply as S-21. A former high school, set in an ordinary suburb surrounded by houses, S-21 was simply a torture factory. About 16,000 Cambodians passed through the gates and only a dozen or so survived. They were all tortured until they confessed their ‘crimes’ and if the authorities didn’t like their confessions, they were tortured again until the authorities were satisfied.
Those who survived the torture were transported 15km out of Phnom Penn to an orchard at Cheung Ek where they were killed and their bodies dumped in mass graves.
And Comrade Duch oversaw all of this.
He escaped after the Khmer Rouge fell but was found in 1996, a born again Christian working in a refugee camp close to the Thai border. It’s taken a long time to bring him to trial, mainly because a lot of the people now running Cambodia are ex Khmer Rouge themselves and they’d rather not re-open history – either that of Cambodia or their own.
It’s pretty certain Duch will be found guilty of crimes against humanity and end his days in jail but there are plenty of others who should be in the dock with him. They never will though, Duch is the only one, his is the token show trial.
I’ve visited both S-21, or Toul Sleng, and the Killing Fields at Cheung Ek. S-21 is little changed, it still looks like a suburban school. And it’s this very ordinariness which is so chilling. You’d expect it to be an evil and malevolent place, but it isn’t, outwardly there’s nothing to tell of the horrors inflicted there. Inside there are cells and instruments of torture and relics of the wretched lives people endured there but you have to let your imagination go to even grasp a fraction of what those ordinary Cambodian people must have endured in their final days.
The most poignant things at Toul Sleng are the photographs. The Khmer Rouge photographed and documented all the prisoners, men, women and children. And a lot of these photographs are now on display. I found it very sobering to look at these images of ordinary people and realise that they were all dead. You can see the fear in some of the faces, incomprehension in others and even stubborn defiance in a few. What would I look like in similar circumstances?
Cheung Ek is a different experience. You walk past pits which contained many bodies, pass other mass graves which haven’t been excavated and you look at the thousands of skulls in the memorial tower – each one was a mother, father, son or daughter. As you walk round, especially in the more remote parts, you’ll see bits of tattered clothing either lying on the ground or sticking up from it. And you’ll also see bits of white stick everywhere but when you look closely you’ll see it’s not stick at all, it’s human bone. If you go and you see some, pick at least one piece up and take it to one the little piles collected on the small shrines. That bone was a part of an ordinary person who was tortured and killed and least you can do is show their memory some respect.
Cambodia is a wonderful country but its people and politics are complicated to put it mildly. If you go, read some history first and then maybe, just maybe, you’ll start to get an inkling of the place. I can personally recommend:
Pol Pot – the History of a Nightmare by Philip Short
Voices from S-21 by David Chandler
Tiger Balm by Lucretia Stewart
The Gate – Francois Bizot
A Dragon Apparent by Norman Lewis – a glimpse of SE Asian life by a travel writer in the 1950’s, absolutely compelling.
YouTube have a good report on the trial from Al Jazeera, find it here
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