ONLY A dozen inmates are believed to have survived the hell that was Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng. At least 14,000 died in four years from 1975 at the former Chao Ponhea Yat High School, renamed by the Khmer Rouge “Security Prison 21 (S-21), their deaths, after excruciating torture, meticulously recorded by guards. Few lasted even weeks in the 1,000-capacity jail before dying on the premises or at Choeung Ek extermination centre 15 kilometres away. There, owing to the shortage of bullets, most were battered to death with iron bars, pickaxes and machetes.
Today many of their photos cover the walls of this, the Cambodian capital’s museum of death, their skulls line shelves, and bloody leg-irons, shackles and instruments of torture litter drab, otherwise empty classrooms. It is spare but eloquent testimony to the banality of evil and the brutal nature of a regime that claimed over two million lives three decades ago and whose legacy this impoverished country still struggles with.
The belated conviction and sentencing this week of “Comrade Duch”, Kaing Guek Eav (67), the commander of Tuol Sleng, a mass murderer but a small cog in the regime, will provide some little comfort to that handful of survivors and the families of the dead. And send perhaps some muted warning, or so the intention is, to perpetrators of genocide worldwide that eventually they may also have to answer for their crimes. The tribunal sentenced the born-again Christian Duch to 35 years, less 16 for time served, for torture and murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. His courtroom professions of “excruciating remorse” have not abated local anger at what is seen as the court’s “leniency”.
It has been a long and difficult road for the hybrid UN-Cambodian court, a special chamber within the country’s judicial system consisting of both local and international judges and prosecutors. First conceived in 1999 it only opened its proceedings in 2007 and has to date cost $78.4 million of foreign donations to bring the first of five indicted Khmer Rouge officials to trial.
Ahead now are even more complex and worryingly politicised trials of some of the ageing, surviving Khmer Rouge’s senior figures, ex-president Khieu Samphan (78), former foreign minister Ieng Sary (84) and his wife Khieu Thirith (78), known as the “Khmer Rouge First Lady”, and Nuon Chea (84), alias “Brother Number Two”, deputy of the group’s late leader Pol Pot.
But many former Khmer Rouge officials are now in senior positions in Cambodian government and politics. They have never been more than half-hearted about the court. Long-serving prime minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge foot soldier who defected to eventual conquerors Vietnam, has even warned of civil war if the court expands its probes into the horrors of Pol Pot’s “Year Zero”. Human rights groups are concerned at the danger the court may face further political obstruction, but the government must be aware of close international interest in the trial process and that the country’s reputation will be irretrievably damaged should it not let justice take its course, however slowly.