On 2 Sept 2020, the man who admitted to overseeing the mass torture and killing of thousands of Cambodians as the head of the prison system for the Khmer Rouge, died in a Cambodian hospital. He was Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch. He ran the regime's prison system, which tortured and killed thousands of Cambodians under his leadership. He had been serving life in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the totalitarian political party.
Duch became the first senior member of Khmer Rouge to face a UN backed tribunal in 2009, in its effort to deliver justice for the regime's genocidal rule of Cambodia in the 1970s. He ran the top-secret Tuol Sleng prison, was one of only a few of the regime's members who even took partial responsibility for their actions.
I went to Tuol Sleng prison museum in 2004. In my diary I wrote :
"$2 to enter the museum, the country’s largest torture and detention centre. Prior to 1975 Tuol Sleng was a high school, consisting of 3 buildings. When the Khmer Rouge came to power it was converted to the S-21 prison and interrogation facility. People were systematically tortured, sometimes over a period of months, to extract confessions, after which they were executed at the killing fields of Choeung Ek. S-21 processed over 17,000 people, 7 of whom survived. The buildings now serve as a museum, a memorial and a testament to the madness of the Khmer Rouge. Much has been left in the state of when the Khmer Rouge abandoned it in January 1979. The prison kept extensive records, leaving thousands of photos of their victims, many of which are on display. Some of the photos were awful. Paintings of torture at the prison by Vaan Nath, a survivor of Tuol Sleng, are also on display. I wasn’t sure why some cells were made of wood, others of brick. And why the large cells on the ground floor had only one bed – unless these were the torture rooms. Prisoners were shackled to the beds. Some of the torture equipment is on display."
It is awful to think that any Cambodians who were seen as enemies of the party, or anyone that disobeyed orders, were put behind bars - with only a handful surviving. Everyone who was arrested and sent to the prison was presumed dead already. Prisoners were beaten, whipped and shocked with electricity, Duch said at his trial, but refused to admit he took part in the torture and killing himself.
As well as killing prisoners, victims' children were also executed, to make sure the next generation could not take vengeance on the Khmer Rouge. Babies were battered against trees.
Previously a maths teacher, Duch joined Pol Pot's movement in 1967, three years before a US campaign of carpet bombing began, which was an effort to take out Northern Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong inside the Cambodian border.
The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975 and quickly changed Cambodia into a peasant society, and forced people in cities into the country to work the land. Duch then headed the prison system.
After he hid in the northwest of the country and was only discovered 20 years later and he was arrested and sent to trial. He then served life in prison.
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See more on my blog "Cambodia's Tuol Sleng Museum".
And a blog on the photos I took at Tuol Sleng Museum.
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