A devoted math teacher before he turned revolutionary, Duch, the man who oversaw the Khmer Rouge’s security apparatus, begins his trial at Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes court tomorrow.
“I have done very bad things in my life,” he confessed to journalists who tracked him down in 1999. “Now it is time for [the consequences] of my actions.”
The 66-year-old Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, allegedly oversaw the torture and extermination of more than 12,000 men, women and children at the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison during the regime’s 1975 to 1979 rule.
PHOTO: EPA
Duch was formally arrested by Cambodia’s genocide tribunal in July 2007, becoming the first top Khmer Rouge cadre to be detained, and is charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and premeditated murder.
He is said to have been feared by nearly everyone who worked under him at the prison in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.
Most who worked there were uneducated teenage boys, who he said could be easily indoctrinated because they were “like a blank piece of paper.”
He has recognized the crimes committed under his command of the regime’s killing machine, where prisoners were tortured into denouncing themselves and others as agents of the CIA, KGB and Vietnamese Communist Party.
Duch was first arrested in 1999 after photojournalist Nic Dunlop uncovered him earlier that year working for a Christian relief agency in western Cambodia.
Before that, he was long thought dead following his disappearance after Vietnam’s ouster of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.
Instead, Duch had converted to Christianity and worked for relief organizations along the Cambodian-Thai border.
“I wanted to be a good communist; I did not take any pleasure in my work,” he told Dunlop. “All the confessions of the prisoners. I worried, ‘Is that true or not?’”
Duch later told tribunal investigators he believed the inner circle of Khmer Rouge leaders did not believe the confessions either, but used them as “excuses to eliminate those who represented obstacles.”
Born in 1942 in central Cambodia, Duch was a top student and is remembered as a sincere teacher devoted to helping the poor before he fled to the Khmer Rouge in 1970 as a reaction to injustice in then-volatile Cambodia.
That decision to join the communist guerrilla movement was influenced by one of his high school instructors who would later be executed at Tuol Sleng.
“I joined the Khmer Rouge in order to liberate my people and not commit crimes,” Duch told tribunal investigators. “I became both an actor in criminal acts and also a hostage of the regime.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS