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New Wednesday of New Times by Peter Uj.
I’m interested
At the age of 77, he died as the former director of the largest torture center for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Under the leadership of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, 15,000 people were tortured and later executed. The man serving a life sentence at the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh died of a long-term chronic lung disease two days after delivery.
During the brief existence of the communist dictatorship, between 1975 and 1979, at least 1.7 million people died and, in addition to those killed, many died of hunger or untreated diseases. Although there were over a hundred similar prisons, even in this system, Tuol Sleng was able to become a symbol of strange cruelty thanks to Duch’s sacrificial work.
Kaing Guek Eav was originally a teacher and received his nickname from an obedient character in a children’s book. “I wanted to be an educated boy who respects his teachers and does good,” he said later in court. This adherence to the rules led to excellent academic results, graduating from prestigious schools and eventually graduating in mathematics. The same obedience made Ducht an effective tool in the hands of the Khmer Rouge, whom he joined in 1967, when insurgents were hiding in the jungle. When they came to power, they were entrusted with their largest torture center, and Duch also became the chief of the secret police.
While Vietnamese troops occupied Cambodia, he oversaw the execution of the remaining prisoners and then fled, but did not destroy the documentation of torture (memories of his main life’s work) for later demotion in the partisan movement. Without looking for the public, in 1999 Nic Dunlop was found by photojournalist in a secluded town near the Thai border and arrested shortly after the interview.
His trial was an important event in Cambodian history, as Duch pleaded guilty and gave a detailed account of the torture that many have long disputed in the country, and apologized to the victims. His main defense was that he had to obey, otherwise he would have been a victim himself, but the cruelty and creativity that led to the tortures and executions refuted this quite clearly. Although he confessed and claimed to have repented of his sins as a newly converted Christian, his arrogance and contempt at trial often led to tense scenes. The judge had to remember at one point that laughter was not the correct answer to a question.
At first, Duch wanted to give detailed testimony because it hurt him that his former dictator, Pol Pot, had denied the existence of torture centers. In court, however, it turned out that he himself knew that the prisoners who arrived there were not criminals and that their confiscated confessions were worthless. He described his work as a self-induction process in which tortured people blamed others for imaginary crimes, which were then collected, and during torture they also made more incriminating confessions, etc.
He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity, torture and planned killings. The high-profile procedure was often compared to the Eichmann trial, about which Hannah Arendt wrote The Banality of Evil. In the case of the Cambodian butcher, the question floated into the courtroom in the same way: what brings a man to the bottom of a list of 17 boy names: “Kill them all.” (New York Times, MTI)
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