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Kamaraj Duche claimed he was just following orders
Kamaraj Dutch, a former senior member of the Khmer Rouge convicted of crimes against humanity, has died in Cambodia.
He was serving a life sentence after being sentenced by a UN-backed court.
King Guek Ew, also known as Komgrang Dutch, ran the infamous Tuol Slang prison where thousands of people were tortured and killed in the late 1970s.
An estimated 20 million people died under the Khmer Rouge, a Maoist regime that controlled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.
The Dutch was the first senior Khmer Rouge leader to be convicted of crimes against humanity by a UN-backed tribunal in 2010 and sentenced in 2012.
He died on Wednesday at the age of 77, a tribunal spokesman said without giving details of the cause. He had been ill for many years.
“The Dutch died at the Khmer Soviet Friendship Hospital this morning at 00:52 am, September 2. I cannot say the details of what happened to him,” said Neth Fiktra, a spokeswoman for the Khmer Rouge tribunal.
What happened in Tuol Challenge Prison?
Kamaraj Duche ran the S-21 prison, also known as Tumel Challeng, which was the most notorious place of torture during the Khmer Rouge regime.
It is believed that at least 15,000 men, women and children are considered enemies of the regime, who passed through the gates of the previous school.
Most of them were tortured, forced to confess to fictitious crimes against the Khmer Rouge, and then executed in so-called murder zones outside the capital, Phnom Penh.
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Tuol Slang was transferred from a school to a prison, a place of torture and a death camp
The prisoners were initially officials of the old government, the people were accused of being middle class and later mainly Khmer Rouge members are suspected of being unfaithful.
The guards, who were always teenagers, forced the prisoners to write a detailed confession of whatever charges were leveled against them and imprisoned friends and family where in return.
Those who survived the torture were eventually taken to “killing fields” at Choing A where they were killed, sometimes after digging their own mass graves.
Less than a dozen prisoners escaped from the Tuzol Challen.
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During his trial, Duchess admitted that he would handle the S-21 and apologized for his part in the horrors that took place there.
He later claimed that he was merely following orders, but his appeal was rejected by the tribunal on those grounds.
Who was the Khmer Rouge?
The ruthless Khmer Rouge, in power from 1975-1979, lost nearly 20 million lives.
The Pol Pot-led regime tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms across the country.
They targeted “intellectuals” known as spectacle wearers.
The regime was overthrown by the Vietnamese military in 1979, but Khmer Rouge leaders escaped and hid in a remote border area.
The UN helped set up a tribunal to try out surviving leaders, which began in 2009.
Only three former Khmer Rouge have been convicted – Kamaraj Dutch, the head of state of the regime Khiu Sampan and Paul Pot’s second-in-command, Nun Chi.
Who was Comrade Dutch?
Dutch was born in the early 1940s. He was a teacher, but joined the Communist Party and in the wake of his leftist activism became a line of brush with the officers.
When the Vietnam War threatened to spill over into neighboring Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, led by Dutch leader Paul, joined the communist rebels.
After the rebels took control in 1975, he became the director of Tuol Slang.
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An image of King Guek Eve, known as King Duke, is in the Phnom Penh Genocide Museum.
When the Khmer Rouge was ousted from power by Vietnam’s invasion in 1979, he fled the country near the Thai border with other expelled leaders.
Living under a false name, his identity was discovered by a journalist in 1999. In a subsequent interview, he confessed to the atrocities on Tuol Slang, but said the orders came from the Central Committee of the Khmer Rouge.
“Anyone who is arrested dies. That was our party’s rule,” he said. “We had the responsibility to interrogate and confess to the party’s central committee.”
Ten years later, facing a UN-backed tribunal, he called himself “deeply remorseful” and apologized to the relatives of his victims.
In the final days of his trial, he was acquitted, saying he was not a senior member of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy.
Relatives of his victims said that this was a sign of remorse.
