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The top Khmer Rouge jailer, who admitted to overseeing the torture and killings of up to 16,000 Cambodians while running the regime’s most notorious prison, has died.
Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, was 77 years old and serving a life sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He died in a hospital in Cambodia early Wednesday morning (local time), said Neth Pheaktra, a spokesman for the court in Phnom Penh that handled trials for the regime’s crimes.
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Duch was admitted to the Cambodian Soviet Friendship Hospital after developing shortness of breath on Monday at Kandal Provincial Prison, said Chat Sineang, head of the prison where Duch had been transferred from the court prison in 2013.
He added that the body would be examined for cause of death before being released to his family.
Duch, whose trial took place in 2009, was the first high-ranking Khmer Rouge figure to face the UN-backed tribunal that had convened to bring justice for the brutal rule of the regime in the late 1970s, whom It is credited with the deaths of 1.7 million people. – a quarter of the population of Cambodia at that time.
Former New Zealand Governor General Dame Silvia Cartwright was one of two international judges involved in the court’s trial.
The communist Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 was charged with genocide for causing the death of many of its compatriots through executions, starvation and lack of medical care due to its radical policies.
Only after neighboring Vietnam expelled the Khmer Rouge from power did the scale and barbarity of their rule become absolutely clear.
As commander of the top-secret Tuol Sleng Prison, codenamed S-21, Duch was one of the few former Khmer Rouge who acknowledged even partial responsibility for his actions, and his trial included his own heartbreakingly graphic testimony of how tortured people. in prison.
The site in Phnom Penh, which had been a high school before the Khmer Rouge came to power, is now a museum with staggering evidence of the cruelty with which the Khmer Rouge persecuted even their own members whom they accused of disloyalty.
Men, women and children seen as enemies of the regime or who disobeyed its orders were imprisoned and tormented there, with only a few surviving.
“All those who were arrested and sent to the S-21 were already considered dead,” he testified in April 2009.
Heng Sinith / AP
Portraits of former prisoners on display at the famous Khmer Rouge prison, S-21, now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Since Duch’s trial, the court has convicted two high-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders, while two other defendants died before their trials could be completed.
The regime’s number two leader, Nuon Chea, died during his appeal process. The tribunal, established in 2004 by an agreement between the UN and the Cambodian government, has cost more than NZ $ 532 million.
The other whose appeal is under consideration, former head of state Khieu Samphan, will almost certainly be the last to stand trial, due to the Cambodian government’s opposition to further prosecutions.
The top leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, died in 1998 as a prisoner of his comrades in what had been reduced to a spent force of jungle-based guerrillas.
Youk Chhang, director of the Cambodia Documentation Center, which has compiled voluminous files on the country’s tragedy, said Duch’s death “is a reminder for all of us to remember the victims of the Khmer Rouge. And that justice continues to be a difficult road for Cambodia. “
The torturers under Duch beat and whipped the prisoners and shocked them with electrical devices, Duch admitted in court, but still denied the accounts of survivors and other trial witnesses that he himself participated in torture and executions.
The children of the detainees were killed to ensure that the next generation could not take revenge.
Duch described himself as “criminally responsible” for the deaths of the babies, but blamed his subordinates for beating them to death.
He said that the prison guards and interrogators themselves were killed for minor mistakes and showed rare emotion on the witness stand in June 2009 as he spoke of seeing his fellow revolutionaries locked up in his prison cells. Confessing to betraying his own friends, he said: “That was more than cowardly.”
When a guilty verdict was finally rendered against him in July 2010, he was sentenced to 35 years, reduced to just 19 because of the time served.
The justices said they considered the Cold War context of atrocities and cooperation and Duch’s expressions of remorse, limited as they were.
But outraged survivors feared that he might one day go free. On appeal, the sentence was extended in 2012 to life in prison for her “gruesome and heinous” crimes against the Cambodian people.
Heng Sinith / AP
Duch, who ran the notorious Toul Sleng, a top-secret detention center for the state’s worst “enemies,” at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh in 2010.
Like many key members of the Khmer Rouge, Duch was an academic before becoming a revolutionary.
The former math teacher joined Pol Pot’s movement in 1967, three years before the United States began bombing Cambodia to try to wipe out North Vietnamese troops and the Viet Cong within the border.
The Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 and immediately attempted a radical transformation of Cambodia into a peasant society, emptying cities and forcing the population to work the land in the country they renamed Democratic Kampuchea.
They backed their rule with ruthless elimination of perceived enemies, and by 1976, Duch was the trusted leader of their ultimate killing machine, S-21.
Court judges said he signed all executions there and was often present when interrogators used torture to extract confessions, which included pulling prisoners’ toenails, administering electric shocks and making submarines.
Despite his refusals, the judges said that at times he himself had participated in torture and executions.
The torture and executions that took place at Tuol Sleng were routinely recorded and photographed, and when the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979, the thousands of documents and film negatives left in the prison were turned into proof of the regime’s atrocities.
Duch fled, disappeared for nearly two decades in northwestern Cambodia and converted to Christianity until a chance discovery by a British journalist in 1999 led to his arrest.
Duch has apologized multiple times, even offering at one point to face a public stoning. But his surprise request on the last day of the trial to be acquitted and released left many wondering if his regret was sincere.
