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PHNOM PENH: The Khmer Rouge commander known as ‘Comrade Duch’, Pol Pot’s chief executioner and security chief who oversaw the mass murder of at least 14,000 Cambodians in the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, died on Wednesday (2 of September). He was 77 years old.
Kaing Guek Eav or ‘Comrade Duch’ was the first member of the Khmer Rouge leadership to face trial for his role within a regime credited with at least 1.7 million deaths in “killing fields. “from Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.
Duch died at 12:52 am (1752 GMT Tuesday) at the Soviet Khmer Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge court spokesman Neth Pheaktra said. He did not give details of the cause.
Duch had been ill in recent years and had serious respiratory problems towards the end of his life. He was admitted for treatment again this week before his death on Wednesday.
In 2010, a UN court found him guilty of mass murder, torture and crimes against humanity at Tuol Sleng Prison, Phnom Penh’s former high school that still stands as a memorial to the atrocities committed inside. .
He was sentenced to life in prison two years later after his appeal that he was just a junior officer following orders was rejected. Duch, who at the time of the trial was a born-again Christian, expressed his regret for his crimes.
Under Duch’s leadership, detainees at Tuol Sleng Prison, code-named “S-21,” were ordered to suppress screams of agony as Khmer Rouge guards, many of whom were teenagers, tried to obtain confessions of non-existent crimes through torture.
The guards were ordered to “tear apart” the traitors and counterrevolutionaries. For the Khmer Rouge, that could mean anyone, from school teachers to children, pregnant women and “intellectuals” identified as such by wearing glasses.
Beneath Tuol Sleng’s chaotic facade, Duch – himself a former math teacher – had an obsessive eye for detail and kept his school-turned-prison meticulously organized.
This brochure photo taken and published by the Extraordinary Chamber of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) shows former Khmer Rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Eav (left), better known as Duch, in a Phnom Penh courtroom on 20 March 2012. (AFP / NHET SOKHENG / ECCC)
“Nothing in the old school happened without Duch’s approval. His control was total,” wrote photographer and author Nic Dunlop, who found Duch in 1999 hiding near the Thai border, two decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. .
“Not until you walk through the empty corridors of Tuol Sleng does Stalin’s language that a death is a tragedy, a million per statistic, takes on terrifying potency,” Dunlop wrote in his account of Duch and his atrocities, “The Executioner lost”. .
On S-21, police photos were taken of the new prisoners. Hundreds are now on display within its collapsed walls.
Norng Chan Phal, one of the few people who survived S-21, was a child when he and his parents were sent to Duch Prison and interrogated on suspicion of ties to Vietnam, the deadly enemy of the Khmer Rouge.
His parents were tortured and killed, but Chan Phal survived to testify at Duch’s trial in 2010.
“He was cooperative, he spoke to the court frankly. He apologized to all the S-21 victims and asked them to open their hearts. He also apologized to me,” Chan Phal told Reuters.
“He apologized. But justice is not complete.”
The court work Duch faced has long been clouded by its limited scope and the age of its defendants. Only two other people have been convicted by the court.
One of them, “brother number two” Nuon Chea, considered the main ideologue and architect of the murderous regime, died last year at the age of 93.
