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Comrade Duch claimed that he was only following orders
Comrade Duch, a former high-ranking Khmer Rouge figure convicted of crimes against humanity in Cambodia, has died.
He was serving a life sentence after being sentenced by a UN-backed court.
Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, ran the famous Tuol Sleng Prison, where thousands of people were tortured and killed in the late 1970s.
Up to two million people are believed to have died under the Khmer Rouge, a Maoist regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
Duch was the first high-ranking Khmer Rouge leader convicted of crimes against humanity by a UN-backed court in 2010 and sentenced in 2012.
He died Wednesday at age 77, a court spokesman said, without giving details of the cause. He had been ill for many years.
“Duch died this morning at 00:52 am, on September 2 at the Soviet Khmer Friendship Hospital. Details of what he died, I cannot say,” said Khmer Rouge court spokesman Neth Pheaktra.
What happened at Tuol Sleng Prison?
Comrade Duch ran S-21 Prison, also known as Tuol Sleng, the most notorious torture site during the Khmer Rouge regime.
At least 15,000 men, women and children considered enemies of the regime are believed to have passed through the gates of the old school-turned-prison.
Most of them were tortured, forced to confess fictitious crimes against the Khmer Rouge, and later executed in so-called death camps outside the capital, Phnom Penh.
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Tuol Sleng was converted from a school to a prison, a place of torture and an extermination camp
The prisoners were initially former government officials, people accused of being middle class, and later mainly members of the Khmer Rouge suspected of disloyalty.
The guards, who were often teenagers, forced the prisoners to write detailed confessions to whatever they were accused of and implicate friends and family who were later imprisoned.
Those who survived the torture were eventually taken to the Choeung Ek “death camps” where they were killed, sometimes after digging their own mass graves.
Fewer than a dozen prisoners survived Tuol Sleng.
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During his trial, Duch admitted that he was in charge of the S-21 and apologized for his involvement in the horrors committed there.
He later claimed that he had only followed orders, but his appeal on those grounds was rejected by the court.
Who were the Khmer Rouge?
The brutal Khmer Rouge, in power from 1975 to 1979, claimed the lives of around two million people.
The Pol Pot-led regime tried to bring Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside.
They targeted “intellectuals” identified as people with glasses.
The regime was toppled in 1979 by Vietnamese troops, but the Khmer Rouge leaders escaped and hid in a remote border region.
The UN helped establish a tribunal to try the surviving leaders, which became operational in 2009.
Only three former Khmer Rouge have been convicted: Comrade Duch, the regime’s head of state Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot’s second in command, Nuon Chea.
Who was Comrade Duch?
Duch was born in the early 1940s. He was a teacher but joined the communist party and his left-wing activism led to friction with the authorities.
When the Vietnam War threatened to spread to neighboring Cambodia, Duch joined the Khmer Rouge communist rebels under leader Pol Pot.
After the rebels took control in 1975, he became director of Tuol Sleng.
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An image of Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Comrade Duch, is in the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh.
When a Vietnamese invasion forced the Khmer Rouge out of power in 1979, he fled along with the other toppled leaders to the countryside near the Thai border.
Living under a false name, he was identified by a journalist in 1999. In subsequent interviews, he admitted to the atrocities committed in Tuol Sleng, but said the orders came from the central committee of the Khmer Rouge.
“Whoever was arrested must die. It was the rule of our party,” he said. “We had the responsibility to interrogate and give the confession to the central committee of the party.”
Ten years later, in front of the UN-backed tribunal, he described himself as “deeply regretful” and apologized to the families of his victims.
In the last days of his trial, he asked to be released, saying that he had not been a high-ranking member of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy.
Relatives of his victims said this was a mockery of his claims of remorse.
