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spiritual. Like most former Khmer Rouge, Muth disavowed any responsibility for what
took place during the 1970s. He was just a servant of his nation, “a lower officer with a
job to protect Cambodian independence and neutrality.” He blamed the United States for
its B-52 bombing raids, and Prince Sihanouk, for calling the Cambodian people to rise up
against the Lon Nol regime. “If the court does not sentence those from the beginning and
only starts to sentence at the end and in the middle, how can it be fair?” he said, speaking
almost inaudibly. “I didn't create the war. I was a victim that was forced to join in.”
Historians tell a different story. They describe how Muth rose in the early 1970s
through the military ranks in Democratic Kampuchea's Southwest Zone, then under the
control of his father-in-law Ta Mok, nicknamed “the Butcher,” the architect of many
of Pol Pot's purges. When the regime came to power, Muth was appointed head of the
navy—a prominent position within the DK military apparatus, with responsibility for
Cambodia's coasts and the port-town of Kampong Som (since renamed Sihanoukville).
Along with Sou Met, the head of the air force, he allegedly played a direct role in purging
military cadres and sending them to the fearsome S-21 security prison in Phnom Penh,
where they were subsequently tortured and killed.
In 2001 academics Steve Heder and Brian Tittemore published an influential paper
which laid out “compelling evidence” of the pair's involvement in killings and purges.
According to the paper, Muth and Met attended regular meetings of the General Staff of
the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea, indicating their “close involvement and know-
Rouge tribunal was established, Muth seemed like an ideal target for prosecution. But
despite all the evidence against him—and the extensive paper trail wending its way from
his leafy rural sanctuary into a dark thicket of killings and disappearances—he will prob-
ably never see the inside of a courtroom.
In February 2012, Cambodia's war crimes court—the Extraordinary Chambers in the
Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)—celebrated its first big victory. A panel of Supreme Court
judges upheld a 2010 conviction against Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Comrade
Duch—the gaunt figure who ran S-21 prison. The judges handed him the maximum pos-
sible sentence: life in prison. It was the first time a Khmer Rouge figure had been sen-
tenced, beyond all appeal, for his role in the human experiment that called itself “Demo-
cratic Kampuchea.”
Four more defendants were also on trial in Case 002, the court's second, more complex
proceeding. There was Nuon Chea, the steely dogmatist who served as “Brother Number
Two” to Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, DK's head of state. The last two were a married
couple: Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, its minister of
social affairs. All four had surrendered in the late 1990s in exchange for amnesties; then,
