Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
12,272 people, who were interrogated, forced to sign what were almost all false confes-
sions, and, in all but a handful of cases, executed.
Thirty years on, Duch faced a panel of judges. The zealous light in his eyes was re-
placed by a rheumy gaze. Behind a screen of glass hundreds of people, including a num-
ber of survivors of S-21, watched and listened. “I know that the crimes I committed
against the lives of those people, including women and children, are intolerably and un-
forgivably serious crimes,” Duch said. “My plea is that you leave the door open for me to
seek forgiveness.” Duch's contrition was not unexpected—his lawyers hoped it would en-
sure a mitigation of the sentence he faced on charges of homicide, torture, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes—but it was nonetheless a powerful moment. When else since
the fall of the Khmer Rouge had a leading figure admitted his guilt, acknowledged the
suffering of his victims, and pleaded for forgiveness?
Over the following months, Duch's trial laid bare the machinery of death over which he
had presided with fanatical attention to detail. Some of the most powerful testimony was
given by Vann Nath, an artist who managed to survive S-21 after Duch put him to work
making paintings and sculptures of Brother Number One. He told of being shackled by
the feet along with dozens of prisoners in one of the converted school buildings at S-21,
where inmates were kicked and beaten by guards for the smallest infractions. There were
frequent disappearances. Screams from the torture rooms pierced the afternoon heat.
After the prison was turned into a museum and its archives opened to the public, Nath
looked up his S-21 file and found a chilling annotation, written in Duch's hand. It said,
keep for use temporarily
. For this white-haired man, who carried the traumas of his exper-
iences to his grave in 2011, testifying at the ECCC was vital for educating young people
about a grisly past that many of them could still hardly believe. “I never imagined that I
would be able to sit in this courtroom today,” he said during his testimony in 2009. “This
is my privilege. This is my honour. I do not want anything more than that. What I want is
something that is intangible, that is justice for those that already died.”
19
During the Duch trial, public interest in the ECCC soared. By the trial's end, some 3
million Cambodians had tuned in to the televised trial coverage. Around 31,000 people
between the Cambodian government and the UN now suddenly seemed worthwhile. But
the successes were marred by long delays. Duch freely admitted his guilt and there was
a paper trail linking him directly to S-21, but because of the convoluted structure of the
court, hearings dragged on for eight months. The trial “meandered here and there and
everywhere,” said Ieng Sary's defense lawyer Michael Karnavas. “It should have been a
two-month presentation [of evidence] … You could have had a judgment in one month,
and then that would have been the end of it.”
