By Tu Thanh Ha
The Globe and Mail
The horror in Cambodia
Duch's victims included university professor Phung Ton, who had taught him and knew several intellectuals who became top Khmer Rouge officials. The professor's was of the country when the Khmer Rouge took over. Forced into slaw labour on a collective farm, his wife and seven children took comfort in thinking that he was safe. But worried about them, he flew back to be with them. The family discovered his fate in 1979. His daughter Sunthary had bartered for some palm sugar that came wrapped in newspapers. When she looked at the paper, she saw her father's picture among a series of photos of S-21 victims.‘Mais, ma chérie, Cambodians are not savages.' Except that some Cambodians were savages, a discovery that doomed the diplomat who spoke these words and rocked the world. Or did it? The trial of the Khmer Rouge's master interrogator, charged with killing more than 12,000 people, has shown that some nations should have known what was coming – and done something Richard Nixon was in the White House, Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin and Pierre Trudeau had just got married. The Beatles had broken up, and American troops were slowly beginning to withdraw from Vietnam.
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