Saturday, November 28, 2009

One man stands to pay for Cambodia's crimes

November 28, 2009
By BEN DOHERTY, PHNOM PENH
The Age

There is anxiety that delays and interference will spell the end of the Khmer Rouge trials.
IN COURT, the high school maths teacher Kaing Guek Eav is a meticulous note-taker. Bespectacled and neatly dressed, he records impassively each of the horrific accusations made against him.
He is unemotional, inscrutable. When he speaks, he is deferential and polite.
The torturer, the mass-murderer he was to become is not apparent.
But they are the same man. Under his revolutionary name, Duch, Eav ran the Khmer Rouge's notorious Tuol Sleng jail. Enemies of the party were brought there to be tortured - shocked, beaten, mutilated - before being bludgeoned to death at the nearby killing fields.

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