A memorial at the Choeund Ek mass grave site in Cambodia is composed of victims' skulls. A flag is reflected in the glass panel (Sarah Caron / Polaris)By CHRISTOPHER SHAY / HONG KONG
The TIME Magazine
When the Khmer Rouge emptied the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh of human inhabitants in 1975, one of Pol Pot's soldiers murdered 4-year-old Theary Seng's father. Later, Theary Seng, her mother and siblings ended up in a prison in southeast Cambodia. One day, Theary Seng awoke to an empty cell — the prison population had been massacred overnight. In a rare act of mercy, the Khmer Rouge soldiers allowed the handful of children to survive. Theary Seng eventually escaped to a Thai refugee camp and then to the U.S. Her story is by no means unique in Cambodia. In just this one prison in Svay Rieng province, between 20,000 and 30,000 people were executed, and during the Pol Pot era, about 1.7 million Cambodians died — more than 20% of the country's population.
Still traumatized by those years and subsequent decades of political instability, many Cambodians had hoped that the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal, a hybrid Cambodian–international court, would help push the country toward reconciliation. In November 2007, Theary Seng, now a human-rights lawyer in Phnom Penh, applied to become the first civil party at the Khmer Rouge tribunal — whereby she and other Khmer Rouge victims are participating in the criminal proceedings with their own set of lawyers. On Friday, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) — the official name of the tribunal — finished hearing its first case. Prosecutors sought a 40-year jail sentence for Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, (pronounced doik) who ran the notorious S-21 prison, a Phnom Penh high school transformed into an interrogation center where Duch is accused of overseeing the grisly deaths of approximately 15,000 people. Over the last six months of hearings, the court heard accounts of interrogators who ripped off toenails, suffocated prisoners with plastic bags, forced people to eat feces, electrocuted prisoners and drained blood to extract confessions. During the trial, Duch, 67, said that Cambodians should hold him to the "highest level of punishment." But he also begged for forgiveness, saying he was only "a cog in a running machine." Duch's defense team painted the former math instructor as a mid-level bureaucrat who didn't personally torture anyone and was only following orders, and on Friday, Duch pleaded for the tribunal to release him.
No comments:
Post a Comment