Duch on Trial: Week 20 (September 21-September 24, 2009) from East-West Center on Vimeo.
Millions watch coverage of Khmer Rouge prison chief's genocide hearings, which wrap up this week
Monday, Nov. 23, 2009
Phnom Penh — From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
As news anchors come, Ung Chan Sophea and Neth Pheaktra are among the dourest on television anywhere. They go on air every Monday for 25 minutes and speak to millions of Cambodians with one unbreakable rule between them: Never smile, no matter what.
The material they have to work with certainly helps them keep that pledge. Ms. Ung and Mr. Neth are famous faces in this country for narrating the torture, starvation and genocide of Cambodia's recent past.
The program they co-host, Duch on Trial, provides a weekly synopsis of the legal proceedings against former Khmer Rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch. By boiling hundreds of hours of often gruesome testimony down to a short highlight reel of the week's events – with in-studio analysts helping cut through the legal jargon – Ms. Ung and Mr. Neth have helped make the often dense and slow-moving proceedings of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia accessible to the nearly three million viewers, roughly a fifth of the country's population, who tune in each week.
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