Chum Mey points to a photograph of a victim of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh. Photograph: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty ImagesChum Mey, one of the dozen survivors who walked out of Tuol Sleng death centre in Phnom Penh, counts on the international court imposing a sentence of life imprisonment
Sunday 25 July 2010
Ben Doherty, Phnom Penh
The Observer (UK)
Chum Mey walks slowly through the corridors of Tuol Sleng – once a school, then a prison, now a museum – past thousands of black-and-white photographs, the unsmiling portraits of the Khmer Rouge's victims in this place. He stops at faces he recognises, pointing out friends, colleagues, a relative he saw for the final time through barbed wire.
Over four years in the late 1970s, it is reckoned, more than 12,000 men, women and children passed through Tuol Sleng prison in central Phnom Penh, and were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Most were tortured into confessing crimes they couldn't possibly have committed before being loaded on to trucks and driven to the notorious killing fields of Choeung Ek, where they were bludgeoned to death with ox-cart axles.
Tomorrow, more than 30 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the man who ran Tuol Sleng prison, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, will be sentenced for the crimes committed here. As Pol Pot's executioner-in-chief, he will be the first Khmer Rouge figure to be held accountable by a court for the crimes of the ultra-communist regime which killed an estimated 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia's population, between 1975 and 1979.
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Over four years in the late 1970s, it is reckoned, more than 12,000 men, women and children passed through Tuol Sleng prison in central Phnom Penh, and were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Most were tortured into confessing crimes they couldn't possibly have committed before being loaded on to trucks and driven to the notorious killing fields of Choeung Ek, where they were bludgeoned to death with ox-cart axles.
Tomorrow, more than 30 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the man who ran Tuol Sleng prison, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, will be sentenced for the crimes committed here. As Pol Pot's executioner-in-chief, he will be the first Khmer Rouge figure to be held accountable by a court for the crimes of the ultra-communist regime which killed an estimated 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia's population, between 1975 and 1979.
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