Court video brings back horrors to thousands of Cambodians

By JOEL BRINKLEY
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Published: Thursday, Jul. 9, 2009 - 5:12 am

KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia -- They started arriving before 8 a.m., middle-age
men and women, poor rice farmers mostly - damaged survivors of the Khmer
Rouge regime.

The Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private research organization that
collects evidence of the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to
1979, was bringing to this small provincial town a video projector and a
DVD. It shows highlights of the current defendant's testimony in the Khmer
Rouge trial under way in Phnom Penh.

"I want to contribute to engaging the victims in the court process,"
explained Youk Chhang, the center's director. "Some Cambodians have moved
on. But there are others who still suffer, and these are the ones we are
targeting."

That's just who he got.

For an hour, about 75 people watched transfixed as Kaing Khek lev, commander
of S-21, the notorious prison/torture chamber where thousands of Cambodians
died, described his crimes. He is better known as Duch, and he told how he
supervised as his soldiers executed victims by whacking them on the back of
the head with a hoe.

Duch is 66 now and looked directly at the judges with a calm and confident
gaze, seeming to be the commander still, as he confessed to his terrible
crimes, apologized and asked for forgiveness.

"I was given a directive to use a plastic bag to suffocate prisoners," he
acknowledged.

When the video excerpts ended, the room sat silent - stunned, it seemed. A
documentation centerofficial asked audience members to talk about what they
had seen. The DVD was paused on a scene in which Duch seemed to be staring
directly at the crowd with a stern, almost threatening, gaze.

The first woman who raised her hand took the microphone and promptly broke
into tears.

"Forgiveness is not acceptable," she declared, wiping her eyes. "They killed
my father and two older brothers."

Next a middle-age man told of how six of his relatives died, and as he spoke
his large brown eyes grew red and filled with tears. Still another man was
choking up so that his words were hard to understand.

"I was a child, and I was starving," he stammered. "They gave us no food,
and sometimes I would fall down and pass out and then wake up again." And so
it went.

Cathartic? Perhaps. Injurious? Maybe.

The problem is, almost half the adult population of Cambodia, those over 35
or 40 years of age, shows symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a
severe psychological condition that typically afflicts soldiers, but also
civilians who live through trauma - like the horror here 30 years ago. And
for them, psychiatric experts say, watching a video like the one these
people saw is like poking a stick in a hornet's nest. It triggers all of the
symptoms: pain, rage - even violence.

One medical study of Cambodian refugees in Long Beach, Calif. - the nation's
largest concentration of Cambodians - found that 62 percent of the adults
had P.T.S.D. That and other studies found a generally dysfunctional
population with high levels of alcoholism, drug use - and terrible violence.

Daryn Reicherter, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, served as a
consultant to theDocumentation Center here in the spring and came back
concerned. "There needs to be some medical follow-up with these people"
after the show has ended, he insisted.

So far, the Documentation Center has trucked more than 10,000 villagers to
Phnom Penh to see the trial - or brought DVD excerpts to show in their own
villages. Youk Chhang understands the doctors' concerns but points out that
he is a researcher, not a treatment specialist. The government, he says,
should provide any needed psychiatric services. But then, Cambodia has only
about 26 psychiatrists in the entire nation.

Yim Choy, a 44-year-old farmer, shouted at the crowd, saying that he had
been conscribed to a child-labor team. "I cannot forgive Duch," he declared,
his voice laced with bitter anger. "How can I when I saw him throw little
boys against a tree?"

Afterward, he told me that, even now, he cannot talk about those times
without growing angry. And yet he has a hard time keeping the thoughts out
of his mind. He even dreams of the horrors - a hallmark of P.T.S.D.

"I see myself with my hands tied behind me." All of that makes him angrier
still.

After watching scenes like this, Reicherter posed a rhetorical question:
"Why is this important?"

"Children are growing up," he explained, "with violent, P.T.S.D. parents who
are drunk and beat them. That's the generation that is coming."

ABOUT THE WRITER

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for
The New York Timesand now a professor of journalism at Stanford University.
Readers may send him e-mail at: brinkley@foreign-matters.com