Khmer Rouge child survivor weeps for mother

By Suy Se

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — A former child survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime's main
torture centre sobbed Thursday as he told Cambodia's war crimes court of his
harrowing separation from his mother at the jail.

Norng Chan Phal, who was around nine years old at the time, also described
seeing bodies when Tuol Sleng prison was finally liberated after invading
Vietnamese-backed forces toppled the 1975-1979 movement.

He was testifying at the trial of jail chief Duch, who is accused of
overseeing the torture and execution of around 15,000 people who passed
through Tuol Sleng.

"I could see my mother on the second floor with her hands on the bars of the
window looking at me and she did not say even a single word to us," Norng
Chan Phal said of the last time he saw her.

Norng Chan Phal, now 39, said they had been promised they were going to meet
his Khmer Rouge cadre father in the capital Phnom Penh, but they were locked
in a room on their first night at Tuol Sleng and would never see him.

"When my jeep took us to that location, I and my brother were happy because
we could ride on a jeep. But then we were threatened and my mother was
forced to get off the jeep and she was not very well," he told the court.

"They (Khmer Rouge cadres) shouted and threatened her and I was also
terrified," Norng Chan Phal said.

He and his younger brother were then separated from his mother the next day,
he said.

In 1979 Vietnamese-backed troops found the two brothers hiding along with
three other children at the prison, a former high school.

He said the youngsters at Tuol Sleng were placed under the care of an old
woman at a workshop and usually given two meals per day, but they never
bathed and were not permitted to wander.

In April 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed, the back entrance of
the prison was flung wide open and "there seemed to be a rush" of people
leaving Tuol Sleng, he said.

He remembered that the old woman insisted he leave through the back gate,
but he hid near a pile of clothes instead.

"I was behind the building. I was looking and waiting to see my mother," he
said. "I saw an opened door and climbed upstairs to the second floor to look
through the opened door, but I could not find my mother."

Norng Chan Phal said he then ran to the adjacent building and stumbled on a
gruesome scene.

"I saw people lying inside the room and maybe they already died, although
they were not swollen. I could see them lying on the beds and there was
blood and I was scared," he told the court.

The 66-year-old Duch begged forgiveness from the victims near the start of
his trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity after accepting
responsibility for his role in governing the jail.

But Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, has consistently rejected
claims by prosecutors that he was a central figure in the hierarchy of the
Khmer Rouge and says he never personally executed anyone.

Led by Pol Pot, who died in 1998, the Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia's cities
in a bid to forge a communist utopia. Up to two million people died of
starvation, overwork, torture and execution during the 1975-79 regime.

Four other former Khmer Rouge leaders are currently in detention and are
expected to face trial next year.