Closing Statements: Prosecutor v. Duch

Beth Van Schaack
Associate Professor of Law,
Santa Clara University School of Law, USA



I. Introduction



After 73 days of trial, the Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) recently heard the Closing Statements in the trial of Kaing Guek Eav (alias Duch), the former head of Tuol Sleng prison (a.k.a. S-21). The statements were a moving, intense, and at times baffling exercise. (A more detailed account of the proceedings is available at the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor.) The public gallery was full the entire week with members of the public, NGO representatives, VIPs representing various foreign embassies, monks in saffron robes and nuns in white robes, uniformed school children, the head of security of the Special Court for Lebanon with his own security detail, and journalists. Hundreds of people were bused in from all over the country by DC-Cam and other organizations. The Civil Parties and the Co-Prosecutors were each given 5 hours to present their Closing Statements. The defendant and his counsel had 7.5 hours. An additional 3 hours was reserved for rebuttal.


The Closing Statement is the final act of persuasion by the parties before the trier of fact. Counsel are expected to connect the facts with the law in such a way that leads the trier of fact (in this case the ECCC judges) to the verdict sought. The Closing is also a time to point out weaknesses in the opponent’s case, evidence, or logic; attack the credulity of the other party’s witnesses; and seek to resolve inconsistencies in the evidence. In addition to accurately portraying the direct and indirect proof, the closing must resonate with the triers of fact on the basis of their life experiences, common sense, and world view. Criminal defendants will also emphasize that the prosecutor bears the burden of proof and highlight instances in the record where the prosecutor failed to meet this burden. A parties’ closing strategy and tone will depend on the theory and nature of the case and the way in which the evidence unfolded during trial. Closing arguments rarely make or break a case. A fabulous closing argument cannot rescue a poorly litigated case; likewise, a terrible closing will not doom a well-litigated case. Observers of the Closing Statements in the Duch case were treated to a vast array of forensic styles and arguments—both legal and extra-legal.



II. Civil Parties



The 90 Civil Parties—some of whom rotated through the courtroom while the rest occupied the front rows of the public gallery—were invited to speak first. The victims were represented by four sets of counsel, each of which was allocated equal time. Karim Khan, co-counsel to 37 Civil Parties, began by emphasizing the novelty of the civil parties’ participatory rights and acknowledging some bumps along the road in coordinating Civil Party participation over the course of the trial. Anticipating an inequality of arms allegation, Khan noted that the Civil Parties were not to duplicate the work of the Co-Prosecutors, and he pointed out a number of instances in the course of the trial when the position of the Civil Parties differed from that of the Co-Prosecutors (for example, his team opposed the inclusion of joint criminal enterprise allegations). He accentuated the unique perspectives and contributions of the Civil Parties to the proceedings in terms of providing testimony about the impact of the defendant’s actions on direct and secondary victims and providing a fuller truth about the crimes committed. He closed by subtly critiquing the ECCC for not providing financial assistance to counsel for the Civil Parties.



His Cambodian co-counsel, Ty Srinna, unfortunately used up much of the remainder of this team’s time reviewing basic biographical data about each of her clients, much of it already in the record. After numerous notes and whispers, she finally concluded and ceded the podium to Khan again. After an abbreviated statement on reparations, Khan—sounding much like the former prosecutor that he is—argued that Duch’s claims of contrition were equivocal and not genuine. Khan challenged Duch’s protestations at trial that he was acting under duress and pursuant to superior orders. Instead, Khan argued that the evidence demonstrated that Duch was ideologically loyal to the Khmer Rouge enterprise, sought to ingratiate himself with his superiors, and used his substantial autonomy to increase, rather than alleviate, the suffering of the detainees—stating at one point that “this is no Schindler.” Potentially undermining the Co-Prosecutors’ theory in Case 002 involving the regime leaders, Khan emphasized the lack of documentation in the record from the Standing Committee concerning the types and severity of torture, implying that Duch took it upon himself to design and implement the horrific torture practices employed at Toul Sleng. In addition, Khan highlighted the larger impact of Duch’s work, arguing that Duch’s unearthing of supposed CIA and KGB spies actually fueled the Khmer Rouge paranoia and led to additional abuses and purges around the country as the Khmer Rouge sought to exterminate real or perceived enemies of the revolution. Khan also addressed Duch’s challenges at the end of trial to the standing of several of the Civil Parties, particularly those individuals who could not provide documentary “proof” of their kinship with someone who died at S-21. Although the Court certified the Civil Parties early on, the judges have taken Duch’s subsequent arguments under advisement.


The second group of 17 civil parties was co-represented by Silke Studzinsky of Germany. Studzinsky’s presentation focused on the goals of her clients—understanding why they or their loved ones were targeted for detention and abuse at Tuol Sleng. Studzinsky’s Cambodian counterpart, Kong Pisey, then presented evidence of sexual assault and abuse that occurred in Tuol Sleng but that was not formally part of the Closing Order (analogous to an indictment). Both counsel implicitly critiqued the Co-Prosecutors for not focusing on sexual violence crimes committed at Toul Sleng. Pisey also sought to deconstruct Duch’s complicated defense, arguing that Duch was a willing executioner who failed to contribute to the truth at trial as promised. At one point, Studzinsky launched into a bizarre and potentially alienating invective on how the victims felt unwelcome before the ECCC because the judges: were not receptive to the victims’ suffering, insensitively asked the victims to show their scars in open court, interrupted the civil parties lawyers, and did not thank the victims for their appearance before the Court. These lines of argument eventually provoked a response from the Trial Chamber, who reminded counsel that prior rulings of the Chamber are not the proper subject of a Closing Statement. This team spent more time on reparations, suggesting that the defendant could write his autobiography and provide the proceeds to the victims (sort of a reverse Son-of-Sam rule). In addition, it was suggested that some portion of the proceeds from the Tuol Sleng museum could go to the victims, and Duch ask the Cambodian government to issue a formal apology.



The third team of Civil Party representatives—including French advocates Philippe Cannone and Martine Jacquin—described their 28 clients as “helpers of justice” and eloquently invoked literature, poetry, and philosophy in their presentations to the relative exclusion of references to the law or evidence. In their remarks, the lawyers for the first time addressed Duch directly, rather than the judges. They called upon Duch to look at the victims and questioned how a man who appeared so respectable could actually be so terrifying. Cannone too acknowledged that the Civil Parties had been disorganized at trial, but considered it a mistake to criticize those for whom the trial was convened and warned of efforts to silence the victims and render them, once again, “voiceless icons.” They invoked the testimony and writing of Francois Bizot, a French ethnologist who testified at trial. Bizot was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1971, prior to the 1975 coup d’état and thus outside the temporal jurisdiction of the Court, and was in the custody of Duch whom Bizot described as a “pure, fervent, idealist.” Bizot movingly recounted his experience in his compelling and at times horrific memoir, The Gate. Cannone also criticized Duch’s invocation of Alfred de Vigny’s poem, “Death of the Wolf” (“La Mort de Lupe”), and his apparent identification with the wolf, who suffers in stoic silence as it carries out its difficult work. Jacquin emphasized that the Khmer Rouge perpetrators were not mentally ill; rather, they took calculated pleasure in their sickening skills.

The lawyers argued that the ECCC had already provided the victims with most valuable reparations of all: the right to be present, the right to participate, and an opportunity for solidarity. Sympathy, empathy, and compassion alone are insufficient. They also suggested the creation of a voluntary trust fund for victims. The third members of their team, Cambodian lawyer Moch Sovannary, proposed more symbolic options, such as posting a list of names at S-21; ensuring the preservation of crime scenes, documents and graves; and establishing plaques and contemplative sites for the victims around the country. Sovannary also stressed the need to assist with the rehabilitation of victims through medical care. Like all the teams, many of the proposed reparations do not involve the accused or his resources, but rather require governmental involvement beyond what the ECCC can order.



The fourth team represented 10 victims. Hong Kim Suon spent considerable time recounting the details of his clients; it is unclear if these were efforts to honor the memory of each of the clients or just cautionary examples of poor time management. French co-counsel Pierre-Oliver Sur argued that his clients could only forgive if they were offered a sincere and complete confession, which Duch has failed to provide. Sur reminded the Court of the testimony of the psychological expert who examined Duch and found that he espoused to a pragmatic theory of survival of the fittest and manifested a shortage of empathy and an inability to understand the suffering experienced by others. Sur accused Duch of monopolizing the proceedings and indirectly accused the Court of being complicit with Duch in limiting the participation of the victims.



III. Co-Prosecutors



The Co-Prosecutors—acting prosecutor William Smith of the U.K. and Chea Leang of Cambodia—delivered the most traditional closing statement of the proceedings from prepared remarks that had clearly been translated in advance. They emphasized their role in the trial: to prove their allegations of fact with the evidence in the record in accordance with international standards of justice. They addressed arguments concerning the jurisdictional basis of the Chamber, they reviewed the charges against Duch, they canvassed the evidence that supports the counts against Duch, and they closed with a discussion of factors relevant to sentencing.



Leang emphasized that Duch could be considered both a senior leader, even though he was not a member of the Khmer Rouge Standing Committee and did not have a policy-making role, as well as someone “most responsible” for crimes within the ECCC’s jurisdiction. Leang acknowledged Duch’s claims that he is a scapegoat, facing prosecution when other security chiefs are not, and will not likely be, before the Court. In response, Leang emphasized that S-21 was in many ways at the apex of the Khmer Rouge extermination regime. Duch had unique access to, and influence over, senior leaders. His prison—which, Leang argued, should be considered a death chamber since there was no realistic chance of release—received high value prisoners from all over the country, including purged Khmer Rouge cadre. Duch’s exhaustive confession analysis laid the groundwork for additional purges and political persecution on a national scale. Leang’s impassioned account in the Khmer language of how prisoners arrived, were processed, were forced to give nonsensical confessions, and ultimately expired at S-21 drew tears from observers in the courtroom. She also described the more sadistic forms of torture and mistreatment (such as forcing inmates to eat excrement), as well as medical experiments and live surgeries committed on prisoners at S-21.



In a strongly doctrinal presentation, Leang then recounted the elements of the crimes charged—crimes against humanity (imprisonment, enslavement, torture, murder, extermination, persecution, and other inhumane acts), war crimes (confinement of civilians, due process violations, cruel treatment, torture, and willful killing), and national crimes under the 1956 Penal Code (torture and murder). Here, she reminded the Court that the Co-Prosecutors’ final submissions did in fact discuss crimes of sexual violence at Toul Sleng, contrary to claims by some of the Civil Parties. In setting out the elements of these international crimes, Leang relied heavily on the ICC Statute and its Elements of Crimes.



Addressing the question of why the Co-Prosecutors sought to charge Duch with war crimes in addition to crimes against humanity, Leang explained that the rule of law requires that the Co-Prosecutors apply the terms of the ECCC Statute and international law. In addition, she noted the importance of enforcing the grave breaches regime of the Geneva Conventions to ensure that those provisions are not mere words on paper, of accurately reflecting the criminality of the accused, and of telling a fuller story of the crimes committed at Toul Sleng, particularly against Vietnamese civilians and prisoners of war. (Leang was forced to admit, however, that there was no specific evidence that Vietnamese detainees were tortured; she argued that it could be inferred that they would have received equal—if not worse—treatment than Khmer detainees). Leang argued that the evidence in the record—including media reports, Khmer Rouge internal documents, and the expert testimony of Nayan Chanda (a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and co-author of several books on Asia)—an international armed conflict commenced in Cambodia in April 1975, several months after the Khmer Rouge invaded Cambodia. By contrast, the defense later argued that no international armed conflict existed until December 1979 when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge.



Acting Co-Prosecutor Smith took charge of elucidating Duch’s individual responsibility for the crimes committed at Tuol Sleng, Smith emphasized that Duch manifested all forms of responsibility—as a planner; a giver of orders; an instigator, aider, and abettor; and a direct perpetrator. Smith also argued that the doctrine of joint criminal enterprise (JCE) perfectly captures the essence of the accused’s liability. He noted that other tribunals have found JCE to be a form of commission and that the drafters of the ECCC Statute chose language identical to that of the other ad hoc tribunals in order to import the JCE doctrine as well. The Trial Chamber reserved ruling on the applicability of the JCE doctrine until the judgment.



Smith noted that Duch has admitted his “absolute authority” over S-21 and his general responsibility for the crimes committed and that he assented to a list of agreed facts concerning the structure of S-21 and its staff. Smith noted, however, that there were omissions and gaps in Duch’s testimony. Duch also advanced a superior orders defense and did not admit to undertaking his functions willingly, claiming instead to be a “hostage to the regime.” Although Duch tried to portray himself as ignorant of the details of the day-to-day operations in Toul Sleng, or as dependent on orders from his superiors, these claims are not borne out by the evidence. Smith reminded the Court that 155 individuals executed at Toul Sleng were former prison staff members—Duch’s direct subordinates. Smith described Duch and his superiors, one of whom will be on trial next year, as “brothers in arms.” He also demonstrated that Duch lived a comfortable family life during the Khmer Rouge era in a spacious villa while his prisoners were shackled to the floor.



Turning to the appropriate sentence, Smith emphasized that given the magnitude and gravity of Duch’s crimes, it was inconceivable that Duch would receive less than a lengthy imprisonment. Smith emphasized the impact of the crimes on the victims and their network of traumatized friends and relatives around the globe, the degree of direct participation of the accused, and his zealous participation in the crimes. As aggravating factors, Smith highlighted Duch’s abuse of power, the unusual cruelty of his actions, and the defenselessness of the victims. Smith then discounted mitigating factors he anticipated from the accused, such as that Duch was acting under duress or pursuant to superior orders. To this, Smith recounted the testimony of Bizot that Duch was not a man in terror, but a man of terror. Smith argued that Duch believed in the validity of any orders he received and implemented them willingly. Although he provided some cooperation after his arrest, Duch lived under an assumed name and remained with his former Khmer Rouge colleagues for years prior to his detention. He only started cooperating when Irish photographer Nic Dunlop discovered his whereabouts in 1999, as recounted in Dunlap’s book, The Lost Executioner. Duch also fought the admission of certain evidence (such as his involvement in crimes at the M-13 detention center prior to the Khmer Rouge assuming power) and resisted the introduction of reserve witness lists or even witness statements in lieu of live testimony. These acts, in Smith’s estimation, attested to Duch’s unwillingness to accept full responsibility for his actions or allow the truth to flow freely. Smith emphasized that opposing the introduction of inculpatory evidence is within Duch’s right as a defendant, but is inherently inconsistent with his claims of cooperation and admissions of responsibility.



Turning to concrete issues of sentencing, Smith noted that national reconciliation is a byproduct of a trial process, not its purpose and that a steeply reduced sentence would do little to contribute to such a goal. He conceded that Duch should receive credit for time already served in military custody prior to his transfer to the ECCC. Given that Duch was unlawfully detained for a period of time and subjected to other legal irregularities, Smith argued that a sentence of life imprisonment—which would otherwise have been appropriate—should be commuted to a determinate sentence of 45 years. Smith suggested that the Court should carve off another 5 years to reflect Duch’s limited cooperation with the tribunal and conditional expressions of remorse.



IV. The Defense



Duch next took the stand. His presentation was a didactic, rambling, and at times seemingly random exposition correcting or underscoring references in the trial record that are likely of interest to only a few beyond the Khmer Rouge historians in the audience. He peppered his testimony with Khmer aphorisms, such as “before harvesting the bamboo, you must remove the thorns,” that in context seemed chilling, especially when he later described purged Khmer Rouge cadre as “thorns in the eyes” of the Standing Committee. His testimony ranged from the founding of the Party of Democratic Kampuchea to the end of the Khmer Rouge era. He testified that “politics governed technique” and described torture as “inevitable.” He claimed that the purges terrified him and that he was afraid of being removed himself. At various points, his statement addressed issues (such as Khmer Rouge leadership structures throughout the different zones) that were so tedious and arcane that members of the audience began to fall asleep, although they were regularly awoken by Court staff under orders from the Chamber to prevent such naps. Addressing his role within this history, he described himself as having been “plunged” into a criminal act with little right to challenge decisions on who should be “smashed.”



Finally, Duch’s statement became more introspective. He stated clearly, “I still am solely and individually responsible for the deaths of 12,000 people and will be forever liable.” Still reading from his prepared remarks and not looking at the Civil Parties in the courtroom, he testified that he owed an accounting to the people of Cambodia and that he was deeply remorseful for having devoted his strength and skills to a criminal organization rather than to serving his people. He implied that early on, he had been given the choice of two paths and, in a split second decision, took a path that led him to a life of endless suffering. Once he became a cog in the machine, he could not withdraw. He humbly apologized to the dead and to the survivors. He asked the victims to leave a door open for him to make an apology and to recognize him as a member of humankind.



Duch’s apparently monotonous delivery of this statement, with nary a glance toward the Civil Parties, made it difficult to glean how sincere and heartfelt these expressions of contrition came across in his native language. Indeed, any emotional impact Duch might have made was no doubt mitigated when, at the close of his remarks, he proceeded to read 34 footnotes aloud, without no indication of their textual referent.



The Closing offered by Kar Savuth, Duch’s Cambodian Co-Defense Counsel, was so inconsistent that one could have been forgiven for thinking that he represented a different client. Rather than focus on Duch’s cooperation and entitlement to mitigation, Savuth attacked the very jurisdiction of the ECCC, arguing that Duch cannot be considered one “most responsible” for the Khmer Rouge’s crimes when there were 196 prisons around the country during the Khmer Rouge era and so many other prison heads are enjoying their golden years. He attacked the Co-Prosecutors’ cumulative charging, he presented evidence that argued against the existence of an international armed conflict, he claimed there were few if any Vietnamese prisoners of war at Tuol Sleng until 1978, and he argued that Duch should benefit from the application of the statute of limitations and the amnesty law.



In his review of the evidence, Savuth suggested that the members of the Standing Committee were solely responsible for the evacuation of Phnom Penh and the execution of members of the prior regime—crimes, incidentally, that were not charged against Duch. Savuth argued that after the Khmer Rouge consolidated their power around the country, only zone standing committees, members of the general staff, and comparable cadre had the authority to execute prisoners. Here, Savuth implicated Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphon in the crimes at S-21, two defendants who will be tried in case 002 next year, and announced that Pol Pot, who has been dead for 10 years, should also be prosecuted. Savuth repeatedly echoed the scapegoat argument, emphasizing that the record showed that Duch never killed anyone directly and that none of Duch’s subordinates was now on trial. He concluded by arguing that Duch should be exonerated because he was just following orders—someone who “fell victim as a loyal servant to the regime” and would have himself been killed by Angkor if he had resisted. Savuth emphasized that only if the proceedings are fair will the dead souls rest and justice be done.



The next morning, Duch’s French counsel, Françoise Roux, took the podium. Roux is a legend in international criminal law, having—among other high profile clients—successfully defended Ignace Bagileshima before the Rwanda Tribunal and avoided the death penalty for the so-called 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui following the September 11th attacks. Roux began his presentation by announcing that this would be his last appearance in court as he was on the eve of assuming a position of head of the defense section for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. He also admitted that he had been forced to amend his remarks in light of his co-counsel’s presentation the day before, and he suggested that he disagreed with several of the arguments advanced on his client’s behalf. Roux acknowledged the paradox he now faced of having a client who had apparently simultaneously pled guilty and also asked for acquittal, likening his client to Albert Speer, who admitted his responsibility without a formal guilty plea and was accorded a 20-year sentence. Roux tried to rehabilitate Duch’s closing remarks, noting that his apologies were sincere “moments of truth” and that no one should doubt the tears that accompanied his testimony over the course of the trial.



The rest of Roux’s presentation was aimed at the Co-Prosecutors and their failure to give Duch sufficient credit for giving them the bulk of the evidence against him. In this regard, Roux played a moving video excerpt from the Closing Statement of Peter McCloskey of the Yugoslav Tribunal in the Obrenović case. In this case, involving a military commander charged with responsibility for the crimes committed at Srebrenica, the Prosecutor in open court gratefully acknowledged the guilty plea of the defendant, his sincere remorse, and his cooperation during the course of the trial and then sought a mere 17-year sentence. At the close of the video, Roux announced, “this is what this trial should have been” and implied that more dialog between the defense and the prosecution would have avoided the debacle of the day before. Roux urged the tribunal to regard superior orders in mitigation, especially given Duch’s continued cooperation with Case 002 and the fact that he had already spent 30 years in captivity of sorts (as a fugitive and then in military custody).



Roux also repeatedly invoked the concept of obedience, arguing that his client never enjoyed full autonomy and to argue otherwise was to “re-write history.” Roux critiqued the prosecution for implying that his client bore the same degree of responsibility as a Pol Pot when the evidence, including testimony from the Prosecution’s own witnesses, revealed that Duch would have been killed had he not complied. Turning to some of the legal issues, Roux rejected the Prosecution’s efforts to invoke the joint criminal enterprise doctrine, arguing that others who were part of the supposed JCE should be entitled to defend themselves. He also argued that Duch cannot be charged with the direct commission of torture, as the Prosecution implied. He suggested that Duch might, like so many other victims of the regime, be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder/syndrome, which might explain Duch’s apparent emotional insensitivity. Roux urged the tribunal to bring Duch “back into the fold of humanity.”



V. Rebuttal



The rebuttals—which offer the parties to comment on each other’s Closing Statements—began immediately. The Civil Parties accused the defendant of trying to ride on two horses at once, implying that his inconsistent statements were, in effect, an abuse of process that should have been resolved between the defense counsel. Khan accused Duch of turning away from the prosecutors rather than engaging them. Studzinsky called the defense’s volte face a “slap in the face” of the Civil Parties. The Civil Parties argued collectively that statute of limitations, personal jurisdiction, and other such defenses should have been raised as preliminary matters and, as such, were waived. They all doubted Duch’s sincerity, and Jacquin accused Duch of seeking the pity his victims never had. After praising Roux’s service to international justice, Canonne accused his compatriot of insulting Cannone’s clients when he sought to minimize the horrors of S-21 by comparing the number dead to the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians killed throughout the Khmer Rouge era. Suon, himself a victim, lost his composure twice over the course of his rebuttal. He accused Savuth of contradicting his own client’s testimony at trial and, in so doing, paining the victims.



The Co-Prosecutors next presented their rebuttal and things got even more combative. Smith told the judges they had been “misled” by virtue of Savuth’s sudden request for an acquittal. Indeed, both Co-Prosecutors argued that, Duch should not benefit from any mitigation for his cooperation if he now seeks acquittal. Smith also wondered aloud whether Savuth had been following instructions from his counsel or if he had acted on his own, “leaving behind” his client. Smith—a former ICTY prosecutor himself—distinguished the situation of Obrenović from the current case on the ground that the former had enjoyed a distinguished military career prior to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and was accused of command responsibility—i.e., failing to supervise his troops—with respect to a single, albeit horrific, massacre. Duch, on the other hand, has a long history of participating in abuses that pre-dates the Khmer Rouge era.



Leang addressed Savuth’s legal arguments, rebutting each one with references to international law, domestic precedent, and prior rulings of the tribunal. She also suggested that if Duch had maintained a consistent position during the trial, the victims might have accepted his apology. At one point, Khan intervened in the Co-Prosecutors’ rebuttal and asked the Court to invite Duch to re-plead and clarify his position. Savuth and Roux largely echoed the themes of their original Closing Statements, though Roux also argued that had Duch stepped down, someone else would have simply taken his place as chairman of S-21. Although the Rules say nothing of a rebuttal to a rebuttal, Smith nonetheless rose once more and called upon the defendant to pick a defense.

The President of the tribunal, Nil Nonn, finally invited the accused to make a final statement at the close of the defense’s rebuttal and clarify his position. Duch rose and stated:



I am most grateful for the opportunity offered to me to make my last words. First, I would like to tell the Court about the spirit of my co-operation with the Court. … I was determined to report to the Court sincerely, honestly based on my best memories and to prove it, at the Military Court, all the documents that I already co-operated in responding to the questions of the judges have already been provided to the Trial Chamber. And here, at this Court, I have responded to all the questions put to me by the Co-Investigating Judges and additional questions by the Co-Prosecutors. The records of the interviews at the ECCC are well used as the evidence and proof. … Questions have been fully been put by parties to me and by the Bench to me, and I have fully responded to such questions and the proof can be found in the transcript, hundreds of pages of transcript. …



So I am here to tell the Court that I have fully co-operated with all levels of the Court, including that of the Domestic Court, the Military Court and this hybrid Court. Second point, I would like to express concerning my apologies, and rather my guilt admission. … Having taken into account the more than one million souls who perished, I never forget them, including those of my relatives, and I have acknowledged how these people had suffered before they died. And I also used another word that all crimes committed by the CPK, I myself, as the member of the Party, acknowledge and apologize for them as the member of the Party, and Pol Pot relied heavily on the members of the Party and those members—and I was among them. So I would like to seek for apologies before my people and my nation. Yesterday the prosecutor, the national prosecutor indicated the new number of 12,300 [who died at S-21]. I never challenged such number anyway because I admit that even more than—there were more than the number that already indicated who died at S-21, and I am responsible for the crimes without any denial. … I still maintain my position that I am responsible for the crimes as the member of the criminal party.



Duch then said: “I will leave it to the Court to decide. I would ask the Chamber to release me. I’m very grateful.” Judge Sylvia Cartwright of New Zealand once again asked Duch for clarification of his position, and he indicated his preference that his national lawyer speak for him. Savuth then rose and confirmed that the request for release was in essence a request to be acquitted, not a plea for complete mitigation. With these final words, Duch and his counsel largely destroyed the painstakingly constructed strategy of accepting responsibility, expressing contrition, and hoping for mitigation.



VI. Conclusion



There were some exceedingly odd moments over the course of the week. For example, when Duch would enter the courtroom, he would often bow to the public gallery, generating laughs among the audience and an occasional bow in return. At one point, Duch pressed a note to the glass facing the public gallery, which was acknowledged by someone in the audience. At another point, a foreigner placed a note on the glass for Duch, who saluted in response. Several of the lawyers questioned Duch’s conversion to Christianity, noting his opportune choice of a religion that embodies a notion of forgiveness. The lawyering was at times brilliant, contestable, and unsettling and the last minute schism between Duch’s lawyers will no doubt go down in history as an example of a fatal flaw in the hybrid systems. A verdict is expected this spring.

The ECCC Should Address Starvation to Fulfill its Mandate

Randle C. DeFalco


“Hunger is the most effective disease.”
- Khmer Rouge slogan

Constant hunger was perhaps the most universal form of suffering endured by Cambodians during the period of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) from 1975-1979. The Khmer Rouge (KR) regime forced all Cambodians to eat communally and outlawed eating privately or raising private crops. These actions effectively stripped the population of the ability to feed itself and made Cambodians wholly reliant on communal rations for sustenance. These rations however, were woefully insufficient, typically consisting of two small ladles of watery rice gruel per day. Many people were beaten, imprisoned or even executed because they were caught searching for desperately needed food for themselves or a starving loved one. People starved by the thousands, often as family members helplessly watched them waste away. Suffering was most acute amongst disfavored “new” people, who were scorned as enemies of the revolution by the KR and forced to do hard labor while receiving the least food. Meanwhile, while other Cambodians starved, senior KR leaders enjoyed bountiful meals and exported thousands of tons of rice each year.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was created to hold “senior leaders” and others “most responsible” accountable for serious crimes committed during DK. The ECCC has two main goals: to provide an accounting of the crimes committed during DK and to develop an accurate history of the DK period. If the ECCC is to achieve either of these goals the Co-Investigating Judges must address the issue of famine and starvation in case 002.

Presently, there is no single “famine” crime under international or Cambodian law. There are however, numerous international crimes that may be committed in association with an instance of mass famine, such as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. At the ECCC, crimes against humanity appear to be the most appropriate mechanism to account for famine and starvation during DK. This is because crimes against humanity are designed to protect civilians from widespread or systematic abuses, even when committed by their own government. The ECCC has jurisdiction over nine discrete crimes against humanity, of which three can be combined to capture the main harms attributable to famine during DK. These are: extermination, “other inhumane acts” and persecution.

Extermination is a crime of mass killing and can be used to account for the massive number of deaths attributable to starvation from 1975-79. The acts of killing that can form the crime of extermination need not be violent and include exposing people to conditions of life that result in mass death.

“Other inhumane acts” are acts that do not fall under a specific crime against humanity, yet are of equal gravity. This crime has been used to account for a wide variety of abuses committed against civilians and could be used to account for the severe physical and mental suffering of virtually all Cambodians during the DK period attributable to chronic undernutrition. This crime is a critical mechanism to acknowledge that all Cambodians were victims of famine, including both survivors and those who ultimately died of starvation.

Persecution is the discriminatory denial of a fundamental right to members of a protected class. The protected classes at the ECCC are racial, religious and political groups. As with “other inhumane acts,” alleged persecutory acts must be of comparable gravity to other crimes against humanity. The key to a successful persecution conviction is establishing that the accused had the specific intent to discriminate against the victim(s) because of their membership in a protected class. Persecution could be used to account for the KR’s discrimination against perceived political enemies, who were given the least food and forced to do the most labor, resulting in especially acute famine.

The three crimes against humanity discussed above, extermination, “other inhumane acts” and persecution, provide the necessary framework to account for three critical aspects of famine during DK: death, suffering, and discrimination against disfavored groups. Extreme hunger was a near-universal Cambodian experience during DK. Victims who starved to death did not die from “natural causes.” Their suffering was wholly avoidable and cannot be blamed on bad harvests or unfavorable weather. Widespread, severe famine was the natural and foreseeable result of the draconian policies formulated, enacted and enforced by a small group of powerful KR leaders. In order for the ECCC to provide a minimally adequate accounting of crimes committed during DK, the Co-Investigating Judges must address this essential issue.

The Long Road to Justice

13 Years of Working To Ensure That the Khmer Rouge Trials Belong to You

By Youk Chhang

During the Khmer Rouge period from April 17, 1975 to January 7, 1979, Cambodians walked constantly. They walked from the cities to the countryside, from their villages to distant provinces, and from the rice fields to the battlefields. After January 7, 1979 the survivors of our country's genocide walked again; this time back to their homes.

In 1997, Cambodians began another journey; the journey to seek justice for crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. And today, 31 years after the Khmer Rouge regime fell we are taking a giant step along the road to justice.

On February 6, 2006 the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) - commonly referred to as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT) - officially began setting up offices at the military barracks outside of Phnom Penh. The first trial, Case 001, began on March 30, 2009, two years behind schedule. The case opened with the defendant, former head of S-21 prison Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), apologizing to victims and accepting responsibility, but ended shockingly however on November 27, 2009 with Duch rejecting responsibility on jurisdictional grounds because he was not a "senior Khmer Rouge leader or those most responsible" as stated in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Law. The judgment of Duch will be delivered in March 2010.


In late 2010 or early 2011, the most important Khmer Rouge trial will begin. Case 002 will try the highest level Khmer Rouge leaders still alive today: Noun Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Ieng Thirith. This trial will be a crucial moment in Cambodia's road to justice because the evidences and analyses brought forth will provide answers to many fundamental questions about the Khmer Rouge regime that survivors had wondered for over three decades.

Cambodia, the United Nations, and several other countries have worked for many years to help us see justice delivered. The United Nations and national governments raised much of the initial $56 million budget for the KRT and stepped in during budgetary shortfalls in late 2008. These governments have also generously funded many Cambodian human rights and international non-government organizations (NGO) that support and monitor the trial process by helping victims file complaints of Khmer Rouge atrocities to the Court, observing and reporting on the activities of the Cambodian government and United Nations, providing counseling to those who suffered during Democratic Kampuchea, and other activities.

Perhaps the most important way that NGOs can help is to work with the Extraordinary Chambers and each other to ensure that the public is informed about the trials and involved in them.

These trials are about seeking justice for victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. These are your trials, and without your participation in them, the Cambodian people will not be able to judge whether the trials are fair, of high standards, and accessible to all.

But how can the people of Cambodia participate in the trials? They are far away and it is expensive to travel to Phnom Penh. Many NGOs in Cambodia are working to make certain that people can read about the trials through magazines and other written materials that are delivered to sub-district and district offices across the country. Others will broadcast news on the radio, and the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) is working with TVK and other stations to produce programs that will help educate people about the Extraordinary Chambers.

In the past few years, DC-Cam has also implemented a project which brought 400-500 villagers every month from all across Cambodia to Phnom Penh to visit genocide memorial sites and meet with officials at the KRT courtroom. After this first phase of the Living Documents Project, phase two which began in early 2009 allowed victims to directly attend Duch's trial hearing, participate in KRT educational workshops, and view Khmer Rouge related videos. Afterward, villagers returned home to share with community members during village forums what they saw and learned so that Cambodians have the opportunity to learn about the trials from people like themselves, in addition to tribunal officials and NGO staff. All of these activities have helped villagers understand how the trials work and to become familiar with the tribunal process. For Case 002, DC-Cam will increase its activities and outreach efforts given the significance of this trial.

All of us want to see trials that are fair and just, and for the Cambodian people to participate in them without fear of intimidation or uncertainty. Learning about the tribunal from the written word, radio and television, and from your family, friends and neighbors will help you see that justice can work in Cambodia and that building a more just future for our children can become a reality.

-------------------------
Youk Chhang is the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. This week is the 10th anniversary of the publishing of DC-Cam Genocide Magazine: "Searching for the Truth." With the ministries of Interior and Information, DC-Cam has distributed 1.5 million copies of the magazine to the villagers within Cambodia. This week also is the 13th anniversary of the establishment of DC-Cam.

Lost in Cambodia

Why did a radical British professor become a cheer-leader for Pol Pot? And why was he murdered on the very day he'd met the brutal dictator?
Andrew Anthony on the extraordinary life and death of Malcolm Caldwell
By Andrew Anthony
The Observer, Sunday 10 January

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/10/malcolm-caldwell-pol-pot-murder/print


The name of Malcolm Caldwell is remembered now by very few people: some
friends, family, colleagues, and students of utopian folly. In the 1970s,
though, Caldwell was a major figure in protest politics. He was chair of CND
for two years, a leading voice in the anti-Vietnam war campaign, a regular
contributor to Peace News, and a stalwart supporter of liberation movements
in the developing world. He spoke at meetings all over the country, wrote
books and articles, and engaged in public spats with such celebrated
opponents as Bernard Levin.

The name of Kaing Guek Eav is, arguably, known by even fewer people, at
least outside of Cambodia. Instead it is by his revolutionary pseudonym
"Duch" that Kaing is usually referred to in the press. Duch is the only man
ever to stand trial in a UN-sanctioned court for the mass murder perpetrated
by the Cambodian communist party, or the Khmer Rouge, in the late 1970s. His
trial on charges of crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva
Conventions, and homicide and torture concerning thousands of victims, drew
to a close in November. Justice has taken more than 30 years, but a verdict
and sentence are expected sometime in the next few weeks.

Although their paths crossed only incidentally, the two men shared two main
interests. They both had a pedagogic background: Caldwell was a history
lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of
London, while Duch, like many senior Khmer Rouge cadres, started out as a
schoolteacher. And they both maintained an unbending belief in Saloth Sar,
the leader of the Khmer Rouge revolution, who went under the Orwellian party
title of Brother Number One, but was known more infamously to the world as
Pol Pot. It was an ideological commitment that would shape the fate of both
men and they held on to it right up until the moment of death - in
Caldwell's case, his own, for Duch, the many thousands whose slaughter he
organised.

In each circumstance, the question that reverberates down the years, growing
louder rather than dimmer, is: why? Why were they in thrall to a system
based on mass extermination? It's estimated that around two million
Cambodians, more than a quarter of the population, lost their lives during
the four catastrophic years of Khmer Rouge rule. What could have led these
two individuals, worlds apart, to embrace a regime that has persuasive
claim, in a viciously competitive field, to be the most monstrous of the
20th century?

When Caldwell appeared at SOAS for an interview in the late 1950s, the
senior faculty thought that they had landed one of the academic stars of the
future. Caldwell, who took his PhD at Nottingham University, had gained a
reputation as a bright young talent and, according to college legend, he
presented himself as a sober scholar.

"So they hired him," recalls Merle Ricklefs, a former SOAS colleague and now
a history professor at the National University of Singapore. "Then he showed
up for lectures and suddenly he was this Scottish radical with long hair,
looking unkempt, and they felt as though they'd been betrayed.

"I thought he was actually a very good economic historian," says Ricklefs,
who remembers "an extraordinary character. very ideologically committed". He
was also struck by his warmth and good manners. As a young American, who
dressed in conservative fashion, arriving in England during the height of
the Vietnam war, Ricklefs expected to be greeted with a certain amount of
antipathy, but he found Caldwell to be "always cordial. Always looking
slightly dishevelled and revolutionary, but never the slightest hint of
discourtesy."

The picture of a friendly, if rather unconventional character, is confirmed
by others who knew him. Professor Ian Brown was Caldwell's successor at SOAS
and he was also his former student. "He was well liked - I suspect not by
the SOAS hierarchy," says Brown, "but certainly loved by students and
colleagues."

He describes a "skinny, somewhat emaciated, rather scruffy character who,
bizarrely, always used to wear a suit - though it was clearly a suit that
had been bought in the 1950s equivalent of Oxfam and not seen too many dry
cleaners." Caldwell never hid his politics from his students, indeed he made
a point of proselytising to them. One of his protégés was Walter Easey, who,
according to Easey's obituarist, Caldwell converted to "a fierce and angry
communism". But to Professor Brown, "he was a gentle person, quietly spoken,
and very tolerant of opposing views. He treated everyone well. He was very
encouraging and a really inspiring teacher."

Both Brown and Ricklefs use the same word to describe this well-travelled,
extremely well-read and highly intelligent man: naive. SOAS, says Brown, was
a college whose standing and ethos rested upon sound empirical study.
"Everyone else in the history department went off every summer to the
archives in Rangoon, Baghdad, etc, and got deep inside the data. Malcolm
didn't. He was a man with very clear theoretical and ideological views and
the empirical basis didn't seem to worry him hugely."

It's not that Caldwell was lost in bookish abstraction, for he did visit the
various communist regimes he extolled. It was more that when he got there he
was all too willing to accept state propaganda as verified fact. For
example, he praised the "magnitude of the economic achievements" of Kim
Il-Sung's impoverished North Korea and, returning from a trip to the highly
secretive state, he wrote that the country was "an astonishing tribute not
only to the energy, initiative and creativeness of the Korean people, but
also to the essential correctness of the Juche line". "Juche" was the
mixture of ultra-nationalism and self-reliance on which Kim built his
monumental personality cult. About the totalitarian surveillance and
ruthless political repression, Caldwell said nothing.

Although academic traditionalists may have disapproved of Caldwell's slanted
scholarship, many idealistic students were inspired by his lectures. Tariq
Ali, who became famous as a 1968 student leader, recalls going to see him
talk on southeast Asia when Ali was at Oxford. They soon got to know each
other and in the summer of 1965 went to a peace conference together in
Helsinki. "We had to fly to Moscow," says Ali, "then there was a train, via
Leningrad as it was then, to Helsinki. We talked a lot and became very
friendly. It was later on that his Cambodian deviation was a bit
off-putting. And he could never completely explain it."

At one time, the pair discussed opening a Vietnamese restaurant as a sort of
act of antiwar gastro-prop. "He would say that after a few drams," Ali
recalls. "He was a great whisky drinker. He was also a great cricket fan and
an early Scottish nationalist."

Cricket is mostly followed in Scotland by the upper classes, but Ali got the
impression that his old friend came from a middle-class background. His
Wikipedia entry states that he was the son of a miner. "You know," says Ali,
"we never bothered about these things. We were so totally immersed in
politics and the state of the world, we never really talked about each
other, our personal lives or social backgrounds."

In seeking to understand why this idealistic Scotsman became a cheerleader
for Pol Pot, it would be wrong to consign him to the maverick margins. A
member of the Labour Party, he stood as a candidate in the 1977 local
elections in Bexley. John Cox, who followed in Caldwell's footsteps as chair
of CND, is adamant that there was nothing out of the ordinary about his
predecessor's politics. "He was well in the mainstream of what I would call
generally progressive liberal thinking," says Cox.

This idea that support for the most illiberal systems of government is all
part of the liberal tradition is one of the more bemusing aspects of
progressive politics. But the missing factor in the equation is the view
that the United States of America is the ultimate villain. The background to
the brutality visited on Cambodia was the brutality visited on Vietnam by US
forces.

Although the Vietnam war was more complex than is often acknowledged (the
tensions between North and South, for example, long predated the war), the
Americans essentially inherited France's colonial conflict. But they fought
it in the context of the Cold War. As much as US administrations may have
seen the battle as one between communism and the free world, to the majority
of Vietnamese it was a liberation struggle.

In an effort to close down North Vietnamese supply lines to the South, the
US also launched a devastating bombing campaign on neighbouring Cambodia.
Instead of winning the war in the former, it served only to destabilise the
latter. To make matters worse, an American-supported coup put in place the
corrupt government of Lon Nol in Phnom Penh. So there was a tendency among
many anti-war protesters to see the Khmer Rouge as just another national
liberation movement, fighting to escape from under the American yoke.

One man who observed the truth up close, four years before the Khmer Rouge
came to power, was a French ethnologist called François Bizot. In 1971,
while out researching Buddhist practices, he was captured in the Cambodian
countryside by Khmer Rouge insurgents. He was held captive with scores of
Cambodian prisoners at the M-13 prison camp, a precursor to the 196 santebal
(secret police) offices that were set up after the Khmer Rouge seized power.
The head of the camp, and the Frenchman's tireless interrogator, was Duch.

Bizot wrote about the encounter in a remarkable memoir called The Gate.
After three months, during which he was shackled and repeatedly accused of
being an American spy, he was suddenly released - all the other prisoners
were executed. So relieved was the Frenchman that he asked Duch if he would
like a gift. His jailer thought for a while and then replied, "with the look
of a child writing to Father Christmas, 'The complete collection of Das
Kapital by Marx.'"

Three days before Christmas in 1978, Malcolm Caldwell received an early
present. On the final day of a two-week tour of Cambodia, he was told that
he would meet Pol Pot. This was indeed a rare privilege. Unlike most other
communist leaders, Pol had not created a personality cult. There were no
posters of him. He was seldom seen or quoted. Many Cambodians had not even
heard of him. Only seven westerners were ever invited to what had been
renamed Democratic Kampuchea. And Caldwell was the first and only Briton.

There were several reasons why Caldwell had been received in Phnom Penh. He
was on good terms with China, Cambodia's main ally in the region. There were
also growing tensions between Cambodia and its larger neighbour Vietnam and,
fearful of an invasion, Pol Pot was belatedly attempting to improve
Kampuchea's image abroad. Most of all, while other supporters had wavered,
Caldwell had remained steadfast. Only months before, he had written an
article in the Guardian, rubbishing reports of a Khmer Rouge genocide. He
cited Hu Nim, the Kampuchean Information Minister, who blamed the deaths on
America. Caldwell was unaware that Hu had himself already been tortured to
death in one of Pol Pot's execution centres. Such killings that the Khmer
Rouge had committed, argued the peace activist, were of "arch-Quislings who
well knew what their fate would be were they to linger in Kampuchea".

Travelling with Caldwell were two American journalists, Elizabeth Becker and
Richard Dudman. Becker had been a foreign reporter in Phnom Penh during the
civil war that brought the Khmer Rouge to power. She knew the terrain, and
had been to Thailand to talk to refugees. She and Caldwell argued endlessly
about the true nature of the situation.

"He didn't want to know about problems with the Khmer Rouge," she says. "And
that carried over to not wanting to know about problems between Cambodia and
Vietnam. He was stuck in '68 or something."

Yet for all their disagreements, she liked Caldwell. "He was a lovely man,
very funny, very charming," she says. "A real sweetie. He was also very
homesick for his family and he said he'd never spend another Christmas away
from them."

According to Becker, Caldwell had not read François Ponchaud's Cambodia:
Year Zero, the book that first catalogued the Khmer Rouge genocide. A friend
of François Bizot, Ponchaud was a Catholic missionary who was in Phnom Penh
when the victorious Khmer Rouge army marched into town. His book became
required reading for anyone interested in what was happening in Cambodia.
"The fact that Malcolm, a professor, had not read it before he went, that I
couldn't believe," says Becker. "I think it was almost ideological that he
didn't read it."

It's perhaps not that strange that Caldwell had neglected to read Ponchaud,
given that he had already dismissed the Frenchman's credibility in print. He
based his damning opinion on a brief extract of Year Zero which the Guardian
had published and a critique of the book by the American academic, Noam
Chomsky. An icon of radical dissent who continues to command a fanatical
following, Chomsky had questioned the legitimacy of refugee testimony that
provided much of Ponchaud's research. Chomsky believed that their stories
were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in
a "vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign" against the Khmer Rouge
government, "including systematic distortion of the truth".

He compared Ponchaud's work unfavourably with another book, Cambodia:
Starvation and Revolution, written by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter,
which cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a
picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll. At the same time Chomsky
excoriated a book entitled Murder of A Gentle Land, by two Reader's Digest
writers, John Barron and Anthony Paul, which was a flawed but nonetheless
accurate documentation of the genocide taking place.

We can never know if Caldwell would have taken Ponchaud more seriously had
Chomsky not been so sceptical, but it's reasonable to surmise that the
Scotsman, who greatly admired Chomsky, was reassured by the American's
contempt. In any case, the 47-year-old Caldwell arrived in Cambodia
untroubled by the story that Ponchaud and others had to tell. In fact, he
had just completed a book himself that would be posthumously published as
Kampuchea: A Rationale for a Rural Policy, in which he wrote that the Khmer
Rouge revolution "opens vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia
but also for the peoples of all other poor third world countries".

With Dudman and Becker, Caldwell was escorted around the country to a series
of staged scenes. Alarmed by the changes she saw and frustrated by what she
was not allowed to see, Becker grew increasingly combative with her hosts.
"It was so clearly awful," says Becker. "One of the problems was the absence
of what I saw. The absence of people. And that's a different kind of proof
to 'I don't see any people being executed.'"

Caldwell was not unduly bothered. "He preferred to stay in the car and laugh
at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us," Becker wrote in her book
on Cambodia,When The War Was Over.

"He'd travelled to other communist countries," she tells me now, "and he
knew exactly what the PR routine was and he thought that all governments do
PR. He did not know Cambodia, and he didn't speak the language. If you don't
speak the language, don't know the country, you can edit out a little more
easily."

At the end of the tour, the party returned to Phnom Penh, which Dudman
described as "a Hiroshima without the destruction, a Pompeii without the
ashes". They stayed at a guest house near the centre of Monivong Boulevard,
one of the empty city's main thoroughfares. Close by was the secret facility
of Tuol Sleng, a former school that had been turned into an interrogation
centre. Known as S-21, Tuol Sleng specialised in gaining confessions through
torture. Between 14,000 and 16,000 prisoners - men, women and, most
hauntingly, children - passed through its gates, including Hu Nim. Only
seven survived. It was run by Duch.

Nowadays Tuol Sleng is a genocide museum, and an established part of the
southeast Asian tourist trail. Although they were intent on erasing history,
Pol Pot and his senior cadres were obsessed with the accomplishments of the
12th-century Hindu dynasty that built the temple complex of Angkor Wat and
constructed elaborate damn and irrigation systems. They considered their own
contribution to Khmer culture to be of a similar, if not greater,
significance. It speaks eloquently of the Khmer Rouge's achievements that,
while Angkor Wat remains the country's main tourist attraction, the next
most popular sights for visitors are Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields at
Choeung Ek, where the prisoners from S-21 were taken to be "smashed" -
usually with an ox-cart axle. A ghost town under the Khmer Rouge, Phnom Penh
is now a bustling, sprawling city, dense with people and commercial
activity. In May 1975, one month after the Khmer Rouge evacuated the
capital, the Swedish author Per Olov Enquist wrote: "The brothel has been
emptied and the clean-up is in progress. Only pimps can regret what is
happening."

If that was blatant wishful thinking, it's an unpalatable truth that the
pimps have returned. A potent mix of Developing World poverty, cheap flights
and sexual licence has made Cambodia a magnet for sex tourists and
paedophiles. The upmarket hotels around the riverside are full of western
and Japanese businessmen, and a certain kind of furtive middle-aged
traveller, stubble-chinned and plump-stomached, is a conspicuous presence in
the bars and clubs frequented by young and under-age prostitutes.

Cambodia has just two seasons: wet and dry. It either rains or it doesn't, a
binary climate that may have helped shape the Khmer Rouge Manichean view of
the world - revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, insider or outsider,
good or bad. It was the dry season when I visited in late November, and a
cooling wind blew through the hot, polluted streets. At first sight, Tuol
Sleng's large courtyard, lined with coconut palms, provides welcome respite
from the noise beyond. A respectful silence is maintained by visitors,
including groups of western backpackers, with their cameras and guidebook
glaze. The three-storey buildings have been left pretty much as they were
abandoned in 1979, slightly dilapidated with jerry-built cells, barbed-wire
fences and medieval instruments of torture. The effect is to transport the
visitor not just back in time, but also into the reptilian depths of the
imagination, a merciless place of zero compassion.

In the courtyard of the prison is a poster listing the rules of the camp.
None of them makes for pleasant reading. For example, number 2 states in an
imperfect translation: "Don't try to hide the facts by making pretexts this
and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me." It vividly articulates
the mentality that shaped S-21, and indeed Kampuchea beyond, the relentless
determination to remove every option from the prisoner - and citizen - to
reduce them to absolute compliance. But perhaps the most disturbing is
number 6: "While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at
all." Denied every human and judicial right, the inmates were also refused
the one prerogative of the tortured: the right to express pain.

I visited the archive on the second floor of the building, where some of the
4,000 files the Vietnamese discovered are housed. Here, I was brought the
"confession" of John Dewhirst, a 26-year-old teacher from Newcastle who was
captured in 1978, while sailing with friends through the Gulf of Thailand.
Intercepted by a Khmer Rouge patrol boat, they were placed in S-21 and
tortured over the course of a month. As the weeks passed, Dewhirst made a
series of ever more bleakly surreal confessions. They start out as
straightforward biography - he explains that he had studied at Loughborough
university. Then he admits to being a CIA agent, recruited at Loughborough
where the CIA, he is made to say, maintains one of its covert training
bases. It "was housed in a building disguised as the Loughborough Town
Council Highways Department Surveyor's Office". He also reveals that his
father is another CIA agent, using the cover of "headmaster of Benton Road
secondary school". Dewhirst was murdered by the Khmer Rouge in 1978.

S-21 was not concerned with the truth. Its only aim was to derive the
fullest possible confession in accordance with party requirements. In his
book Voices From S-21, the historian David Chandler quotes Milan Kundera's
phrase (used to describe the Soviet bloc secret police) of "punishment
seeking the crime" to sum up the prison's project. To this end, the most
depraved techniques - electric shocks, rape, the forced eating of excrement,
medical experimentation, flaying, and lethal blood extraction - were
employed. It's hard to comprehend that these agonies were not just
formalities, they were preliminaries. It wasn't a question, on arriving at
the prison, that an inmate would be lucky to get out alive. He or she would
be lucky to get out just dead. A guidebook for interrogators clarified the
issue: "The enemies can't escape from torture; the only difference is
whether they receive a little or a lot."

The precise level of punishment was decided upon by Duch. If the confession
was not sufficiently elaborate, the punishment was increased. In these
situations Duch impressed upon his staff that "kindness is misplaced". Some
interrogators were more disposed to brutality than others. And some were
simply demented sadists. The most sadistic of them all went by the name of
Toy, a pitch-black irony that his English-speaking victims were in no
position to appreciate. In recent testimony, a prison guard recalled that
one of Dewhirst's party (either the young teacher himself or the New
Zealander or Canadian travelling with him) was burned alive in the street.
The order that they be incinerated came directly from Pol Pot.

Just a few months after that grisly murder, Caldwell prepared himself to
meet the man who commissioned it. The Scotsman knew little or nothing of
Dewhirst's fate. Instead his mind was on agrarian revolution. Caldwell
believed that the world was accelerating towards a global famine and that
the answer was Developing World self-sufficiency. But Cambodia was a strange
place to test his theory. As Professor Ian Brown notes: "This is a part of
the world that historically had not been a food-deficient area, so you
wouldn't go looking for a crisis there. Again, that seems to indicate a more
fundamental flaw in his approach: he comes at it with a theoretical
position. And therefore he'd search for an argument, not necessarily
evidence, that will sustain that."

In Pol Pot, Caldwell found someone with an argument that suited his
purposes. Pol's plan was a massive increase in rice production to finance
Cambodia's reconstruction. It required collectivisation and slave labour,
though Caldwell preferred to see the effort in terms of spontaneous
revolutionary spirit. In the event, owing to the shortage of technicians and
experts (who were killed as class enemies) and lack of peasant support,
production fell well short of targets. But terrified of underperforming,
regional commanders still sent their designated contribution to be exported.
The result was the opposite of self-sufficiency: famine. Unable to accept
the shortcomings in his plans, Pol instead blamed spies and
counter-revolutionaries, and that meant that, in the absence of rice, spies
and counter revolutionaries had to be produced. The network of torture camps
was the only area of Democratic Kampuchea's infrastructure that met its
targets.

Of these dreadful facts, Caldwell remained ignorant on the Friday morning in
Phnom Penh that he was taken in a Mercedes limousine to see Pol Pot. The
setting for the meeting was the former Governor's Palace on the waterfront,
built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception room replete
with fans and billowing white curtains, the two men sat down and discussed
revolutionary economic theory.

Becker had met Pol Pot earlier the same day, and in When the War Was Over
she writes: "He was actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome but
attractive. His features were delicate and alert and his smile nearly
endearing."

The perennially shabby academic and the fastidious dictator must have made
for an odd couple. In any case, Caldwell left the meeting a happy man. He
returned to the guest house he was sharing with Becker and Dudman, full of
praise for Pol Pot and his political outlook. "We went over stuff," says
Becker. "He thought he had had a good conversation. He had avoided at all
costs any discussion of Vietnam. And he was looking forward to going home."

That night they all had dinner together and afterwards Dudman went to his
room. Becker and Caldwell "stayed at the table to have our last argument
about Cambodia". He took the longer view and said that the revolution
deserved support. She, on the contrary, was even more convinced of the
refugees' testimonies. "That night," she writes, "Caldwell tried once more
to get me to change my mind."

Becker went to bed at 11pm and was woken a few hours later by the sound of
what she took to be dustbins. Coming to her senses, she realised there were
no dustbins in Phnom Penh. What she had heard was gunfire. She opened her
bedroom door to see a young man pointing a pistol at her. He was wearing two
bands of ammunition and carrying an automatic rifle over his shoulder. She
begged him not to shoot and locked herself in her bathroom.

Meanwhile Dudman had woken up and, looking out of his window, saw a file of
men running along the street. He knocked on Caldwell's door. The two men
spoke briefly and then a heavily armed man approached. The man shot at the
floor and Dudman ran into his room. Two shots were fired through his door.
The two Americans remained hiding in their rooms for the next hour before an
aide arrived and told Becker to stay where she was. Almost another hour
passed before she was allowed to come out. Caldwell, she was told, had been
shot. He was dead.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) are located in a
large, purpose-built court on the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh. During the
course of last year, hundreds of Cambodians made the trip out from the city
and in from the countryside to bear witness to a long-overdue reckoning.

The lone defendant in the trial is a slim, well-preserved 67-year-old with
small, sensitive eyes. With his thick grey hair and concentrated expression,
he looks like a sprightly grandfather, a little stiff and formal, but
sufficiently attuned to the contemporary world as to be smartly dressed in a
Ralph Lauren shirt or, on another occasion, a cream cashmere roll-neck
sweater. A giant bullet-proof glass screen divides the court from the
auditorium, where 500 or more people sit watching the proceedings. Centre
stage is Duch (pronounced "Doik" in Khmer), seated with his back to the
audience. To his left is a bank of lawyers, and behind them in the corner
the relatives of victims. In front of the defendant sit the judges, on an
imposing two-tier stand. Ten years, some 400 staff, a dozen judges, a
battery of international lawyers, an ongoing legal wrangle, and many
millions of pounds is what it has taken to put Duch on trial.

Following Caldwell's murder, four guards assigned to the tourist's
protection team were arrested and taken to S-21. Owing to the importance of
their alleged crime, the commandant of the prison was instructed to head
their interrogation. So the stories of Caldwell and Duch came together at
the inevitable point of a torture camp. Here, amid bestial squalor, is where
the liberation dream ended.

Two of the "confessions" made by guards referred to in their S-21 files as
"the Contemptible Met" and "the Contemptible Chhaan", outline a baroque
conspiracy involving many other people. The Contemptible Chhaan gives an
explanation for the murder: "First, we were attacking to ruin the Party's
policy, to prevent the Party from gathering friends in the world. And in
attacking the guests on this occasion, we would not attack them all. It
would be enough to attack the English guest, because the English guest had
written in support of our Party and the Kampuchean people for a long period
of time already. Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in attacking this
English guest, in order that the American guests would write about it."

Whether this was yet another example of innocent men implicating other
innocent men, it's impossible to know. Certainly there must have been some
kind of in-house involvement, as the guests were guarded. But who instructed
the guards, and why they did so, remains a subject of speculation. Some
argue that the Vietnamese were behind the killing, others that it was a
function of an internal party struggle.

Caldwell's brother, David, wrote a letter to the Guardian, expressing his
belief that "Mal" had "discovered the truth about the Pol Pot regime" but
"dared not admit this to either Becker or Dudman". This seems unlikely.
David Chandler told me that he once met the translator of the meeting
between Caldwell and Pol Pot, who remembered a very pleasant exchange
conducted in a spirit of enthusiastic agreement. If that anecdote suggests
Caldwell died a dedicated Pol Potist, it tells us little about Pol, a man
for whom the word "inscrutable" might have been invented. As his deputy,
Ieng Sary, later recalled: "Pol Pot, even when he was very angry, you could
never tell. His face. his face was always smooth. He never used bad
language. You could not tell from his face what he was feeling. Many people
misunderstood that - he would smile his unruffled smile, and then they would
be taken away and executed."

But why would he seek international support by killing one of his few
remaining friends from abroad? It makes no sense. "Don't apply rational
thinking to the situation," Becker cautions. "It was crazy. Crazy. Malcolm's
murder was no less rational than the tens of thousands of other murders."
The journalist Wilfred Burchett claimed to have seen a Cambodian report not
long after Caldwell's death, which stated that he "was murdered by members
of the National Security Force personnel on the instructions of the Pol Pot
government". Burchett theorised that Caldwell had changed his mind about the
regime, but all the available evidence indicates otherwise. In the end,
Becker's conclusion seems to be the most satisfactory: "Malcolm Caldwell's
death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired."

The confessions of Caldwell's alleged killers were completed on 5 January
1979. Either that day or the following one, the four men were bayoneted to
death in the prison itself. They were very possibly the last killings to
take place at S-21. On 7 January, the Vietnamese army arrived in Phnom Penh,
and Pol Pot and his associates fled into the jungle.

The contrast between the care taken to observe Duch's legal and human rights
and the indifference with which he dispatched his victims is lost on no one.
But as Philippe Canonne, one of the lawyers representing the relatives of
the victims, said of the urge to inflict on Duch what he had meted out to
his prisoners: "We must give voice to this sentiment, but then have the
strength to transcend it."

It's this sort of resolution that has made the trial a legal landmark in a
nation that has had little experience of the rule of law. That it was ever
staged at all is a major accomplishment. For 20 years after the Vietnamese
invasion, Duch lived at liberty. At first he followed the bulk of the Khmer
Rouge into exile on the border with Thailand. After the fall of the Khmer
Rouge, the US and China refused to accept the Vietnamese puppet government
installed in Phnom Penh. In a shameful version of the principle that my
enemy's enemy is my friend, they instead persuaded the UN to recognise a
coalition resistance movement, of which the Khmer Rouge formed the major
player. Thus Pol Pot was afforded the support of China, the protection of
Thailand, and the indirect recognition of the United States.

For two decades the Khmer Rouge waged guerrilla warfare against the
government in Phnom Penh. Then, in 1997, Pol Pot was placed under house
arrest by his fellow Khmers Rouges. He died peacefully in his sleep on 15
April 1998. A year later the photojournalist Nic Dunlop found Duch working
for a Christian relief agency. An interview was duly published and Duch
handed himself in to the Phnom Penh authorities.

In theory, the trial is a joint effort between the UN and Cambodia, but the
effort has been all the UN's. The Cambodian People's Party, which has ruled
since Pol Pot was overthrown, is led by onetime Khmer Rouge members who,
under threat of purging, had defected to Vietnam. One of these is Hun Sen, a
former revolutionary soldier, who has been prime minister since 1985. His
government was accused by Amnesty International of widespread torture of
political prisoners, using "electric shock, hot irons and near suffocation
with plastic bags". And for many years, senior former members of Pol Pot's
government lived under protection in Cambodia, some with family links to the
government. So there were several reasons why a major trial with
international media coverage was potentially embarrassing or inconvenient.

After much pressure, in November 2007 the Cambodians finally arrested the
four most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders: Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng
Thirith and Khieu Samphan. Their trial is scheduled to start in 2011, though
few observers will be surprised if it is indefinitely delayed. All of them
claim ignorance of any wrong-doing. Perhaps the most galling example is a
long letter of evasion and self-justification that Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's
chief ideologue, wrote to Cambodian newspapers in 2001. "I do not see any
importance in bringing up this tragic past. We would be better off to let
everyone be at peace so that all of us can carry on our daily tasks. I tried
my best for the sake of our nation's survival, so that we might enjoy
development and prosperity like other nations. I am so surprised that this
turned out to be mass murder."

In one form or another, this exculpation has been used over and again by the
supporters of communist revolutions, from the Russian via the Chinese
through to the Cambodian. Each new manifestation commanded the fervent
advocacy of a new generation of radicals. Sooner or later the grim reality
was revealed, which, paradoxically, only raised the hope that the next
version would get it right. As the French philosopher Jean-François Revel
has remarked: "Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce
results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists
in the name of what does not."

Somehow the link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist terror has
never been firmly established in the way, for instance, that we understand
Nazi ideology to have led inexorably to Auschwitz. As if to illustrate the
point, earlier last year the ECCC announced that Helen Jarvis, its chief of
public affairs, was to become head of the victims unit, responsible for
dealing with the survivors, and relatives of the dead, of S-21.

Jarvis is an Australian academic with a longterm interest in the region, who
was recently awarded Cambodian citizenship. She is also a member of the
Leninist Party Faction in Australia. In 2006 she signed a party letter that
included this passage: "We too are Marxists and believe that 'the ends
justify the means'. But for the means to be justifiable, the ends must also
be held to account. In time of revolution and civil war, the most extreme
measures will sometimes become necessary and justified. Against the
bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don't respect their laws and their
fake moral principles."

Jarvis refused to speak to me about these matters. But Knut Rosandhaug, the
UN's deputy administrator for the tribunal, said that the administration
"fully supports" her. In this sense, although she was never a Pol Potist
herself, Jarvis shows that the spirit of Malcolm Caldwell has survived the
last century. It lives on in the conviction that the ends justify the means,
and in the manner that liberal institutions can house the most illiberal
outlooks.

The means, of course, always become the ends. Duch or someone like him is
the method and the madness, the process and the final product. At least the
man himself claims to grasp what continues to elude too many who should by
now know better. In his deposition to the court, he said: "I clearly
understand that any theory or ideology which mentions love for the people in
a class-based concept is definitely driving us into endless tragedy and
misery."

The following day, his lawyer, Kar Savuth, asked that Duch be acquitted and
set free.

Caldwell didn't trouble himself with the means in Cambodia. He was too
focused on an imaginary end, which meant that he never glimpsed the deadly
real one approaching.

"He may have been starry eyed," says John Cox. "But we all do that. Even my
local football team I support long after they've been destroyed match after
match. It's a human failing."

A few days after Caldwell's murder, a testimonial was published in the
Guardian.

"Caldwell," the writer said, "was an irreplaceable teacher and comrade whose
work will undoubtedly suffer the customary fate of being better appreciated
after his death."

As it turned out, history has forgotten Caldwell. But the amiable apologist
for tyranny should be remembered, if only so that we don't forget history.?

KHMER ROUGE IN SCHOOLS: Challenges of teaching a brutal past

Friday, 08 January 2010 15:02 Robbie Corey Boulet

DC-Cam hopes that its history lessons about the Khmer Rouge can promote
reconciliation, but pushes teachers to use new techniques.

Photo by: DC-CAM ARCHIVES AND VIETNAM NEWS AGENCY
Cambodians in Phnom Penh hold signs that read "Hooray, Cambodia has been
completely liberated", and "Hooray, the People's Advisory Council,
Revolutionary Kampuchea", on January 17, 1979.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE REGIME WAS BAD, BUT NOT EVERY INDIVIDUAL WHO JOINED THE REGIME WAS BAD.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Takeo Province
ON a recent Thursday, a classroom full of high school teachers in Takeo
province sat in groups of five sharing survivors' recollections of
20th-century mass atrocities.

In one group, the first teacher to speak delivered a five-minute summary of
the Holocaust structured around the account of a Jew who fled the ghetto in
Horochow, Poland, to forage in the forest. "It's an amazing thing," the
teacher said, reading from the survivor's account. "When one is hungry and
completely demoralised, you become inventive. When I even say it I don't
believe it - I ate worms, I ate bugs, I ate anything that I could put in my
mouth. And, I don't know, sometimes I would get very ill."

Another told the group about the killing of more than 8,000 men and boys
during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, relating the story of a 17-year-old,
identified as Witness O, who survived and later testified in court about his
experience. "The soldiers tied Witness O's hands behind his back with a kind
of very hard string, and then put him in another classroom, where he could
feel clothes under his feet," the teacher said. "When all the men's hands
were tied, the soldiers took them out of the building and put them on a
truck."

A third teacher told the group about the Iraqi government's 1988 campaign
against the Kurds, reading aloud the account of a labourer who was nearly
buried alive in a mass grave. "When I sat down, I was hit on the back of the
head," he read. "I fell down inside the hole. I saw one of the guys inside
the hole, and I lost my consciousness."

And then it was Yeb Dodon's turn. The 55-year-old teacher from Kep was
tasked with providing a brief history of the Khmer Rouge regime. It was this
history that was the focus of the training programme, organised by the
Documentation Centre of Cambodia, in which the teachers had been
participating for the past two weeks.
The training was one of six held in November and December that covered A
History of Democratic Kampuchea, the first government-sanctioned textbook
about the regime. Between now and the end of 2010, the 186 teachers who
participated will, in turn, help to train 3,000 of their peers.

DC-Cam is hopeful that, 31 years after the regime fell from power, the
curriculum can help Cambodia along the difficult road to national
reconciliation, though doubts remain about whether the teachers will be able
to successfully implement the innovative methods it prescribes.

Beginning his presentation, Yeb Dodon said: "Khmer Rouge was the name the
King gave to his communist opponents in the 1960s. April 17, 1975, ended
five years of foreign interventions, bombardment and civil war in Cambodia.
On this date, Phnom Penh fell to the communist forces.

But under Democratic Kampuchea, all the people were deprived of their basic
rights."

He went on from there, eschewing the survivor's narrative he had been given
and instead reciting facts about the leadership structure of the Khmer
Rouge, its 1977 four-year plan and its construction projects. He touched on
Norodom Sihanouk's support of the regime, and how the King was later placed
under house arrest on the Royal Palace compound. But just as he began to
tell of the abolition of religion, Christopher Dearing, who was helping to
run the training for DC-Cam, told the teachers that time was up.

Yeb Dodon closed his book and laughed. "I think there is too much," he said.

Written by DC-Cam researcher Khamboly Dy and published in 2007, A History of
Democratic Kampuchea offers a straightforward and thorough account of the
regime's rise, reign and legacy, though one that skirts several points of
contention, such as whether the 1979 overthrow by the Vietnamese amounted to
liberation or an invasion.
The teacher's guidebook has been more controversial. During the approval
process, members of a Ministry of Education review committee occasionally
clashed with DC-Cam staff members over how the material should be taught,
objecting to some of the more interactive lessons.

The guidebook calls for, among other things, an in-class lecture by a
survivor of the regime, an interview with a former cadre and a role-play in
which students pretend to be both victims and perpetrators of Khmer Rouge
crimes.

Teachers who participated in the Takeo training said they were apprehensive
about the interactive and small-group activities, many of which differ
markedly from the traditional lecture-style teaching methods commonly
employed in Cambodia. Several said, in fact, that they were far more
concerned about the format of the lessons than their content.

"Dividing in groups is new for me, and I have never really done this
before," said Sam Rethy, 55. "Usually I just have my students read and
answer questions, without any activities."

Yeb Dodon said he was grateful for the exposure to new techniques, though he
added that he was worried about the prospect of having to actually use them
on his own. "I think this guidebook and the foreign instructors taught me
how to teach more effectively," he said, "but it is going to be very
difficult to follow these instructions because my teaching style has never
been to divide people in groups and have discussions like this."

Though DC-Cam Director Youk Chhang said he believed the teachers had adapted
to the methods, the organisers of the Takeo training indicated that there
could be obstacles down the road.

"In relation to history teaching, the differences in pedagogy are not great
or insurmountable: the main difference relates to a greater emphasis on
organised student participation and collaboration," Laura Summers, a
Cambodia expert at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom who served
as a training monitor, said via email.

However, she added, "Most classrooms will not have the space that we had in
the training centre, or the easily moveable chairs with writing arms.

Most schools have heavy, wooden desks and no assembly hall or spare teaching
rooms."

Beyond resource limitations, Dearing said, some of the teachers might lack
the confidence to try the new techniques outside the context of the
training.

"The idea is to increase the teachers' competency and confidence in these
methods so they will be comfortable using them in large classes. Many are
ready to do this now," he said. "However, I expect that not all teachers
would readily implement these methods on their own."

Youk Chhang defended the interactive teaching methods, citing as an example
the comparative history exercise, which he said would contextualise the
Khmer Rouge years for students unfamiliar with mass crimes in other
countries.

"I want to show that, yes, these are crimes against humanity, but we're not
the only victims," he said.

The inclusion of a wide range of voices in the lessons, he added, would help
to establish a balanced, authoritative narrative of Democratic Kampuchea.

This would be a welcome change from years past, some teachers said. Because
the Ministry of Education has never before endorsed a textbook specific to
the Khmer Rouge, what little classroom instruction students have received
until now has been informal, often drawing heavily from teachers' personal
experiences - or, in the cases of younger teachers, those of their
families - rather than peer-reviewed academic material.

For example, Eng Bo, a 39-year-old teacher who travelled from Kampot to take
part in the Takeo training, said during a break that, in previous years, he
had often told students of being separated from his parents and of being
ordered, at the age of 5, to retrieve clothes from the dead bodies of cadres
at the cooperative to which he was sent. But he said he had been unable to
relate those experiences to broader crimes committed by the regime because
he himself had known little about the scale of its destruction.

"I was alive during the Pol Pot time, so some of this is not news to me," he
said. "But this week I have been very shocked to learn about all of the
people that Pol Pot killed."

Reaching for reconciliation
Youk Chhang is convinced that the teaching of Khmer Rouge history can
promote national reconciliation - in the acknowledgments of the teacher's
guidebook, he goes so far as to assert that DC-Cam's Genocide Education
Project "has become the truth commission of Cambodia".

But even among teachers participating in the trainings, he said, there
remains a tendency to demonise former cadres, particularly regime leaders.

"The teachers want to see who these people were. They always ask for
photographs," he said. "They want to see their faces. But when they see the
pictures, they're not satisfied because the faces look so human. They don't
see the cruelty. They want to confirm what they already know, and so they
keep asking for more pictures."

He added: "We need teachers to recognise that half of their students are the
children of former Khmer Rouge. The regime was bad, but not every individual
who joined the regime was bad."

Historian David Chandler, who has consulted on the Genocide Education
Project, said this idea was central to attempts at reconciliation. "I think
understanding that human beings are human beings rather than monsters from
outer space is crucial for coming to terms with a phenomenon like the Khmer
Rouge," he said.

To this end, even those most deserving of condemnation are presented in a
nuanced manner. The guidebook, for example, includes a photograph of Pol
Pot, taken in the 1980s near the Thai border, sitting in a chair with his
daughter in his lap, smiling, while five other children gather around him.
"I want to humanise him," Youk Chhang said of the image. "Pol Pot was
obviously a bad leader, but I don't want to create hate."

The curriculum has been designed to strike a balance between laying bare the
atrocities for which the regime is responsible and defusing any tension that
knowledge might spark.

Asked to give an example of how such tension might manifest itself, Youk
Chhang recalled a textbook distribution event at Phnom Penh's Youkunthor
High School involving Norng Chan Phal, a child survivor of Tuol Sleng
prison, and Him Huy, who worked there as a guard.

Though the event was intended to demonstrate the potential for
reconciliation between victims and perpetrators, the question-and-answer
session went in a different direction.

"At first, the whole class was silent," Youk Chhang said. "You could tell
they were preparing questions. But they were undecided on who to ask.

Finally, one of the students got up and asked Him Huy: 'Did you join the
Khmer Rouge because you wanted power?' And then the whole class started
clapping. The whole class! They did not stop! And Huy tried to answer
politely, but the students wouldn't accept the answer.

"And that kind of question can make a teacher uncomfortable," he added.

Though the wounds of the regime are far from healed, those who organised the
Takeo training said they believed that, by the end, the teachers were
capable of presenting the period in a manner that downplayed individual
wrongdoing, thereby limiting the potential for similar incidents.

"The teachers recognised that they were not only teaching the history of
[Democratic Kampuchea] in terms of raising students' historical
understanding of the period, but also their historical empathy with people
who lived during the period," Dearing said.

Summers noted that many of the teachers at the Takeo training were Khmer
Rouge survivors - "so they knew many party, army or co-op cadres as human
beings".

"The teachers were interested in promoting reconciliation through the
teaching of history and in preparing their students for life in the rapidly
changing social and economic circumstances of today," she said.

"One teacher stated during a general discussion that a greater knowledge of
history would not ensure that all students would become good citizens, but
he said 'we must aim for that' and then hope that 'at least some of them
will be better citizens'."