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Thirty years on, Khmer Rouge torturer faces justice
Sat Feb 14, 2009 11:09pm EST
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By Ek Madra
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Thirty years after the fall of Cambodia's "Killing Fields" regime, 78-year-old Chum Manh will finally see his torturer stand trial.
Nearly every Cambodian family lost loved ones during the 1975-79 period of Khmer Rouge rule that claimed an estimated 1.7 million lives.
Despite committing genocide in one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, none of Pol Pot's surviving henchmen ever faced justice. Until now.
The U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal opens its first trial on Tuesday when 66-year-old Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, faces charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and homicide while he ran the S-21 torture center.
"I want to ask him why he killed his own people, and why did his men torture me?" Chum Manh told Reuters during a visit to the Phnom Penh high school that was turned into the notorious S-21 prison during Pol Pot's regime.
Chum Manh was among only 14 survivors from the jail, where an estimated 16,000 prisoners were tortured before being clubbed to death in the Cheoung Ek "Killing Fields" outside the capital.
"What motivated them to commit such heinous crimes?" Chum Manh asked as he surveyed his old cell in the former prison. Now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the building is largely preserved as it was when the Khmer Rouge jailers were driven out in 1979.
"YEAR ZERO"
When the black-clad Khmer Rouge overran Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the besieged city's residents welcomed them with open arms, hoping it meant the end of Cambodia's civil war, a tragic sideshow to the U.S. anti-communist war in neighboring Vietnam.
Little did they know, the real nightmare was about to begin.
Within hours of occupying the sleepy capital, nestled on the banks of the Mekong and dripping in French colonial grandeur, Pol Pot started 'Year Zero', one of the most violent social experiments in human history.
Towns and cities were emptied as the entire population was forced out into the fields. By some accounts, the population of Phnom Penh went from 2 million to 25,000 in just three days.
Money was banned and the central bank was blown up. Cars were piled up at Phnom Penh airport as a monument against modernity.
Then the killing started.
Those with glasses, those who spoke a foreign language, those with soft hands were all marked out as "educated" or "bourgeois" and thus deemed to be enemies of Pol Pot's peasant revolution. Continued...
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