A devoted math teacher before he turned revolutionary, Duch, the man who oversaw the Khmer Rouge’s security apparatus, begins his trial at Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes court tomorrow.
“I have done very bad things in my life,” he confessed to journalists who tracked him down in 1999. “Now it is time for [the consequences] of my actions.”
The 66-year-old Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, allegedly oversaw the torture and extermination of more than 12,000 men, women and children at the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison during the regime’s 1975 to 1979 rule.
PHOTO: EPA
Duch was formally arrested by Cambodia’s genocide tribunal in July 2007, becoming the first top Khmer Rouge cadre to be detained, and is charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and premeditated murder.
He is said to have been feared by nearly everyone who worked under him at the prison in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.
Most who worked there were uneducated teenage boys, who he said could be easily indoctrinated because they were “like a blank piece of paper.”
He has recognized the crimes committed under his command of the regime’s killing machine, where prisoners were tortured into denouncing themselves and others as agents of the CIA, KGB and Vietnamese Communist Party.
Duch was first arrested in 1999 after photojournalist Nic Dunlop uncovered him earlier that year working for a Christian relief agency in western Cambodia.
Before that, he was long thought dead following his disappearance after Vietnam’s ouster of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.
Instead, Duch had converted to Christianity and worked for relief organizations along the Cambodian-Thai border.
“I wanted to be a good communist; I did not take any pleasure in my work,” he told Dunlop. “All the confessions of the prisoners. I worried, ‘Is that true or not?’”
Duch later told tribunal investigators he believed the inner circle of Khmer Rouge leaders did not believe the confessions either, but used them as “excuses to eliminate those who represented obstacles.”
Born in 1942 in central Cambodia, Duch was a top student and is remembered as a sincere teacher devoted to helping the poor before he fled to the Khmer Rouge in 1970 as a reaction to injustice in then-volatile Cambodia.
That decision to join the communist guerrilla movement was influenced by one of his high school instructors who would later be executed at Tuol Sleng.
“I joined the Khmer Rouge in order to liberate my people and not commit crimes,” Duch told tribunal investigators. “I became both an actor in criminal acts and also a hostage of the regime.”
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