[The following is in regards to the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Comrade Duch, who was the head of the Khmer Rouge’s internal security branch, in which he oversaw the Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp where thousands were held for interrogation and torture. While the trial itself takes place in the early 2000s, I still felt it appropriate, as the trial only covered events taking place between the years 1975-1979. Every testimony is from that time period, and everything depicted by the author, who was present at the trial, are essentially reactions to this gruesome period of history by contemporaries who were present or had participated. In that sense, I feel this fits well for our purposes, and I do not believe it breaks the 20 Year Rule.]
When he tells the story of the exodus of April 1975 [from the capital city of Phnom Penh], during which his two-year-old son died, no detail seems to him too trivial. Chum Mey has repeated his story so many times over the past thirty-five years that he remembers even the smallest detail.
[…]
When he reconstructs the terrible days he spent in the individual interrogation cell [at S-21], Chum Mey stares ahead, his eyes filled with pain. When he describes how thin he was, his voice rises at the end of his sentence to a pitch so high it sounds like a soprano’s voice scale. He describes hearing voices shouting at him: “You sons of bitches, the Angkar will destroy you all! Don’t worry about your families!” His hands were tied, his eyes blindfolded, his ankles in chains.
Chum Mey remembers sitting in a room into which he had been dragged by the ear from his cell. Someone took off the blindfold that had covered his eyes from the cell to the interrogation room. He saw fresh blood on the ground. His interrogators asked him how many people in his network had joined the CIA and the KGB. Chum Mey had no idea what the CIA was. Or the KGB. He had heard those terms before, but he didn’t know what they meant.
[…]
Formerly a tractor mechanic in Phnom Penh, he had been working maintenance in a clothing factory when he was arrested. He tried to show deference to his captors by using reverent forms of address, even calling them the Khmer equivalent of “sir.” He got a hundred lashes for his efforts. He was to address them as “brothers.” Then Comrade Hor, Duch’s deputy, rolled up his sleeves and began beating him with a stick. When Chum Mey tried to protect himself, they broke his fingers. Then they clamped electric wires to his earlobes. The wires ran not to a manual generator, as Duch had claimed, but directly from the wall sockets to Chum Mey’s ears.
”Kyoukyoukyoukyoukyou…” emits Chum Mey, smacking his tongue against his palate in imitation of the electric shocks, before miming how his eyeballs jumped out of their sockets.
[…]
Chum Mey was beaten and insulted for twelve days and twelve nights. A guard sat on his head. His toenails were torn out, a process that took two days.
[…]
”Were the toenails ripped out entirely, or just partially?” he [Presiding Judge Nil Nonn] asks. “Did they grow back?” The survivor is now standing in the middle of the courtroom. Someone asks the cameraman to zoom in on his feet, and in an instant, the courtroom is a circus.
[…]
Finally, Chum Mey confessed. The torture came to an end. Before his imprisonment, he hadn’t known that the CIA and the KGB had even existed. Now he admitted to working for them both. What’s more, the pain brought on by the beatings had become sufficiently unbearable for him to remember the names of his many accomplices. He named sixteen of them. No one could save anyone else, he says. It was every man for himself: “They just told me to think about my network. I didn’t have much time to respond. I don’t know if others had denounced me, if that’s why I was arrested.”
It’s more than likely. Chum Mey’s boss, the director of the factory where he worked, was arrested before him. His deputy followed. Then another employee. Then Chum Mey. They were all dots on one of those “lines” that had to be erased.
Source:
Cruvellier, T., and Alex Gilly. “Chapter 4.” The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. Ecco, 2014. 27-9. Print.
Further Reading:
សារមន្ទីរឧក្រិដ្ឋកម្មប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ទួលស្លែង (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) / Security Prison 21 (S-21)
No comments, yet...