[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.]
One year later, her husband was purged at S-21 and she was sent to S-24 for “reeducation.” After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, she returned to her village, where her mother told her that it was because of her, the revolutionary, that her father was dead. She fell to her knees before an aunt and begged her forgiveness, but the aunt refused to give it.
[…]
She immediately apologizes [to the court]: “Sometimes I feel as if I am mentally unstable.”
[…]
She describes how the entire population of Phnom Penh [the capital of Cambodia] was evacuated in the hours after the arrival of the Khmer Rouge. She remembers each moment. She can still mimic the way black-clad soldiers with megaphones in hand insinuated that all educated people were to be eliminated. “They said that they would keep only the base people.”
Her husband was deputy director of civil aviation at Phnom Penh airport. He was arrested. She was sent to be “reeducated” by working on the dykes and dams. During the rainy season, her black-clad supervisor told her that if she passed this test, she would survive. If not, she would die. She closes her eyes to help jog her memory before diving back into the details of her tragic odyssey.
[…]
After the fall of the regime, she returned to Phnom Penh and found work at the hospital. One day, her boss summoned her and told her to visit the museum at S-21. She knew very well the Pnhea Yat High School, where the Khmer Rouge had set up its detention center. Friends of her parents used to live close by. She reached the prison and was met by one of the survivors, she says. It’s at this point that, in court, the pitch of her voice rises and cracks. Her speech becomes a series of short, strident cries, and she addressed the court in that striking timbre that the Khmer language reserves for anger, grief, and incomprehension.
As S-21, she was shown documents, including a photograph. It was the last one taken of her husband, Thich Hour Tuk, alias Tuk. The documents contained the date he was brought to S-21: February 2, 1976, and the date he was executed: May 25, 1976.
In the photograph, the prisoner’s piercing gaze appears to defy the photographer.
[…]
The widow lowers her voice to give the court an impression of a conversation she had with a cousin, and another she had with a niece. Sometimes she seems disoriented and confused, as though suffering from the mental malady she mentioned at the beginning of her deposition. Then she reminds herself that the regime accused her husband of a “great crime.” And then her angry voice returns and cracks through the courtroom like a whip and she asks the same question over and over again: “Why? Why? Why?”
She says that men fall into one of two categories: those that resemble humans and have gentle hearts; and those that resemble humans and have animal hearts. An extremely devout woman, she prays for Duch’s reincarnation and that “all of these beings cease to be cruel like Pol Pot’s people.” Then that question again: Why?
”Why should people who have done no wrong be locked up and mistreated? I don’t understand.”
Her story returns ceaselessly to the inexplicable, a circle without end: they came for him, he disappeared, he’s dead. It is enough to drive you mad.
[…]
It turns out that it was the witness’s older sister who denounced her husband to the black-uniformed guards. She considered her older sister like a mother.
We felt betrayed. She had been indoctrinated. That’s why she said the things she did. Once, after all that happened, after all the suffering, I asked her what exactly Communism was. Now I know what it is: it’s jealousy, it’s competition and mass murder, it’s sending people to S-21; it’s betrayal; it’s the denunciation of kith and kin; it’s your loved ones getting arrested and executed. When I remember Buddhist teachings, I feel calmer, I understand that she did what she did because of the way the Communists brainwashed her. She denounced my husband.
[…]
The judges have fallen quiet. Her lawyer has cast her adrift on the river of her memory, aboard her raft of grief. Her lawyer doesn’t ask a single question; not one person in the courtroom interrupts her frenzied torrent of words, her heartbreak, her pain and madness, and that question - Why? - that keeps coming back again and again, the woman banging her head against it until it bleeds. “I was loyal to my country. I was loyal to my husband. Why have I been punished like this?”
Source:
Cruvellier, T., and Alex Gilly. “Chapter 17.” The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. Ecco, 2014. 124-26. Print.
Further Reading:
សារមន្ទីរឧក្រិដ្ឋកម្មប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ទួលស្លែង (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) / Security Prison 21 (S-21)
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