This is a story of accountability, in an exemplary and symbolic sense. In this story, context is everything.
An elderly man has just been sentenced to 30 years prison (which means an effective 19-year further prison term, as he was in prison awaiting trial for many years already). Why is the sentencing of this one man, who was the head of the Khmer Rouge regime's main interrogation centre in Phnom Penh during its years of power, so important?
Comrade Duch was found guilty of all charges against him in the joint Cambodian/United Nations court, set up in Phnom Penh to try Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity. The court's gestation was painfully slow: Duch is the first person to be tried here. Next year, four surviving senior members of the Khmer Rouge political leadership from 1975–79 will go before the court, if they are still alive.
Duch was not a member of the top leadership. He was a middle-ranking Khmer Rouge cadre, a former teacher, tasked to administer the S-21 interrogation centre at Toul Sleng, a suburb of Phnom Penh. Here, tens of thousands of Cambodians were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and executed at a nearby killing field. All were suspected of being enemies of the Khmer Rouge: many had been previously active in political or military roles before the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, or were Khmer Rouge cadres themselves who had fallen under the suspicion of an increasingly paranoid and fanatically nationalist regime.
The regime was toppled in 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion, which replaced it with a Communist state under Vietnamese protection, the State of Cambodia.
Around 1.7 million Cambodians are estimated to have died during the Khmer Rouge regime. Many died of starvation and disease under forced labour conditions, but many others died by mass execution. There were killing fields all over Cambodia, where people were killed on orders from local party cadres. People were clubbed to death or pushed off cliffs, for the most minor breaches or for having bourgeois class backgrounds.
S-21 was different. It became the leading interrogation centre for people suspected of political crimes (and their families). Here, the Democratic People's Republic of Kampuchea (DPRK) set about devouring its own people.
Hun Sen was a young minor DPRK cadre from the suspect eastern region, who saw the writing on the wall. He fled with comrades to Vietnam; he would have probably died in Toul Sleng otherwise.
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