Khmer Rouge prison chief first of regime to face atrocity charges

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Some 16,000 Cambodians passed through the S-21 torture center on their way to the killings fields. Only a dozen are thought to have survived.

Three decades after the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. And a former school teacher known as Duch, who presided over the chamber of horrors in Phnom Penh, has finally been charged with crimes against humanity.

On Tuesday, Duch, now 62, became the first top Khmer Rouge figure indicted for atrocities that led to an estimated 1.7 million deaths while the group ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

"I want to confront him to ask who gave him the orders to kill the Cambodian people," said 77-year-old Chum Mey, an S-21 survivor.

"I want to hear how he will answer before the court, or if he will just blame everything on the ghosts of Pol Pot and Ta Mok," he said, referring to the movement's notorious leader and his former military chief. Pol Pot died in 1998, and Ta Mok died in 2006.

Cambodia's holocaust was the first major case of genocide of the late 20th century. As many as one-fifth of the country's citizens died.

But until this year, when personnel and facilities for a U.N.-backed genocide tribunal were finally in place, those responsible remained mostly at large, leaving the victims of the killing fields near the capital little hope of justice.

"Today, 31 July 2007, the Co-Investigating Judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia have charged KAING GUEK EAV alias DUCH for crimes against humanity and have placed him in provisional detention," said a tribunal statement issued Tuesday night. It gave no other details, but suggested that more information might be released today.

Duch, whose formal name has been transliterated as Kaing Guek Eav or Kaing Khek Iev, was one of five top Khmer Rouge figures whose indictments were recommended this month by prosecutors of the tribunal, which is a mixed body of Cambodian and international jurists. The judges have not yet released the names of the four others.

The Khmer Rouge was founded in the 1950s by Cambodian communists, including several leading ones educated in France, which had been the country's colonial master until independence in 1953. The group was a growing but marginal force until 1970, when a pro-Western coup ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk from power, and Cambodia was drawn into the maelstrom of the Vietnam War.

Some historians believe that heavy U.S. bombing of the countryside radicalized many peasants, swelling the guerrilla ranks and eventually turning their anger into brutality.

With backing from an embittered Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge won a five-year civil war. The group immediately demonstrated its extremist determination by emptying the capital, Phnom Penh, of its inhabitants within days of its victory on April 17, 1975 and sent the city dwellers to toil on rural communes.

The Khmer Rouge also all but cut off Cambodia from the rest of the world in an effort at forced self-reliance.

In waves of deadly purges, the Khmer Rouge eliminated civil servants and soldiers of the old regime, the merchant class and intellectuals. Others died of hunger, disease and overwork.

But the revolutionaries soon turned on each other, and those taken to Duch's prison were in many cases loyal Khmer Rouge members who became victims of paranoid suspicion.

The schisms weakened the regime, which tumbled in 1979 after an invasion by neighboring Vietnam.

Duch supervised the brutal interrogations of those seen as enemies of the Khmer Rouge. His attention to detail and sense of duty meant S-21 kept meticulous records, which are likely to serve as key evidence in any trial.

According to a transcript of a 1999 government interview obtained by The Associated Press, Duch claimed he was not a "cruel" man, but "an individual with gentle heart caring for justice ... since childhood."

Duch arrived at the tribunal headquarters for questioning at dawn Tuesday in a car driven by Cambodian government security forces, said tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath. He was taken from a military prison, where he has been detained since 1999.

Three senior-level colleagues are living freely in Cambodia, albeit in declining health: Nuon Chea, the movement's chief ideologue; Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state. All three are widely believed to have been recommended for prosecution.

Like many senior Khmer Rouge, Duch had an academic background. A student who excelled in math, he was a teacher and then deputy principal of a provincial college.

He was jailed for his leftist sympathies and opposition to the corrupt climate of mid-1960s Cambodia. By 1970, he had fled into the jungle to join the Khmer Rouge.

Even before the Khmer Rouge came to power, he ran a prison for the group in the jungle, where suspected enemies were held and executed.

After the Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, Duch disappeared for almost two decades. He lived under different names in a former stronghold of the group in northwestern Cambodia, where missionaries converted him to Christianity.

His chance discovery by a Western photojournalist led to his arrest in May 1999.

Duch, like other former Khmer Rouge figures, has said he was simply following orders from the top to save his own life.

"I was under other people's command, and I would have died if I disobeyed it. I did it (duty) without any pleasure, and any fault should be blamed on the (Khmer Rouge leadership), not me," he told a government interrogator after his arrest.