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Khmer Rouge chief to take judges round Killing Fields

— PHOTO: AFP

A stark REMINDER: A tourist takes pictures of skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at the Choeung Ek killing fields memorial, 15 km southwest of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, recently.

The Khmer Rouge’s chief interrogator who headed the notorious prison where 14,000 Cambodian men, women and children met their deaths is to return to the scene of his alleged crime next week.

Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch (65), will guide judges from Cambodia’s U.N.-backed genocide trial through the Tuol Sleng torture centre almost three decades after he fled advancing Vietnamese troops who ended the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign of terror.

Some of the seven people who survived their incarceration in the former school in Phnom Penh’s suburbs will join the party on Wednesday and give evidence at the tribunal’s headquarters. A day earlier Duch, charged with crimes against humanity along with four other senior Khmer Rouge leaders, will be taken to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, where most Tuol Sleng inmates were murdered.

Duch, a former maths teacher before joining the revolution to establish a peasant utopia, will explain to the French co-investigating judge, Marcel Lemonde, and his Cambodian counterpart, You Bun Leng, what happened there after 1975, when up to 1.7 million people died.

The re-enactment is part of the judges’ investigative process to gather evidence against Duch, who has already acknowledged his role in the Killing Fields after embracing Christianity. However, he has always contended he was following Pol Pot’s “verbal orders”. Duch will be accompanied by his lawyers as he walks around the sites. Both serve as a memorial and museum but will be closed to visitors. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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