January 4, 2007
The Guardians of Hell
By Jürgen Kremb
Pol Pot and his minions committed mass murder against their own people. Now,
an international tribunal is to judge the regime—what some people call
the first legal reckoning with communism. Can justice be served, 30 years
on?
Memories plague farmer Nhem Sal, 50, even in his sleep. He feels the pain in
his ankles and wrists, as if his teenaged Khmer Rouge warden were still
tying him to the bare metal bed on the third floor of Block A, in the
infamous torture prison Tuol Sleng.
Justice in
The camp was called "S-21"—and it was the center of terror in Pol
Pot's
regime. More than 30 years have passed since then.
Nhem Sal feeds his family with rice he grows himself. He is about 1.70
meters tall, has a thinning lock of hair over his forehead, and his hands
are covered with calluses. His straw hut is in the
60 kilometers south of the Cambodian capital,
A year ago, authorities came to his yard and told Nhem Sal he'd been chosen
to serve as a witness for the international human rights tribunal,
officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
(ECCC). Finally, in early 2007, after years of difficult talks between the
government of Hun Sen and the United Nations, the last survivors from the
so-called "Democratic Kampuchea," the regime of the communist mass
murderer
Pol Pot, will stand before an international court in
quarter century, state prosecutors have been sifting through trial
documents, and now they want to take depositions from the first witnesses.
The crimes committed were monstrous. Almost half of
7 million died in Pol Pot's barbaric attempt to turn his country into the
ultimate communist society, says Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Foreign experts consider 1.7 million to be a more probable figure for the
number killed. Nhem Sal's visitors said only seven of the approximately
20,000 inmates of S-21 survived the torture camp. Five are still living, and
Nehm Sal is one of them.
Nationalist fervor
In the spring of 1970, all the farmers in his village stood around the only
radio and listened to the voice of Prince Sihanouk, speaking to them from
distant
him, said Sihanouk, and he urged the youth to liberate their homeland.
dropped 500,000 tons of explosives on the country in the late 1960s, to
destroy lines of communication with the Vietnamese communists that ran
through
II.
After Nhem Sal and his friends heard the prince on the radio, they took off
for the jungle and joined the Khmer Rouge. Five years later, they had won,
taken over the capital and driven the population into the countryside, where
they were to live out "true" communism. It was the start of a
ruthless
campaign of genocide against
Five months later, child soldiers—not unlike Nhem Sal and his comrades
themselves—arrived at their camp and accused them of being "spies for US
imperialists." After a brief interrogation, they shot Nhem Sal's
supervisor.
He ended up as "fertilizer for the rice fields," as his executioners
cynically put it.
Nhem Sal was thrown on a truck and taken to Tuol Sleng prison. During the
days he was tortured. He spent the nights chained to his cot. Unlike most of
the others in the camp, he was suddenly released after a year to combat
again with the Khmer Rouge in border fighting against
finally came to an end in December 1978. Vietnamese soldiers—headed by
the Cambodian Hun Sen, a renegade from the Khmer Rouge—liberated the
country from the orgy of bloodletting that Pol Pot had set in motion.
Years of Suffering
1863: Establishment of a French protectorate
1953:
until 1970: Sihanouk tries to keep
March 18, 1970: Military putsch by General Lon Nol
April 1975: The Khmer Rouge sack
costs at least 1.7 million lives.
Dec. 1978 / Jan 1979:
since 1979: Armed resistance by a triumvirate of groups against the Vietnam-
established government
1985: Hun Sen becomes Premier
1991: Peace treaty signed
1993: Free elections
1998: Pol Pot dies
Now, 28 years later, Nhem Sal has returned for the first time to Tuol Sleng
as he prepares to take the stand as a witness before the tribunal.
White letters announce over the entrance: "
floor are long rows of boards affixed with photos. All prisoners had been
photographed by Pol Pot's guards upon their arrival at this tropical gulag,
and their personal data noted.
Nhem Sal spends some time examining the walls of photos, searching in vain
for his own image. Suddenly his memories overwhelm him and he runs outside.
Why did the Khmer Rouge exhibit such barbarity? Who gave the order to commit
mass murder of their own people? French scholar Philippe Peycam has tried to
answer such questions. "Indirectly, the catastrophe began with us, the
French," says the director of the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap,
which is located near the world-famous site of the temple Angkor Wat, which
also had housed the Khmer Rouge.
"Without Pol Pot, we would have been an American province"
Copyright 2007
Spiegel Online