Wooden timbers make a neat pile near the modest home of Kim Hoeurn, 42, who says she was known as “Hong” by the Khmer Rouge when she worked as a medic for the revolution. She used the name around other revolutionaries, but didn’t like it. She refused to call her brother by his Khmer Rouge name.
They called him Duch.
At her home on a recent afternoon, chickens pecked at a low table where moist, black peanuts dried in the sun. A broken Sanyang motorcycle and a new Chinese tractor sat in the front yard. A glass cabinet filled with prescription medicines attested to her job as the village pharmacist, which she began only recently.
“We’ve heard nothing about him since he was arrested,” she said of Duch. “He never replies to the letters that I send.”
She says she learned of his notorious past as the director of the Tuol Sleng torture center, or S-21, just three years ago when he was helicoptered away to Phnom Penh by government agents. She has been waiting for news of his fate ever since.
If a war crimes trial were held in Cambodia today, Duch would feature prominently, as he has vowed to implicate higher ranking leaders in his testimony. Duch and Ta Mok, the one-legged former Khmer Rouge military commander, are the only men imprisoned and awaiting a legal reckoning for the wide spectrum of crimes committed by the ultra-Maoist revolution during the late 1970s.
Government officials say they may hold a trial on their own now that the UN has pulled out of Cambodia’s tribunal negotiations. Sok An, the government’s lead negotiator on the tribunal, said a decision could come in a matter of days, not weeks.
The trial would give a measure of peace to Cambodians who suffered during the Democratic Kampuchea regime. A trial would also give Duch’s family some understanding of his place in Cambodian history, of which they claim ignorance.
In two interviews with The Cambodia Daily, Duch’s sister and one of his four children shared their view of his extraordinary life, from gifted student to Khmer Rouge torture chief, to widower and born-again Christian missionary. They spoke about the tribunal and the charges of treason and murder lodged against Duch.
Two of his children who live in Siem Reap were not contacted. Duch, jailed at the Phnom Penh military prison, just a few blocks from S-21, has not been allowed to speak to the press since his detention.
The interviews shed light on the obscure parts of Duch’s life, including the rarely mentioned 1995 murder of his wife, Sophal.
His surviving family disagree today whether Sophal, who was known to the Khmer Rouge as Rum, was simply the victim of a robbery gone awry or of a more calculated attempt to exact revenge for her husband’s role at Tuol Sleng, where numerous pieces of evidence have pointed to horrific executions.
His wife’s death would likely garner little sympathy among Cambodians today. Duch is held responsible for the deaths of more than 16,000 men, women and children who spent their last days in Tuol Sleng—a high school converted to the headquarters of the security forces. A tourist attraction today, the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes displays photographs of hundreds of people who died there.
Months after his wife’s death, Duch was baptized as a Christian and began wandering the countryside under an alias to preach in the name of Jesus Christ.
He emerged from his secret life three years later when he was found in a refugee camp working as a medical assistant. Government security forces arrested him and flew Duch to Phnom Penh by helicopter on May 9, 1999.
“The accusations say he is a brutal killer, but he is very gentle and he never had any trouble with the family,” said his younger sister, Kim Hoeurn, 42, who lives in a Battambang province village. “The people here, the villagers love him very much. So I don’t believe that accusation is very right.
“If he had done like that, as the accusations say, I don’t think he was willing to do it. He was forced to do it. At that time if he did not do what he was told to do, he would have been killed and maybe the family members, including me, would not be alive today. If he didn’t follow Angkar’s order, I don’t think our family would have survived.”
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Duch, born under the name Kaing Khek Ieu in 1942 in Kompong Thom, drew attention early in life for his academic gifts. He had the second highest score in the 1959 national high school graduation test, according to Far Eastern Economic Review reporter Nate Thayer. He found work as a math teacher in Kompong Thom after graduation.
His political life came alive while teaching and he found himself in trouble for leading a small riot during which a bus was burned. Branded a communist, he was imprisoned for several months without trial. On release, he fled to the maquis and soon after reemerged as a Khmer Rouge security official.
By October of 1975, if not before, Duch had become the director of S-21. Early on, he told prison guards there how to insulate themselves from the cruelties of their jobs, assembling a group of guards in February 1976 to talk about the appropriate way to handle the suspected spies and Vietnamese infiltrators under their guard.
“You must rid yourselves of the view that beating the prisoners is cruel. Kindness is misplaced [in such cases]. You must beat them for national reasons, class reasons and international reasons,” he said, according to records compiled by Khmer Rouge historian David Chandler.
The talks were clearly effective.
