In the year that he spent painting portraits in the S-21 detention center, Bou Meng was given an intimate glimpse of the personality of the prison’s head, the survivor told the Khmer Rouge tribunal on Wednesday.
Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, would regularly visit the artists’ workshop on site and sit beside Mr Meng while he painted.
The prison head did not beat him, Mr Meng said. “However, one day—I did not know what I did wrong—he asked me and Im Chan [a sculptor] to beat each other up.”
The two men were given plastic pipes and ordered to hit each other until Duch eventually told them to stop.
“I was not happy with that. He did not treat me like a human being,” Mr Meng said.
In the many days that Duch visited the workshop, the artist described his demeanor as normal. “If he needed to laugh, he laughed, sometimes he smiled,” he said. “I could see his face, but I could not judge his emotion or his feeling.”
The painter recalled that Duch would often sit in a chair beside him while he painted, and sometimes offered criticism.
“Duch sat next to me watching me painting the portrait of Brother Number One Pol Pot,” Mr Meng said. “He ordered me: ‘You should adjust the throat. It’s not a tumor; it’s just fat.’”
Besides four huge and remarkably life-like portraits of Pol Pot, Mr Meng said that he also painted a cartoon dog with the head of former North Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Duch has said that prisoners were made to bow down before that painting as an act of humiliation.
Before he was taken out of regular detention to paint portraits, Mr Meng said that he was beaten and received electric shocks during intensive interrogation that lasted several weeks.
“I was severely tortured,” he said. “The blood was on the floor, flowing from my back…. Even if my back had wounds, they beat on that wound.”
Eventually, he said, his interrogators became frustrated that he would not confess to being a member of the CIA.
“They wrote a false confession and ordered me to sign it…. I cannot remember the content of the confession.”
Mr Meng and his wife were taken to S-21 together sometime in 1977. After being photographed upon entrance, they were separated, and never saw each other again.
Mr Meng said he still keeps the photograph taken of his wife on that day. “That is the only photograph of my wife that I have with me until today.”
Like fellow survivor Chum Mey on Tuesday, Mr Meng was allowed to ask a question directly to Duch on Wednesday.
“I would like to ask him, where did he smash my wife, whether it was at Choeung Ek or another location,” Mr Meng said. “Just tell me where she was killed, then I would go to that location just to get the soil from that location to pray for her soul.”
Duch replied that he did not know. “I would like to presume that your wife was killed at Boeng Choeung Ek,” he said.
