By Miranda Leitsinger, CNN
July 26, 2010 12:34 a.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: Kaing Guek Eave, alias Duch, found guilty, gets 35 years in prison
• NEW: Verdict is historic first for U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal
• Duch pleaded guilty but said he was following orders
• Duch was member of the Khmer Rouge regime who ran S-21 torture prison

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN) — A man who ran a notorious torture prison where more than 14,000 people died during the Khmer Rouge regime was found guilty of war crimes Monday and sentenced to 35 years in prison — with five years taken off that sentence for time served.

The verdict against Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, also convicted him of crimes against humanity, murder and torture. It was a historic first for a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal.

Duch, 67, was the head of the S-21 prison, where at least 14,000 people died.

“It’s clear that he will never be a free man again,” said Youk Chhang, director of Documentation Center of Cambodia.

Prosecutors had asked for a 45-year sentence with five years’ credit for time served.

Duch pleaded guilty but said he was only following orders and asked for forgiveness.

In the last week of the trial, he argued that international law did not apply to him because he was following orders.

Few people brought to the prison made it out alive; only about a dozen were found by the Vietnamese who invaded Cambodia in 1979.

Duch has acknowledged his role overseeing the prison but has sought release after 10 years in detention, angering survivors.

Outside the court on Monday, hundreds of Cambodians, including the Muslim minority known as Cham, watched previous court sessions on large television screens.

Timeline: Rise of Khmer Rouge and its aftermath

“We want to hear directly from the court what the verdict will be,” said Tin Mosa, who along with 40 others from the Cham group, got up early Monday to come to the court.

“I can assume that the international court is good enough to bring justice for the Cambodian people, especially for me,” he said. “I want to see Duch die in jail.”

More than 10 million Cambodians were expected to watch the live broadcast of the verdict being televised across the country, said Reach Sambath, the spokesman for the court.

“Today is a historic important day for the people of Cambodia,” Sambath said.

At least 1.7 million people — nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population — died under the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime from execution, disease, starvation and overwork, according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

Another four of the ultra-Maoist regime’s former leaders are waiting to see if they will stand trial before a U.N.-backed tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The tribunal began its work in 2007 after a decade of on-and-off negotiations between the United Nations and Cambodia over the structure and the functioning of the court.

Chhang, director of the documentation center, said his organization was holding verdict watch gatherings in seven provinces so that rural Cambodians could observe.

Chhang said the verdict may not suit everyone, but he thinks Cambodians will be able to turn over a new leaf once the verdict is announced.

“This is what we have, and then we must move [on]. We have our own identity now, our own family, our own society now. We have to build it, make it strong, to prevent [the past] from happening” again,” he said.

On Sunday, parents, siblings, friends and loved ones gathered before monks in a courtyard of the prison site — now a museum — to participate in a ceremony to honor the dead. Among them were survivors of S-21, such as Bou Meng, who wept at times during the memorial.

“I have been waiting for justice for 30 years,” he said. “If the verdict does not please me, I will be disappointed forever.”

Eng Chanthy, 47, lost her father, six brothers and grandfather to the Khmer Rouge due to starvation.

“I believe that justice will be brought by the tribunal court,” Chanthy said.”I heard Duch was apologizing to the Cambodian people and asking the people to pardon to him, and I don’t agree with him asking for freedom.”

“I feel that Duch should die in prison. I don’t want to see him live in freedom,” she said.

By Miranda Leitsinger, CNN
July 25, 2010 5:19 p.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Documentary explores the atrocities committed under the Khmer Rouge
• Filmmaker tracks down former fighters to find out why they participated
• Teth lost his family in the mass killings
• Film is honored at the Sundance film festival

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN) — “I come back here to where I killed people. And I feel terrible. My mind, my soul, my body is spinning inside. All the things I did are flashing through my mind.”

The speaker is a man named Suon. Sitting alongside a field, the former Khmer Rouge militia commander explains in the documentary “Enemies of the People” how he slit people’s throats and talks about drinking gall bladder bile.

The film had its premiere in Asia just ahead of the first verdict to be handed down by the Cambodian genocide tribunal on Monday. It has already won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival

At least 1.7 million people — nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population — died under the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge from execution, disease, starvation and overwork, according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

Four of the ultra-Maoist regime’s former leaders are waiting to see if they will stand trial before a U.N.-backed tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Timeline: Rise of Khmer Rouge and its aftermath

Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, the head of the infamous torture prison in the country’s capital of Phnom Penh, has stood trial on charges including crimes against humanity. The verdict will be announced in his case on Monday, more than 30 years after the fall of the regime.

In the film, directed and produced by Cambodian Teth Sambath and Briton Rob Lemkin, Teth tracks down about 100 former Khmer Rouge fighters who were responsible for the killing to learn why they participated.

“We don’t have the answers from the Khmer Rouge leaders and from other Khmer Rouge cadre about why there [was] starvation, why they [were] killing the people,” he said. “I am very worried that if we [cannot] find out the real history, the Khmer Rouge history would be hidden … the new generation they would not understand.”

Powerful moments in the film, which opens Friday in the United States, include a woman who said she cried in secret so the Khmer Rouge would not kill her. There is also Soun’s description of killing a pretty woman he had asked to stay with him but was ordered to get rid of.

“When they talk [about] how they kill[ed] people, it made me feel very frightened, but I kept it in my heart,” said Teth, 42, who lost his brother, mother and father to the Khmer Rouge.

“I wanted to get the truth, so I had to ask — even if there are bad things, because it’s for history. We had to ask everything, even bad or good. We need to get everything out.”

Teth’s odyssey began in 1996. His family’s earnings went to his search for the fighters, leading him crisscrossing the southeast Asian nation looking for scarred men and women. But he never told his family or close friends about his mission since he did not want to bring up the hard and sad memories of the past.

A journalist for the English-language Phnom Penh Post, Teth eventually met Nuon Chea, the second-in-command under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, who is now waiting for the genocide tribunal to decide if he will stand trial for crimes against humanity.

He befriended Nuon Chea. At first, Teth did not tell him how his family died because he wanted to get to the truth.

But after years of visits, Nuon Chea told Teth about the orders to kill — especially those expelled from the party and labeled criminals.

“They were killed and destroyed. If we had let them live, the party line would have been hijacked. They were enemies of the people,” Nuon Chea told him.

Teth said he Nuon Chea are friends, but “it doesn’t mean I support him.”

“There is a difference between friendship and the law,” he said. “If the law judges him and sends him to jail, okay, yes.”

Teth has rejected a request from the genocide court reviewing Nuon Chea’s case for a copy of the film.

“I told all these people [the killers], I do not work for the court. I do not work for anyone but all the people … to know about the real history. If I give this kind of stuff to the court, it means that I betray Nuon Chea and I betray the killers,” he said.

In the film Teth brings Nuon Chea together with Suon and another former fighter Khoun.

The two men listen to Nuon Chea, who counsels them that since they had no intention to kill and were following orders, they had committed no sin — and under Buddhism, need not fear punishment.

“You can start life again,” he tells them.

But Suon, in the next scene, is unconvinced.

“How many holes in hell must I go through before I can be reborn as a human being again? I feel desperate, but I don’t know what to do. I will never again see sunlight as a human being in this world,” he says.

Teth and Lemkin said they have had positive feedback to the film, with Cambodians telling them they had never seen such confessions.

“This film can tell the people the truth, can tell the victims the truth. It can tell the new generation how to avoid — not to repeat — the mistakes from the past,” Teth said. “One more thing, it can encourage other Khmer Rouge perpetrators to come out, to confess and to join together to make a real story [of their experience].”

Teth noted that the killers had felt better after confessing what they had done, and Lemkin noted that the process had in turn helped his co-director and producer.

“Another aspect of what this film is really about is that he is trying to lay to rest the ghosts of his dead family in the hope that perhaps he and his new young family, living family, can find a way to go forward,” he said.

“He wanted to find that there was some kind of rationality, and I think in discovering the humanity of the killers … he discovers something that is very much healing and a kind of cathartic resolution to this very, very terrible loss that he had to live through.”

cambodian apsara dancer

cambodian apsara dancers

thedame:

Floating house on Tonle Sap, Cambodia

Soursdey Chnam Tmey! Happy Cambodian New Year!

(via measart)

squashed:

I’ve got to confess, I’m not a huge fan of the American Apologies blog. Implicit in an “apology” to the world for this or that wretched celebrity or politician is the assumption that the world is and should be hyper-focused on what we’re doing. And, if a particular movement is popular in other parts of the world, it strikes me as particularly patronizing to say, “We’re sorry we made that thing you like.” And apologizing for something the rest of the world has neither heard of nor cared about is a little silly. It’s American Exceptionalism thinly disguised by American Exceptionalism. “I’m an American cosmopolitan American that doesn’t care how American I am and is ashamed of my American Americanness. Did I mention my massive Americanity?”

But that’s not really the point. It’s a joke. It gets a laugh. I won’t criticize it further.

But, for reasons unknown, I decided to throw in something I thought was worth apologizing for amongst “infomercials,” “Rick Santorum,” and “Charlie Sheen.” Here was my submission:

#80 The Bombs We Left in Laos

Remember that time we went to Vietnam? Remember how we took a few side trips through Laos, dropping cluster bombs? Remember the twenty million tons of bombs we dropped? We sure didn’t. When we left, we left our unexploded munitions behind.

Since the end of the war, over 20,000 Lao citizens have been killed or injured by our bombs. Most are children. Some are living in such poverty that they’re actively searching out bombs to sell as scrap metal. It doesn’t end well. Fortunately, we’re a wealthy country now and could clean up our mess.  Unfortunately, we don’t care enough to bother.

this also includes parts of cambodia, which is also tryin’ to de-mine some of the landmine fields.

maddox…one lucky cambodian kid.

yessiewessie:

whtsuphoe:

haha comel dohh anak dia puun :DD