FEATURE: Cambodia's painful history

The ABC's Zoe Daniel reports from Phnom Penh on the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison chief, Comrade Duch.

Zoe Daniel, South-East Asia correspondent

Last Updated: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:34:00 +1000

Looking at Kaing Guek Eav now, it's hard to imagine him being responsible for the crimes that he's been convicted of.

A small, frail, elderly man, Comrade Duch sat unflinching through hours of testimony detailing atrocities committed on his orders. Recently he was convicted of crimes against humanity and stood silently to be sentenced to 35 years in jail.

In his eyes there may have been a tear, but it could also just have been the milky myopia of age.

Now in his late 60s, the former Khmer Rouge prison chief has nineteen years left to serve. The court shaved five years off his sentence because he was imprisoned illegally when he was first arrested by Cambodian authorities. He's already spent eleven years in jail.

That means if he lives long enough, he'll be released in his late 80s.

This was a big shock to prison survivors and families of those killed at S-21 which was the regime's most notorious torture centre. About 15,000 people were interrogated, tortured and exterminated under Duch's leadership and their families expected him to pay with life in prison.

One great benefit of the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia has been the great release that it's given people to talk about what happened, but the nature of sentencing obviously wasn't clearly explained.

The prosecution had asked for forty years, and ordinary Cambodians thought that would mean he would never leave prison.

Outside the court there was a sense of sheer disbelief that the man who has admitted responsibility for ordering unimaginable torture may walk free within his lifetime.

Witnessing the case and the verdict has brought with it a sense of history. To see such a fraught process finally brought to conclusion more than thirty years after the event was a privilege. But to see victims and the families of those killed weeping over the sentence outside the court made it disappointing too.

Over the last year and a half, I've spoken with many Cambodians about their Khmer Rouge experience.

Inevitably, those who were there worked in the fields and came close to starving to death. Some walked for days and nights dodging mines and bombs to save their children by escaping into neighbouring countries. Others were arrested, beaten, tortured and defeated - saved only by some small twist of fate that prevented them from being murdered by their jailers. They often lost their closest family members and that's a pain that never leaves.

To see these people rendered powerless again by a court designed to give them peace was painful in itself.

But perhaps no verdict would have been enough for people who have experienced such unimaginable horror. Some even called for the death penalty, which was ruled out by the hybrid international court.

Duch now plans to appeal.

But no matter how it all ends there is increased understanding about what happened within the community. Young people who make up the majority of the country's population now at least have a sense of their history, and they're determined not to let it happen again.

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