CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 4:11 pm

Kerry Hamill was executed after the yacht he and friends were sailing strayed into Cambodian waters in August 1978.
TV3/SUPPLIED

Kerry’s final “confession” – something all prisoners were forced to write – was dated October 18, Hamill said. It is believed Kerry was executed at least two months after being captured.

Photo's below;
Foxy Lady in Darwin harbour in late 1977
Kerry Hamill (on right)
Stuart Glass (standing) Canadian. Co-owner of Foxy Lady - shot and killed off Koh Tang when the boat was apprehended.

There was also a British guy, John Dewhurst who was on the boat. (no photo) He went to Toul Sleng and suffered the same torture and murder as Kerry.
The exact circumstances of their eventual death are not known but it was almost certainly at Toul Sleng (ie, not taken to Choeunh Ek killing fields). There are indications, probably reliable, of their bodies being burnt with petrol and tyres but as far as i am aware, it has not been definitely ascertained whether they were alive or already dead when burnt.

They received the same torture and conditions as everybody else.
As John Bingham points out on another thread - the long detailed confessions they wrote about lifetimes of working for the CIA was pure evil loony tunes stuff.

RIP - Kerry, John and Stuart - Freedom Riders, adventurers and very very fine men.

'How I caught feared executioner responsible for 14,000 deaths - and he wasn't a monster'
EXCLUSIVE: Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, oversaw the notorious S-21 prison in Cambodia where prisoners were tortured and killed. After Duch's death photographer Nic Dunlop, who exposed his new identity, said it is wrong to see him as a monster
ByDave Burke
14:17, 4 SEP 2020Updated14:34, 4 SEP 2020

As bloodthirsty dictator Pol Pot's trusted executioner, Kaing Guek Eav was responsible for the deaths of at least 14,000 people.

The Cambodian commander oversaw the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, where defenceless victims were tortured by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.

After being made to give "confessions", prisoners were executed in the notorious Killing Fields outside capital Phnom Phen.

Their children were also murdered to prevent them seeking revenge, the executioner, known as Comrade Duch, later admitted.

But when the brutal government fell in 1979, Duch was able to escape the city.

For 20 years he evaded justice, masquerading as a teacher, aid worker and born-again Christian - until he was exposed by photographer Nic Dunlop.

Thanks to Dunlop, Duch, who died in prison on Wednesday at the age of 77, became the first senior Khmer Rouge figure to be punished for his crimes.

Reflecting on the killer's death, the photographer and writer told Mirror Online that in spite of the horrifying atrocities he committed, Duch should not be viewed as a "monster".

The truth, he said, is far more terrifying.

"I think to portray him as a monster is understandable and simple, and it makes it easier to see ourselves as being apart from Duch," he said.

"But it's lazy. It's not monsters who commit these crimes, it's people like us.

"It's a terrifying thought for us, but they didn't think they were doing anything wrong."

After quitting art college in London, Dunlop became fixated with finding Duch seven years before he finally located him in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in eastern Cambodia.

Tuol Sleng prison - now a museum displaying photos of those killed there - was one of the first places he visited on his arrival.

He carried a picture of Duch with him everywhere he went in the hope someone could point him to the killer.

"I wanted to understand why the perpetrators acted as they did, and I remember thinking that if he was still alive, Duch was the man I'd want to talk to," he recounted.

Having shown the photo to hundreds of people, he was caught off guard when an aid worker who identified himself as Hang Pin introduced himself in a former Khmer Rouge area in 1999.

Dunlop immediately knew he was the man he'd been looking for - but didn't confront him straight away.

"It was completely unexpected, it caught me off guard," he said.

"He came across as an ordinary teacher. He didn't have blood all over his hands or anything like that, overall he was very unremarkable."
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/h ... e-22624839

^^^
Nic Dunlop at day 1 of Duch trial.
In that bag over his shoulder is his beautiful old Hasselblad camera, his tool, which is possibly older than him.
Nic's finding of Duch is a classic example of how the most extraordinary discoveries can be found in this country if you just relentlessly keep looking around. Often thee most extraordinary of these are found by just coaming coaming coaming the mundane. (keep that in mind, it's true for anybody).
I have a slightly different reading of Duch's character to some of Nic's analysis, which is normal.
But full agree with what he says in the report above ^^^. ESPecially what he says about "it is not evil them - it is any one of us". (to paraphrase)

Long read:
Duch, the last silence of the torturer
Sep 04 2020 by Antoine Audouard, for JusticeInfo.net

In the aftermath of the death of Douch, a former Khmer Rouge torturer convicted of crimes against humanity, French writer Antoine Audouard examines crime and punishment, the often insoluble questions posed by the journey of a murderous but "conscious and enthusiastic" revolutionary, and the meaning or impasse of his trial.

5 min 53Approximate reading time

To some people it is a soothing thought to believe that torturers (wherever they may come from) are “different” from the rest of us - an otherworldly ilk of barbarians or sick individuals driven by the pathological pleasure of inflicting pain on their victims. What they did, we’d never do, so we like to think.

It might be disturbing to remind those “belles âmes” (as we say in French) of a few biographical details of Kaing Kek leu, aka Duch, the former executioner in chief of the Tuol Seng central Khmer Rouge detention and torture center, who just passed away in Phnom Penh at the age of seventy-seven. Duch, the son of Khmer peasants, was endowed with outstanding qualities: he had an intense desire to learn, he was self-disciplined and had the passionate energy of a hard worker. Unlike several future prominent leaders of the revolution, he didn’t make it to the prestigious Paris universities, but he did manage to study at lycée Sisowath, the best French school in Cambodia. A school teacher, he taught mathematics and was also an avid reader of French literature; more than sixty years after his French baccalaureate, observers were fascinated, during his trial, to hear him quote – with feeling and accurately – from romantic 19th century poet Alfred de Vigny. Young Duch was an idealist who was not satisfied with the improvement of his own condition: he was deeply pained by the miserable living conditions of most Khmer peasants and burned with the fire to join the fight to change it for the better. Like most leaders of the revolutionary movement, he detested corruption, was altruistic and devoted to a cause he wished to serve with all his might.

Before he took on the responsibility of S21, he had nurtured his organizational skills as the head of M13, the jungle camp where young French anthropologist François Bizot was detained. He was convinced in his heart of hearts that every detainee – Bizot included – was an enemy of the revolution, a CIA spy, a threat to the ongoing wave of change. The young Kampuchean revolution was under attack from all sides: it was only fitting, he then believed, to execute the accused without wasting time on technicalities like “due process” : in order to cleanse the new society, these dangerous individuals should be eliminated mercilessly; in the process every means was justified to have them confess their crimes. Following his logic to the end, Duch became personally engaged in commissioning innumerable acts of torture and executions.

Although Duch claimed without any precision or evidence that he spared a few other M 13 prisoners, Bizot stands as the only individual ever to fall into his hands and survive. Reminiscing about the young man he’d known in the jungle, Bizot portrayed not a monster but a human being; some among the families of Duch’s victims were offended and hurt. How dare he, they contended, exonerate this mass murderer from his crimes? Bizot himself, summoned as an opening witness during Duch’s trial in 2007, made it very clear that in his opinion, the only “just sentence” for Duch would have been one apportioned to his victims suffering. When his judges sentenced the torturer to life rather than death, they unwillingly attained that goal: throughout the last ten years, abandoned by his own family, an object of universal hatred, Duch had an eternity of empty days and interminable nights to reflect upon the extent of the horrors he participated in with zeal, his respect for hierarchy and his pride of a job well done.
Full article: https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/justicei ... turer.html

Another article on Duch from the justiceinfo website:

Duch, a symbol to the bitter end
Sep 03 2020 by Thierry Cruvellier, JusticeInfo.net
Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his revolutionary nickname Duch, died in Phnom Penh on September 2. The former director of the infamous prison S-21 under Pol Pot's regime had become the unwilling symbol of the mass crime committed by the Khmer Rouge. His death comes at a time when the meagre effort to bring justice to the Cambodian tragedy is itself running out of breath.
6 min 51Approximate reading time

23 years in prison, more than 25 years of a revolutionary's life, including 8 years supervising the torture and execution of thousands of presumed and mostly imaginary enemies, finally got the better of the strength of Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch. The former Khmer Rouge executioner, sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012, died in a hospital in the Cambodian capital shortly after midnight on September 2 at the age of 77.

For eight years, Duch was a key commander of the Communist Party of Kampuchea's security services, in charge of the arbitrary detention, interrogation, torture and systematic execution of those whom the Party, led by Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot, randomly considered its enemies. First, from 1971 to 1975, it was camp M-13, when the Cambodian communist guerrillas - the 'Khmer Rouge' (Red Khmer), according to the name given to them by King Sihanouk - were in the maquis. Then it was S-21, an ultra-secret prison set up in the heart of the capital, Phnom Penh, during the period when the Khmer Rouge controlled the country, from April 1975 to January 1979. Four years during which it is estimated that a quarter of the Cambodian population perished through bloody purges, mass executions, forced labor, disease, exhaustion and hunger. Until the Vietnamese army invaded the country and pushed the Khmer Rouge back into the mountains for another twenty years of fighting in the name of a totalitarian ideology.

A Khmer Rouge who killed other Khmer Rouge

It was in 1967 that Duch joined the Communist Party, when it was banned and clandestine but not yet a guerrilla group. In January 1968, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison for sedition. He was freed two years later, thanks to a coup d'état organized by the reactionary and militarist right, supported by the United States - in short, Duch's enemies. He then immediately joined the armed rebellion. And it was in the company of several other professors of his generation that he became a senior member of the secret police. He reached the peak of his revolutionary career between 1976 and 1978, when S-21 was in full swing and purged thousands of Party cadres. Indeed, it is estimated that 80% of the 12,000 or so prisoners identified at S-21 were Khmer Rouge themselves. The heart of Duch's work was to be a Khmer Rouge killing Khmer Rouge. He received orders directly from the supreme organ of the Party, whose paranoia and infernal, voracious and almost anthropophagous cycle of murders he satisfied and fed. The internal enemy was everywhere. It justified all the failures of the Revolution. And the confessions, often grotesque, extorted through terror and torture by agents trained by Duch, allowed the regime to "prove" the multiple conspiracies of which it claimed or believed itself to be a victim.

https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/tribunal ... r-end.html

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 2:59 pm Bizot stands as the only individual ever to fall into his hands and survive.

Statistically speaking, he is one of the luckiest men alive.
I spotted Monsieur Bizot filling out of the gallery one lunch break during Duch's trial. On the day before he gave his testimony from memory.
So i took the opportunity to get shuffled next to him so i could ask a question i had wanted to since reading his book.

Thinking of my friend, and of Duch's other western captives, i asked
"Why do you think he did not kill you, out of tens of thousands? Was anything to do with being a westerner?

He replied " Because i could speak Khmer"
That was the short answer, and i think he was referring specifically to the difference between himself and the other westerners.
But it was obviously more than that.

My view (only) after reading Bizot's book. and from my reading of Duch's character -
Bizot had a very deep and very high level of knowledge and understanding about Cambodian culture. He was a true scholar.
Duch, like all psychopaths, is a supreme narcissist. And like all Khmers he is also a fiercely proud but insecure nationalist.

By engaging Duch in high falooting discussions about high Khmer culture, Bizot was flattering the man and flattering cambodia.
Here was this scholar, this "Loak", treating him as an equal in these high minded matters. By this way Duch was able to allow Bizot to be his equal. There would be no honour for Duch if this was a lessor figure.
So he let his equal go - as you would - a man so high and noble as yourself.

Anyway, read "The Gate". or read it again.
John leCarre wrote in his introduction "If you have not read this book i envy you, for you have the pleasure ahead"
(or words to that effect).

The mathematics of death
Comrade Duch died on September 2nd
The supervisor of killings for Cambodia’s murderous Khmers Rouges was 77
Obituary
Sep 12th 2020 edition

AS THE VIETNAMESE army closed in on Phnom Penh in January 1979, Comrade Duch was ordered to kill the prisoners remaining in his charge. He just about had time to supervise that. (Killing was not usually done in his prison, only in the fields he had designated at Choeung Ek, seven kilometres away. Unless someone slipped up.) He also started to destroy his archive, but did not get far. The orders from Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, had not specifically requested that. Besides, he did not greatly want to.

The archive was well over 100,000 pages, containing meticulous details of the detainees who had passed to death through his prison, Tuol Sleng, or S-21, over the previous four years. (The most exact figure given later was 15,101, but the archive was by then incomplete.) Prisoners’ weight on entering. Their photographs, with the blank look of people at the end of the line. And their confessions, in as many versions as were needed to condemn them. He kept all the versions, with defective parts crossed out in red. In the margins, neatly, he put comments. “Do not write these words.” “Do not play tricks.” The final acceptable confession was typed and sent to “Angkar”, the high leadership of the Communist Party of Cambodia, to Brother Number Two and Brother Number One, Pol Pot himself. That was the rule. He kept at least two copies. Each carried his decision about the prisoner: "Can be destroyed", "Take away", "Keep for medical experiment"...

[CEO News: The rest of the article is paying, but thought this excerpt was chilling enough to be worth passing on.]
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020 ... tember-2nd

If you are quick and hit Ctrl-A then Ctrl-C, you can then paste the entire article into Word or similar to read it.

Opinion
The closing of one bloody chapter in Cambodia’s history does not mark the end of its efforts to define justice
Nic Dunlop
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published 14 hours ago
Updated September 11, 2020

Nic Dunlop is a photographer and author of The Lost Executioner: The Story of Comrade Duch and the Khmer Rouge.

In a prison known as S-21, more than 12,000 Cambodian men, women and children were tortured and killed, some of the two million people who died under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 to 1979. In S-21, a man named Comrade Duch – Pol Pot’s chief executioner and the former head of the Khmer Rouge secret police – led the killings as the prison’s commandant.

Today, the Khmer Rouge are gone, ousted by Vietnam in 1979 and finally defeated by the Cambodian government in 1999 after years of guerrilla war. The prison has become a museum, its walls adorned with mug shots of arriving prisoners. Though they number in the thousands, they are but a small representation of the many horrors inflicted by the infamous regime; those responsible for the killings had never faced international justice. Now, Duch is gone, too; he died last week, at the age of 77, serving out his life sentence as the first former Khmer Rouge leader to be tried and convicted at the UN-backed court in Cambodia.

For me, as a photographer during the war, Duch – who had disappeared after the fall of the Khmer Rouge – became something of an obsession. By 1998, I began carrying a photograph of Duch, taken from the prison when the Khmer Rouge were in power, and asking people if anyone recognized him. I believed that if there was one man who could shed light on this period, it was Duch. He was a key link between the Khmer Rouge leadership and the killing.

I never expected I’d actually find him. But in early 1999, with the war between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge finally over, I hitched a ride with Canadian sappers into a former Khmer Rouge zone. I was wandering around taking photographs when a small, wiry man walked up to me and introduced himself. I was stunned. It was Duch.

I returned several times to meet him. Finally, with journalist Nate Thayer, we confronted Duch and he confessed to his role as executioner, establishing the chain of command and revealing that the Khmer Rouge had deliberately planned mass murder. A born-again Christian, Duch expressed what appeared to be genuine remorse: “I feel very bad about the killings … there were many who were innocent.” As a result of his extraordinary confession, he was arrested and taken to Phnom Penh to await trial.

Many saw the Khmer Rouge tribunal as a first step toward ending the “culture of impunity” in Cambodia, a country plagued by violence. Human-rights workers have investigated hundreds of political murders, but no one has ever been convicted. Newspapers often carry reports of “people’s courts” where mobs act as police, judge and executioner, where suspected thieves are caught and killed by angry mobs. This rage serves as a measure of the frustration of a people who have never known any form of justice – a lack of accountability many consider an enduring legacy of Khmer Rouge rule.

At his trial, Duch was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Prosecutors had sought a 40-year sentence but, because of mitigating circumstances – time already served in prison, his willingness to assist the court, his stated remorse and his repeated apologies to the victims throughout the trial – his sentence was reduced to 19 years. After the sentencing, the media rushed to get the responses of survivors, many of whom saw the verdict as a betrayal; they were outraged that a man who ordered the killing of so many thousands of people should be sentenced to a mere 19 years.

“He tricked everybody,” said Chum Mey, a survivor of Duch’s prison, as he wiped tears from his eyes. “I was a victim during the Khmer Rouge, and now I’m a victim again.”

Nothing can compensate for the misery that people such as Duch inflicted. As one judge said, “a sentence can only be symbolic.” But the judgment “finally represents credible legal acknowledgement of the Khmer Rouge’s criminal policies,” that judge added, and the acknowledgment of mitigating circumstances and unlawful detention in the sentence by Cambodian legal professionals set a precedent. This was lost in the news coverage, which focused almost entirely on the response of the victims. And when an upper court UN war-crimes tribunal extended his sentence to life imprisonment in 2012, I wondered whether we in the news media had understood the purpose of the trial at all. To me, the tribunal – which faced mounting criticism – had caved to public opinion.
Full article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... -not-mark/

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 4:30 am
But full agree with what he says in the report above ^^^. ESPecially what he says about "it is not evil them - it is any one of us". (to paraphrase)

I have no idea how he reached that conclusion but I very firmly believe it is not true.