S-21 Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh (picture by stebaraz, 2006)
Last year I had the chance to spend a couple of weeks in Cambodia; I did not know so much about the country before crossing the border at Poipet (I was coming from Thailand): Cambodia was a big surprise to me, a beautiful country with wonderful people, struggling to recover from a dark and recent past which is not yet ended.
Anyway, in a far past Cambodia was the center of the Khmer empire, which was the largest continuous empire of South East Asia. The empire had an intensive cultural and political life and its greatest legacy is Angkor, which was the capital during the empire's zenith. Angkor bears testimony to the Khmer empire's immense power and wealth: satellite imaging reveals Angkor to have been the largest pre-industrial urban center in the world, larger than modern-day New York.
The visit to the ruins of Angkor constitutes the highlight of any trip to Cambodia: the city is absolutely wonderful and magic, its buildings emerging from the forest where it has been hidden for over 6 centuries.
Anyway, I think that the beauty of Cambodia resides in its countryside: I remember with great joy a day-trip on a moto in the surroundings of Battambang, and the boat-trip to Siem Reap.
Having the time to taste the flavour of rural Cambodia, wandering around with no specific destinations, allows the visitor to dip into the country's rhythms and culture.
Anyone who travels to Cambodia cannot avoid facing the spiritual and material consequences that the Khmer Rouge regime left on Cambodian identity, like scars that fail to disappear.
What happened in the country between 1975 and 1979, after the radical Maoist movement of the Khmer Rouge lead by Pol Pot took the power, has been defined by some scholars as a "self-genocide".
It is estimated that about 1.7 millions people lost their lives because of the violence, the displacement, the famine and the total collapse of the industrial and agricultural system: about 1 Cambodian out of 5 did not survive to Pol Pot's rule.
Recently I read a book by Francois Bizot, a French scholar who is the only Westerner who survived imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge.
The book's title is "The Gate", and tells the story of the author's imprisonment in 1971: he was captured and accused of being a CIA agent (actually, he reached Cambodia in 1965 to study Buddhism).
Bizot developed a strange relationship with his captor, Comrade Duch, who convinced the Khmer Rouge leadership of Bizot's innocence.
But Comrade Duch is the same person who later became the director of the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, the center of the Khmer Rouge repression system: out of 17.000 people imprisoned, only 7 survived.
Bizot's book takes the reader into an exploration of the mind of a man who later became one of the cruelest torturer of the last century, and makes us doubt that the difference between monstrosity and normality is not as big as we would like to believe.
After the fall of the regime, Duch succeeded in avoiding the capture, and disappeared in the forest: the complete story can be read here.
And here comes the photojournalist,Nic Dunlop.
Born in Ireland, he became a photojournalist in 1990, a soon got obsessed by Cambodian history and by the history of the S-21 and of Comrade Duch.
Here, and in his book "The lost executioner", Dunlop tells his story, about how he started travelling Cambodia looking for Duch, and how, at last, he found him in 1999, and made him confess to be the S-21 lost executioner.
Here you can find the picture he shot to Duch when he bumped into him in a Refugee Camp in eastern Cambodia, where Duch was working for an American NGO, after his conversion to Christianity.
And, suprisingly, when Nic Dunlop found him, Duch did not oppose any resistance, and declared himself ready to face the judgment of a court and to pay for what he did.
Today, after almost 30 years, Comrade Duch is likely going to be trialed for his crimes: recently has been reached an agreement between Cambodian and foreign judges for a U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal to begin investigating Khmer Rouge leaders in the deaths of 1.7 million people during their 1975-79 communist regime. (italian and english)
Enigmatic and elusive as ever, Comrade Duch is waiting in his cell for his fate to be decided, thanks also to a brave and undaunted photojournalist who dedicated part of his life to his hunting.
My S-21 pictures can be seen here.
p.s. 19th September 2007 Update
Good News..
"Police arrested the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader Wednesday, taking Nuon Chea to appear before a U.N-backed genocide tribunal for his role in the 1970s Cambodian regime blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people"
"Nuon Chea helped Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot seize control of Cambodia's underground communist movement in the 1950s and '60s. He later became the group's chief political ideologue during its murderous rule in the 1970s"
Read more here
