Survivors of Khmer Rouge torture center await justice FEATURE 07/25/2010

Survivors of Khmer Rouge torture center await justice

FEATURE 07/25/2010 PHNOM PENH — In January 1979, as the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed and its leaders fled Phnom Penh, invading Vietnamese troops stumbled upon an abandoned prison with fresh corpses chained to iron beds. It was Tuol Sleng, or “Hill of the Poisonous Trees,” the most infamous of all of the jails run by Pol Pot’s murderous regime. Next week the prison’s former chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, will hear the verdict in his trial at a UN-backed tribunal where witnesses have recounted the horrors of a place from which almost no one came out alive. Norng Chan Phal, 40, is one of just a handful of survivors to emerge from the Khmer Rouge regime’s main torture center, liberated by the Vietnamese invasion. He told the trial last year how, as a child, he saw Tuol Sleng guards threaten, beat and photograph his mother. Soon afterwards she disappeared and was never seen again.... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100725com3.html

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