PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The man accused of being the Khmer Rouge’s chief torturer put down his prepared speech, removed his eyeglasses and gazed at the courtroom audience Tuesday as he pleaded for forgiveness from the country he helped terrorize three decades ago.
“At the beginning, I only prayed to ask for forgiveness from my parents, but later, I prayed to ask forgiveness from the whole nation,” Kaing Guek Eav (pronounced “Gang Geck Ee-uu”) — better known as Duch (“Doik”) — recounted on the second day of his trial before a genocide tribunal.
Hundreds of spectators seated on the other side of a glass wall in the courtroom — including relatives of the victims — listened intently.
The tribunal’s proceedings are the first serious attempt to fix responsibility for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians from starvation, medical neglect, slave-like working conditions and execution under the 1975-79 rule of the Khmer Rouge, whose top leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998.
Duch, 66, could face life in prison. Cambodia has no death penalty.
He commanded the group’s main S-21 prison, where as many as 16,000 men, women and children are believed to have been brutalized before being sent to their deaths.
Duch betrayed no emotion Monday as he listened to allegations that prisoners were beaten, electrocuted, smothered with plastic bags or had water poured into their noses, and that children were taken from parents and dropped to their deaths.
He got his first chance to speak after prosecutors gave opening arguments Tuesday and took responsibility “for crimes committed at S-21, especially the tortures and executions of the people there.”
