A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree

by Shamini Flint

  “Did you play a role in the torture?” The lawyer was persevering.

  There was a brief but definite nod.

  “Who told you to do it?”

  “Samrin.” His whisper was accompanied by another sidelong glance at the accused sitting within a semi-circular wooden dock with unexpectedly Romanesque balustrades. After thirty long years, this skinny man drumming his foot up and down on the floor was still terrified of the Choeng Ek commandant.

  “What sort of thing did you do?”

  “The usual…”

  “Perhaps you could elaborate?” asked the prosecutor, two hands clasped behind his back.

  The thin man’s right hand went to his throat as if the words he wished to speak were stuck in there. He had a quick sip from a glass of water. His voice, when he finally spoke, was loud and high-pitched, as if he had resolved to tell the truth. “We were instructed to remove toenails and fingernails if the prisoner did not confess. Also, sometimes we placed poisonous creatures, snakes and centipedes, on their bodies.”

  The lawyer nodded encouragingly.

  “If the confession was not in enough detail, we would reduce the daily food ration from two condensed milk tins of rice gruel to just one.”

  Singh winced.

  “What was the worst thing you ever did?”

  There was a silence and then the hurried pre-emptive defence. “I didn’t want to do it. Samrin made me. I was just following orders.”

  “What was it?”

  “We had to kill the children.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If there was a confession, if the prisoner was a traitor, his whole family was purged. You see, the leaders did not want to risk any relatives seeking revenge. They were tainted – after all, the fruit does not fall far from the tree. Pol Pot used to say, ‘To kill you is no loss, to keep you is no gain’.”

  Every eye in the courtroom was fixed on this man who was resorting to expressions from the Khmer Rouge leader’s personal cupboard of revolutionary maxims.

  “Even the children?” asked the lawyer.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “You see, the regime didn’t have enough bullets.”

  “How?” snapped the lawyer. His hands were gripping the balustrade separating him from the witness. Even from where Singh was sitting, he could see that the man’s knuckles had turned white. He was asking the questions, but like almost everyone in the room, Singh included, he barely had courage to face the answers.

  “I smashed their heads against trees – there was a special killing tree at Choeng Ek.” He swung his long thin arms in a wide semi-circle like a man wielding a baseball bat. “You know, like this…”

  Singh glanced around the court. Amongst the worn, shocked faces of the spectators, one stood out – a tall, elderly Caucasian was leaning forward, his hands clasped together tightly. Tears, unchecked, perhaps even unnoticed, were coursing down his cheeks. They dripped from his chin like rain off the eaves of the policeman’s Singapore home.

  The inspector remembered the serial killer who was hunting down ex-Khmer Rouge one by one. All his long years of pursuing murderers, of siding with the victims whatever the motivations of the killer, did not prevent Singh from wishing that the vigilante would track down Ta Ieng.

  ♦

  Singh had not known what to expect from the next witness but it had not been this wrinkled man wearing an oversized shirt and a pair of baggy tan shorts that revealed he had a prosthetic limb attached to the stump of his left knee. His artificial leg was an aluminium rod with an old running shoe on the end. On his good leg he wore a flip-flop. As the gnome-like figure sat down, Singh saw that one side of the man’s face was eclipsed with thick dark mounds of scar tissue. The man’s left eye was shut and deeply indented, as if the eyeball within had been removed.

  “You are Cheah Huon?”

  The other man answered in Khmer, “Yes,” revealing teeth that had yellowed like old ivory.

  Singh reached hurriedly for his earphones.

  “You are originally from Kompong Som province?”

  Cheah Huon nodded and was requested to speak his answers for the court by one of the crimson-clad judges. He gave them an informal grin and answered loudly, “Yes.”

  “You were sent for re-education by the Khmer Rouge?”

  “Yes, I was.” The left side of his mouth was misshapen and from the tentative translation in his ears, Singh guessed that his speech was distorted and difficult to understand.

  “Why?”

  Huon cupped a hand behind one ear and leaned forward towards the lawyer who recognised his cue and repeated himself, much louder this time. To Singh’s amusement, the voice in the earpiece grew more distinct too. This was not so much a translator at work as a method actor.

  The witness focused his good eye with disconcerting intensity on the questioner who took an inadvertent step backwards. No surprise there. Singh was reminded of the proverbial stare of the basilisk. “One of the schlops heard me talking to my wife,” he said.

  A judge from Europe leaned forward and spoke into her microphone. From her accent Singh guessed she was French. “What is a schlop?”

  The inspector realised that the word had not been translated with the rest of the sentence. Was it such common parlance in Cambodia that an interpretation was unnecessary?

  “It means a spy,” explained the Cambodian lawyer.

  “Many of the ‘old’ people would hang around outside our huts or near us when we were eating or working in the fields. They were listening for information that they could pass on to the bosses,” continued the witness.

  Singh knew – again he had Chhean and her notes in the blue folder to thank – that ‘old’ people referred to the peasants, especially those who had been living within Khmer Rouge-liberated areas before the fall of Phnom Penh. ‘New’ people were city folk who had been purposefully scattered throughout the country after the cities were emptied.

  “What did you say to your wife that the schlop reported?”

  “I spoke in French.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said sadly, shaking his head from side to side. “Anyway, the schlop who turned me in did not speak French.”

  Singh scratched his bearded chin.

  “They said I was an intellectual – because I spoke French, not Khmer – and needed to be retrained to understand the new socialist order,” he explained further.

  “And they sent you to Tuol Sleng prison?”

  “S21, yes.”

  “When did you first come across the accused, Samrin?”

  Samrin was sitting on Huon’s blind side so he had to turn his head a full half circle to see him. Singh noted that he did not seem afraid, despite Samrin’s reputation for cold-blooded cruelty in the service of the revolution. Probably, after what he had been through as evidenced by the blasted heath that was his face let alone the missing limb, he was beyond fear.

  “After I had confessed to being a CIA agent.” To Singh’s amazement, Huon chuckled. “We all confessed eventually, of course. I confessed everything that I could imagine they wanted to hear even before they tortured me.” He spat on the ground suddenly, amusement turning to anger that was visible in a reddening of the scar tissue so that the wounds looked almost fresh. “They tortured me anyway. They were sadists, all of them.”

  “What about Samrin?” prompted the lawyer.

  “When they were tired of me, they sent me to Choeng Ek, you know, the killing fields outside Phnom Penh. Samrin was there. I saw him often because I was put on duty to cover the graves.” He responded to the expression of puzzlement on the lawyer’s face, “You see, the prisoners dug their own graves and were then executed, usually by being bludgeoned to death with ox-handles – but when they were dead there was no one to,” he made a sweeping motion with his hand, “spray chemicals – to disguise the smell – and cover the bodies with earth. They asked me to do it because I was not in a
s bad shape as the others from Tuol Sleng.” If the lawyer found any irony in the crippled man asserting that he had been in relatively good shape, he kept any hint of it out of his voice.

  “What was Samrin’s role?”

  “He would supervise each mass execution: give instructions of how deep the earth was to be dug, tell the prisoners to line up on their knees, check names against the master list he had been sent from the prison. Sometimes, he would take part in the killing as well if they were short-handed although usually he left it to junior rank cadres.”

  “How did you survive?”

  “I was still on duty when the Vietnamese came. Samrin ordered that all the prisoners be killed so that no one could speak of that place, tell what had happened there. It was a messy business, there were so many to be killed at once. I pretended to tumble into the grave. No one bothered to help me – I’m not sure they saw me – or maybe they thought I would suffocate. That happened quite often, whenever a blow was mistimed or the aim was not good and the prisoner didn’t die immediately.”

  He stopped speaking and silence reigned in the court as if it too was a mass grave.

  “What happened next?” asked the lawyer, hitching his gown higher onto his shoulders as if he could feel the chill of the tomb.

  Singh adjusted his headphones so that they sat tight on his ears. He didn’t want to miss anything.

  “I lay in there with the bodies. When night fell, I managed to scramble out. The guards, Samrin, everyone had fled. The next morning the Vietnamese arrived.”

  Huon did not embellish his tale any further. There was no need. Everyone in the room was imagining what it must have been like to be in a deep, stinking, bloody pit, hemmed in on all sides by the dead and the dying.

  “Is that how you received your injuries?” asked the lawyer sympathetically, clearing his throat and finding his voice again.

  Huon gestured at his artificial limb and ran the other hand across his scarred cheek gently. He turned his head from side to side so that the audience could see the full horror of his injuries. “Yes, I believe it was the chemicals they sprayed on the bodies – it ate through my skin like acid.”

  In the silence that greeted this last piece of information, Singh heard a quiet sound, like the slow exhalation of air from a balloon. He turned his head and was just in time to see Sovann, the beautiful creature who had not finished her lunch, half rise from her seat, close her eyes and slip to the ground in a dead faint. In a few moments, she was surrounded by concerned people and lost from view. Singh remained seated. There was nothing he could do. She was too far away, there were others to help and he had no real locus to interfere.

  The lawyer for Samrin’s defence rose to his feet. He was a middle-aged Englishman with a paunch that overhung his belt like a waiting avalanche.

  “You claim that you saw my client, Samrin, supervising affairs at Choeng Ek?”

  “Yes…him!” Huon pointed at the defendant with an angry finger.

  “But we have only your word for that – and you are not a very credible witness. I am sure you mean well but the suffering you have undergone means that your recollections cannot be trusted.”

  Singh suddenly understood the thrust of the defence. With so many witnesses dead or disappeared after thirty years, linking Samrin to the atrocities was not a straightforward job for the prosecution. Everyone knew full well that Samrin had ordered the executions at Choeng Ek but the evidentiary trail was intermittent.

  And Samrin believed he had a chance. He had pleaded ‘not guilty’ to all the charges against him, spurning an invitation to admit guilt and seek clemency from the court on the grounds of age and infirmity.

  “Why should I lie?” demanded Cheah Huon.

  “I am not suggesting you lied,” explained the barrister smoothly, “just that you might be mistaken.”

  “That is not true!”

  “I guess we differ in our opinion then.”

  The Cambodian lawyer rose to his feet. “Is there anything else you would like to share with the court?” he asked.

  Cheah Huon was leaning forward, still angry at being disbelieved. He gripped the balustrade with both hands and bit out his next words. “I know many things that this court would be interested to hear. Not just about Samrin but about others too. Remember, a small axe can fell a big tree if it is sharp enough. My body is injured” – he scowled at the English lawyer – “but my mind is still sharp and I can prove it!”

  There was a whispering in the courtroom that sounded like a stiff breeze through long grass.

  One of the judges, a sleek, well-fed looking Cambodian man with receding dark hair said, “That is very interesting, Mr Cheah Huon. We look forward to hearing your testimony – but it will have to wait until tomorrow.” He looked around at his fellow judges and intoned, “Court is adjourned until nine a.m. in the morning.”

  Five

  François Gaudin sat on a low bench against a recently painted cream wall and pillowed his head on arms folded across his knees. At last he straightened his spine with a conscious effort. He took a few deep slow breaths, as if air was precious and to be savoured. The smell of fresh paint had an oddly medicinal property – almost like the old-fashioned smelling salts he remembered his grandmother clutching in a loose-skinned, plump-veined hand. It cleared his head and he was able to stand.

  Ta Ieng’s testimony had made him physically ill earlier that day as he had heard, first hand and for the first time, what the Khmer Rouge had been prepared to do to children. But he knew that, if it was possible to grade the horrors of the past, then what lay ahead of him was probably going to be worse. He was outside the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, known as S21 by Brother N°1, Pol Pot, and his henchmen. He flinched at the anonymity of numbers so beloved by the Khmer Rouge.

  It worked to distance the perpetrators from the crimes and removed any vestige of humanity from the victims. They were not people, just ciphers – involuntary participants in a grand revolution for which sacrifice was necessary. The prison had been the subject of numerous books, films and documentaries; a museum of horrors that was open to the public so that tourists could gape and stare and wonder what madness had led to such things and whether those seeds of insanity still lay within the smiling, friendly Cambodian people.

  The multi-storeyed building looked like a school, and indeed it had been before it was taken over by the regime, the classrooms divided into cells with hastily constructed rough-edged brick walls, crude checked barbed wire fixed between roof and balcony to prevent untimely suicides. The short grass in the compound was dry and had a brownish tinge. A couple of tall palms stood like sentries at the front.

  The attache at the French embassy had pointed out that his wife would have been considered an enemy of the state because of her relationship with a Frenchman, the evidence there for all to see in their mixed-blood children. She might have been arrested right away, sent to a convenient prison nearby – just like this one, perhaps even this one. After all, S21 was the biggest and was known to have housed foreigners: Vietnamese and Thais but also Americans, Frenchmen and Britons.

  François screwed up the courage to go inside. He knew what to expect, of course. They even sold postcards of Tuol Sleng on the streets. Small children offered up souvenirs of death to the barangs, the foreigners. He knew what to expect and yet he didn’t. He had not realised that, like the Mona Lisa, the rows and rows of victims, each holding a card with a number on it, followed a visitor with their eyes. He had not known that the subjects had their hands tied behind their backs so that each one looked like their arms had been lopped off at the shoulders. The photos were in black and white, the eyes dark haunted hollows. The victims silently begged him to come to their aid or accused him with dead eyes for having survived, for having escaped, for having left his wife and children behind.

  He stumbled upon an exhibition of paintings by Vann Nath, one of only seven people known to have survived the prison. He read on the notice board that Vann had been a
prisoner, but kept alive – there was a note on an execution list in Duch’s hand, “Keep the painter” – because the prison boss liked his depictions of Pol Pot. The artist had spent the years after the regime’s collapse painting his memories, trying to exorcise the ghosts he carried around in his head.

  François turned a corner and was confronted with the next canvas.

  The Frenchman sank to his knees and his sobs came from the depths of his soul, first loud and anguished and then a continuous soft sound, like bubbles bursting against a wall. He lay on the ground, curled up as tight as he could, hands around his knees, eyes open and yet unseeing, all his focus concentrated within. The guards came to fetch him with the quiet professionalism of those who had seen others collapse under the weight of memories at Tuol Sleng.

  “A barang,” observed one of them. “Unusual.”

  The other was looking at the painting which had broken the man before them, seeking a reason for his collapse.

  It depicted a young woman with dishevelled dark hair, her face creased with desperation but also a single-minded concentration. A guard in black pyjamas and a blue krama was yanking her small baby from her hands as she fought to hold on. Another cadre was beating her back and legs with a rod, trying to persuade her to let go of the child.

  “Why does this canvas affect the barang so much?” asked the second guard as they led the hunched sobbing figure away.

  The other one shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  ♦

  “I don’t trust Cheah Huon.” The voice was firm.

  The judge held the receiver hard against his ear as if he feared that the words might be overheard although he was alone in the room. He sat behind a desk, staring blankly at the opposite wall. His glasses, thick black plastic frames, were perched on the end of his nose. He scratched his hairline, which had receded so far back that he looked like a Chinese eunuch with a shaved scalp.

  “I don’t understand – I paid him off, just as you asked. He promised to keep his mouth shut. What’s the problem?”