Kaing Guek Eav, also known as “Duch”, is burning in Hell.
Duch was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for atrocities he had committed as a commandant of the Tuol Sleng prison. At least 14,000 people died after being held there, most of them sent to a killing field after being tortured and forced to confess to often imaginary crimes. Only a handful survived.
Duch (pronounced doik) and Tuol Sleng prison became a symbol of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge as it devoured itself in paranoia and purges. Under the regime, from 1975 to 1979, at least 1.7 million people died from execution, torture, starvation, untreated disease or overwork.
A joint Cambodian-United Nations tribunal found Duch guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes as well as homicide and torture. The tribunal first sentenced him to 35 years, giving him credit for years already served in pretrial detention. A higher court within the tribunal later increased the sentence to life imprisonment without a right to appeal.
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The force of his personality dominated the courtroom, and his self-confidence sometimes hardened into condescension as he corrected a lawyer or witness about details of the case against him.
At one point, a judge reminded him that laughter was not an appropriate response to a question.
A panel of court-appointed psychiatrists said that Duch was “meticulous, conscientious, control-oriented, attentive to detail and seeks recognition from his superiors,” and that he exhibited “a strong presence of obsessive traits.”
One question hovered above the trial: the source of the “evil” — as he himself described it — that could have compelled him to scribble on a list of 17 children, “Kill them all.”
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During his trial, however, Duch seemed to doubt the validity of his work, telling the courtroom that while running the prison he did not believe most confessions that his torturers had extracted and that he then annotated and sent to his superiors.
“I never believed that the confessions I received told the truth,” he said. “At most, they were about 40 percent true.”
And he said he believed that only 20 percent of the people whose names had been extracted through torture were genuine opponents of the regime. Those people were in turn pursued, arrested and tortured until they, too, produced the names of imagined accomplices.
“The work expanded,” Duch said. “People were arrested illegally, right or wrong. I considered it evil eating evil.”