A child looks at skulls inside a stupa at the popular tourist site Phnom Sampov near Samlot in Battambang province, some 291 kilometres northwest of Phnom Penh this month. The resumption of Duch's trial today may bring new light to bear on generations-old moral questions for the Kingdom. (Photo by: AFP)Monday, 30 March 2009
Written by Thet Sambath and Georgia Wilkins
The Phnom Penh Post
Samlot
Tuol Sleng chief's admission of guilt would come amid questions of whether the perpetrators of Khmer Rouge atrocities can also be victims.
HIM Huy, one of the only surviving guards from Tuol Sleng prison, knows that he stands in the middle of one of Cambodia's greatest moral dilemmas: Can the perpetrators of the worst Khmer Rouge atrocities also claim to be victims of the regime?
The 53-year-old's stint at the Khmer Rouge's torture centre may have helped keep the wheels of the paranoid regime well-oiled, but Him Huy now says he was a prisoner of ideology and a slave to the orders of his higher-ups.
"I am also a victim of the Khmer Rouge. If I did not respect and practice Angkar's orders, I would have been executed like the other prisoners," he says.
0 comments:
Post a Comment