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March 30, 2009
Posted: 317 GMT
The Khmer Rouge trial has been a harrowing story to cover. The unimaginable magnitude of the killing is breathtaking: 1.5 million, 2 million, some even put it as high as 3 million - an abstract and unfathomable number. But it's when I'm confronted with men like Norng Champhal that the horror and terror are really drawn into sharp, brutal focus. He told me through tears of raw grief, how he was separated from his mother 30 years ago at the most notorious of the 189 torture and detention camps, Tuol Sleng or S-21. 
Norng Champhal was just 8 or 9 when he was taken to Tuol Sleng prison. He is one of the few survivors.
 He never saw his mother again and spent several days hearing the haunting screams of people being tortured to death. Then finally the Khmer Rouge fled, as invading Vietnamese forces approached. He frantically ran from room to room looking for his mother. In each, he found iron bed-frames with blankets thrown over the mutilated corpses the KR had hurriedly abandoned. He told me he peeked under one blanket, trembling as he looked. A nine-year-old boy, checking corpses to see if they were his mother. He never found her, but he thinks it's impossible she survived. He says those memories are still so fresh and clear they are still profoundly painful. More than 14,000 people died in S-21. Only a few survived, among them Champhal. His story is repeated across this violated land. At least a quarter of the population died between 1975 and 1979. It would be the equivalent of approximately 70 million Americans being slaughtered in just three years, eight months and 20 days. Historians argue about the extent to which the U.S. secret bombing of Cambodia contributed to the rise of the fanatical Maoist regime. Certainly the U.S., U.K. and others continued to back the KR long after they were ousted from the capital. But this trial will not initially dwell on U.S. involvement or the causes of the Khmer Rouge rising to power. It will begin simply with the story of S21 and the man that put so many, including Champhal's mother, to death. Duch, or Kaing Guek Eav, is charged with crimes against humanity and has admitted his role as Commandant of S21. Now finally Champhal may begin to get some answers about the nightmare that still casts its long and dark shadow over this traumatized country. Watch my report on notorious Tuol Sleng and survivor Norng Champhal's recollection of the torture camp. Posted by: CNN Bangkok correspondent, Dan Rivers |
 
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