DUCH ENDED UP in the same military detention centre as Ta Mok, in the Tuol Sleng district of Phnom Penh, a five-minute walk from the prison that he once ran. He was charged under the 1994 law outlawing the Khmer Rouge.
In 1997, just before the coup, the two co-Prime Ministers, Hun Sen and Prince Rannaridh, asked the United Nations to set up a tribunal to try former Khmer Rouge leaders. With the subsequent political turmoil, this process had stalled. But now, with Duch’s discovery, pressure was stepped up once again to bring those leaders who had defected to account.
Duch’s re-emergence and subsequent revelations stunned people all over the country, particularly those who had worked with him. ‘We are in a state of shock frankly,’ said an ARC official. ‘He was our best worker, highly respected in the community, clearly very intelligent and dedicated to helping the refugees.’
Back in Phkoam village, Duch’s former neighbours refused to believe the news. Even when I told them he had confessed of his own free will, they gave me sceptical looks. They were a wary lot, used to propaganda from one side or another. Several of his friends believed that if he hadn’t followed the Organisation’s orders, he too would have been killed. ‘He never did anything bad, never created trouble,’ said one villager. ‘He should be released.’
Not everyone shared this view. When I showed my own photograph of Duch to another woman, she muttered, ‘Criminal’, before handing it back to me.
The American Refugee Committee then issued a statement effectively washing their hands of the episode. ‘ARC does not know, and has no way of determining, past identities of individual members of refugee communities in any of the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border.’
As an organisation ARC had come into existence during the border crisis of 1979 and knew the situation well. In the decade following the Vietnamese invasion, when the West and China supported the Khmer Rouge coalition, almost half of the funding for the border relief operation came from the United States Government. This money was available for work on the border, but not inside the country. Despite their ‘apolitical’ status, the ARC, like many American organisations on the border in the 1980s, followed what their political paymasters in Washington advised. Most relief agencies were discouraged from asking who was ultimately benefiting from this humanitarian effort. It was either take the money and play the game, or risk closing down altogether.
For the most part, this cynical manipulation of aid was accepted. Humanitarian intervention became a substitute for political action. Although occasional protests were made, most aid workers saw their work in strictly humanitarian terms. Anything beyond it was political and therefore beyond their remit. How these groups and organisations were able to preserve this neutrality in such an environment was nothing short of miraculous.
For the more politically aware, it wasn’t a clear-cut argument. These aid workers understood that the refugees were prisoners of the factions, and became frustrated with the polarisation of the Cold War. Many accused the aid programme of assisting the wrong side of the conflict and aiding the Khmer Rouge.
It occurred to me that to work in Phnom Penh, which had its own complications, was an easier moral position to take. To work on the border was increasingly difficult to defend with all the obvious contradictions of assisting the Khmer Rouge and the war effort. Those with a more questioning and political reading, who took the moral weight of the border and all its injustice on board, were forced to question everything, including their own moral beliefs.
‘We saved a hell of a lot of people’s lives,’ said Rob Burrows, Deputy Director of the United Nations Border Relief Operation. It’s hard to fault these kinds of arguments. It is a language that reflects urgency and dedication, of a tough and uncompromising stance of apparent selflessness – all the attributes we have come to associate with aid workers. But it is also a language that deflects a closer scrutiny. Despite appearances many aid organisations have become defined by an establishment they appear to be free of, reliant as many are for government funding. As one former worker for ARC told me, ‘Everything we do is political.’
As an organisation ARC would have known they were dealing with the Khmer Rouge. They would have known that those with an education were cadres; people of influence and power. And ARC was using this relationship to help the refugees. The people of Samlaut probably didn’t know that Duch had presided over Tuol Sleng, but it is possible that they knew he had been in the secret police. Many referred to him as Duch – not Hang Pin. They certainly knew that he had been close to the leadership – Ta Sanh had been Pol Pot’s stronghold for several years.
When Burrows heard the news of Duch working for the ARC he was relieved. The first thought that occurred to him was, ‘Thank God UNHCR didn’t hire him.’ My own photograph of Duch that had appeared in the papers showed him wearing his ARC T-shirt. ‘I was thinking,’ said Burrows, “Jesus Christ, what if that had been a UNHCR T-shirt?” It would have meant that we were idiots or worse.’
One former ARC director, Bob Medrala, wasn’t surprised by the revelations and didn’t feel there was anything to be ashamed of. ‘If you’ve got people who look like they care, who are smart, they become your workers – it’s easy for that to have happened,’ he told me. There were plenty of unsavoury characters on the border, Medrala added. They were the survivors.
One afternoon in Phnom Penh, I went to see Duch’s lawyer with Sokheang. Kar Savuth kept a large python in his garden. It sat lazily in a cage it had long outgrown. Its coils were the thickness of a man’s torso and were folded like tyres stacked upon one another. Kar Savuth had kept it since the Vietnamese arrived in 1979, when he saved it from being killed by people who wanted to eat it. The children called it Chamroeun which, in Khmer, means prosperous.
Kar Savuth had been appointed Duch’s lawyer by the government. With his stiff grey Chinese top, thick-rimmed spectacles and receding hairline, Kar Savuth reminded me a little of Kim Jong Il, the reclusive leader of North Korea. We sat in the shade of his garden, not far from Chamroeun’s cage, the lawyer’s gold Rolex occasionally glinting in the sun. His daughter served water and soft drinks. He pulled out his rather slim file on Duch.
Taking out a gold pen he began scanning the documents. ‘During the Pol Pot regime we had to do what we were assigned to do,’ he began in tired tones without looking up. ‘If we didn’t do it, they would have killed us.’ He then outlined the basis of Duch’s case.
Although Duch had been commandant of the prison, the lawyer said, he had never personally killed anybody. That had been the job of the guards. He had been cheated by the revolution and by Pol Pot and it was under the orders of his superiors that the killing was carried out. ‘Even the executioners weren’t guilty,’ he said. Why?
‘Because they were ordered to kill the prisoners. They were ordered from the top. If they didn’t kill, they would be killed.’ He leaned back, resting his elbows on his seat. ‘That is why,’ he concluded, ‘Duch is innocent.’
I quoted Duch’s admission that he had personally killed the remaining prisoners on Nuon Chea’s orders. I also told him what Ein had told me about the beating of Sri the cook. Duch may not have killed him personally, but he certainly participated in beatings and in torture. Kar Savuth shifted in his seat. He seemed genuinely surprised.
‘That’s wrong,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Duch’s duties were only to read the confessions for Son Sen, because above Duch was Son Sen. Above Son Sen, there was Nuon Chea, and above Nuon Chea, there was Pol Pot.’ He stopped to mull over what I had just told him, then leaned forward, a worried look on his face. ‘I’ve never heard him say things like that,’ he said.
I asked Kar Savuth whether, if there was a trial, Duch would be freed. ‘Just bring in somebody who’s still alive and ask if anybody saw Duch kill prisoners. Nobody saw him kill prisoners,’ he said, looking more confident.
In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, who was being tried for his part in the European holocaust, told the court that he was ‘just following orders’. It is the standard defence of mass murderers and torturers, from Bosnia to Rwanda, that it was a job, just like any other. When the table is turned, the guilty either deny their involvement completely, readily identify with their victims as lesser victims, or create elaborate and complex arguments designed to muddy the clarity of moral responsibility. In some cases they even continue to attack the veracity of their victims’ claims.
If Duch were ever to face a court it is almost certain that his defence would rest on this one point: that he was following orders and if he hadn’t, he too would have been killed – the Organisation would be ultimately to blame. And perhaps, to a certain extent, it was true. What real choices did any of the staff have if the only other option was death?
If no-one testified that they had witnessed Duch carry out a killing on his own initiative, I wondered, could Duch get off on a technicality?
After meeting the lawyer Sokheang and I returned to Amleang, where Duch’s first prison was, to find someone who could confirm that Duch actually had killed with his own hands. Ham In, the survivor from M-13, had mentioned one of Duch’s former bodyguards, who lived near the old prison.
Now forty-nine, Chan Voeun looked at one of the pictures of Duch that I had taken. ‘He hasn’t changed much,’ he said. He spoke with a deep voice, his hair was short and curly and his furrowed brow betrayed his anxiety. What seemed like the entire village had crowded around us, curious at the foreigner in their village. Voeun was building a new house when we arrived and nervously fingered a hatchet in his hands as we introduced ourselves.
Did he ever see Duch kill anyone personally and not simply give the order?
‘I saw him kill one person with his gun,’ he replied. ‘It was after he interrogated a man for two or three days and he didn’t confess. Duch took him outside and tied his hands and shot him in the chest three times. He died instantly.’ Voeun said he wasn’t the only witness; there were at least six others. He told us that Duch later killed three other bodyguards. ‘If he interrogated them and he wasn’t satisfied with their answers he would kill them himself,’ said Voeun. ‘He killed a lot of people.’
Sokheang has investigated scores of political murders, but never has anyone been charged. There were more than a hundred extra-judicial killings during the 1997 coup alone, many of which he investigated with his colleagues. One photograph from the time showed a body face down in a ditch. The flesh from the knees down had been scraped away to reveal the tibia, fibula and foot bones. It was as though the man had been dipped in acid. A local official on the scene had volunteered that perhaps it was a suicide.
Cambodia is a society plagued by violence. One of the most disturbing aspects of this ‘culture of impunity’ is the emergence of ‘people’s courts’, where lynch mobs routinely beat people to death acting as police, judiciary and executioner. It is a measure of the frustration and rage of a people who have never known any form of social justice. Many believe this is one of the most enduring legacies of Khmer Rouge rule.
Decades of violence have compounded to create a shattered society where normality is a thin veneer. It has left people bereft of the ability to respond to those around them and, as a result, people have tremendous difficulty in trusting one another. Added to this is the fatalism inherent in Khmer Buddhism, where people feel unable to effect anything approaching positive change. This belief in a preordained life, where the individual is powerless to act, is deeply rooted. ‘It undermines people’s ability to have initiative, to speak up, to dare to work together, to trust each other, to cooperate,’ Ellen Minotti, a social worker in Phnom Penh, told me. ‘All over the country there is a deep anger at the injustice.’ No-one believes in the ability of those in authority to act in a responsible way. Many believe that if there is a Khmer Rouge tribunal, it might unravel the fragile peace that exists and prove to be both politically and personally destabilising.
Few young Khmers have any real understanding of what took place under the Khmer Rouge. In the standard history textbook for students of fifteen years old, six lines out of seventy-nine pages referred to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The rest was devoted to the glories of the Khmer empire and the various wars with Cambodia’s traditional foes: the Thais and the Vietnamese.
‘We must not ask Duch and other Khmer Rouge why,’ Ho had told me. ‘There is no reason why.’ I asked him to explain. ‘Every day someone hates somebody. They invented many reasons to kill people. They were all excuses and lies. And they will only shirk responsibility. Khmer people do not have the powers of self-criticism, it’s one of the more negative aspects of Khmer culture. In our culture it’s always the faults of others. It’s the classic characteristic of a society in decline – it was Cambodians killing Cambodians.’ Why is an accusatory term that can offend. How by contrast invites people to look at situations and invites understanding. When I talked with former Khmer Rouge from Tuol Sleng and elsewhere I did my best to avoid using why. It put people on their guard and in some cases they would clam up altogether. People kill one another all the time all over the world; the crucial thing is to understand what led them at that moment to do such a thing. Ho believed that by understanding the stages of how Cambodia as a society could produce such a cataclysm, people would be able to learn from the past and move on.
‘The most important thing is to know how the people were killed, not why – that is why a trial is important.’
But how do you persuade people that having a tribunal is worth it? In Cambodia the record of broken political promises and betrayals far outweighs the promises kept. People are scared that they will go through all that pain for nothing or actually put themselves in danger. Cambodia, said Minotti, is still not a safe place to be.
Sokheang told me that working in human rights now was a logical extension to him joining the Khmer Rouge in Paris. ‘With this work, I can help save lives.’ He sees his human-rights work as a way to address the social injustices all around him. His experiences have also left their mark psychologically and he suffers from acute insomnia, headaches and stomach pains. His doctor has told him that there is nothing physically wrong with him. Sokheang’s large assortment of pills he knows are to relieve the symptoms, not the cause. But Sokheang is in a privileged position working in the human-rights world. He can channel much of this energy into his work and it provides him with something like a support structure.
Not long ago Sokheang’s brother, Ly, made a trip back to the area where the family had been sent during the Khmer Rouge. He learned from the locals that the man who had killed their three brothers was still living nearby. They offered to take Ly to see him. ‘I didn’t dare,’ he said, ‘otherwise it would’ve brought me back to the past, twenty years ago.’
Sokheang, on the other hand, wanted to return and confront him. He wanted to find out what exactly had happened and then file a complaint if a tribunal ever convened.
His brother thought it would be pointless and that it would only reawaken painful memories. The family was also afraid of retribution. Sokheang, not wishing to argue, let the subject go. ‘They were living together at that time and I feel that they may have suffered more than me, because I was away.’
Why did he want to confront this man, I asked. ‘Because a crime is a crime. There is no time limit for you to complain even twenty, thirty, fifty years on if you know that man killed your brothers. It can also serve as a lesson for future generations, to prevent it from happening again. This is the main reason.’
Ly didn’t believe the trial should be restricted to the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. ‘If they want to have an international tribunal they have to try all the people who committed crimes,’ he said.
Across the country, nearly everyone I spoke to, including people who had worked at Tuol Sleng, believed surviving Khmer Rouge leaders should be put on trial – at least in principle. ‘I want them killed for what they did,’ one woman from Samlaut told me. ‘Separating loved ones, arresting people – I don’t want just a trial. I want to eat them.’
Although the negotiations to set up a tribunal had been dragging on for years, and despite the violence, Minotti found cause for optimism. She told of how some Khmers she knew talked about meeting up for a family reunion although they weren’t exactly family. They had been together during the Khmer Rouge period, and helped each other, and had survived together. Now their ties were unbreakable.
‘What I’m amazed at,’ she said, ‘is why the good people are good, because I don’t see any reinforcement for people to be good, for being incorrupt, for not stealing and not cheating. And there are a lot of people who are good. It’s just stunning to me.’
One organisation that has been trying to provide a critical understanding of the Khmer Rouge period is the Cambodian Documentation Centre, based in Phnom Penh. The centre was established in 1995 by Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program to facilitate training and field research in Cambodia. It was created for the purpose of collecting as much data on the Khmer Rouge period as possible and has amassed hundreds of thousands of documents, including the confessions and photographs from Tuol Sleng. Should a trial of Khmer Rouge leaders convene the centre will provide much of the evidence. The ultimate aim is for the centre to become a permanent, autonomous institute open to the general public for educational purposes. It is an extraordinary undertaking. One morning I went to meet the director. Chhang Youk, now in his forties, was immaculately turned out in a tie and shirt, streaks of grey running through his hair. Behind his desk sat reams of documents and files on shelves that dwarfed him. His offices have become one of the first ports of call for foreign journalists and he is routinely quoted in the local and international press.
Youk had fled Cambodia as a refugee after the Khmer Rouge were ousted. He later settled in the United States and studied political science in Texas before working with the Dallas police force in the crime-prevention unit before being selected to head the Cambodian Documentation Centre. Youk has a young staff of archivists and researchers, most of whom were children during Khmer Rouge rule. As we sat in his cool, polished offices, they could be seen in the background busily cataloguing, storing, copying and numbering. It is a slow process as new material keeps coming to light. One of the most important undertakings has been the production of a magazine in English and in Khmer called Searching for the Truth, which is distributed all over the country. In it scholars and eyewitnesses provide their analysis and tell their stories. As a result, the centre receives new information as more eyewitnesses come forward. While I was there, a former survivor from S-21 thought to have died suddenly re-emerged. It is a long process of investigating a past that they hope will never be repeated.
Youk believed the future was bright. ‘It’s a new generation now,’ he said confidently. He seemed to believe that a trial was simply a question of time. Almost 200 countries unanimously adopted the agreement between the government and the UN to establish a Khmer Rouge tribunal. He talked of having Cambodians write their own history and expected something similar to a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission in conjunction with a tribunal, with public forums for debate and discussion in villages.
The US Government had been the first to fund the centre with a grant of over a million dollars. I often wondered whether it was healthy to have as the principal backer for all this crucial research a government that had played a role in bringing the perpetrators of the murder to power. ‘One has to be pragmatic,’ said Youk. The US interest in all this, he believed, was to somehow make amends for the past.
I wanted to believe what he was saying, but found little reason for the optimism he espoused. The tribunal, if it was to convene, would only concentrate on the Khmer Rouge years between 1975–9. Only five of the original Khmer Rouge standing committee were still alive and they were old and, in some cases, sick men. Duch had been in prison for several years now. The US meanwhile continued to deploy their B-52s in Afghanistan, perhaps even using the very planes that had unleashed their deadly cargo on Cambodia.
Youk believed that the centre was a crucial stepping-stone to putting an end to the violence and lawlessness. The tribunal would also stop the Khmer Rouge period being used as a yardstick to measure the country’s abysmal human-rights record. ‘It will be a lesson for the younger generation to learn that if you commit the crime of genocide or a crime against humanity or anybody, it doesn’t matter how long it takes, people will be after you.’
Not everyone believed in a trial. In Sopheap was still a believer in the revolution when I first met him. He had been Ieng Sary’s personal secretary when the Khmer Rouge had been in power. During the 1980s, he was a diplomat for the Khmer Rouge, based in Cairo, and had been close to Pol Pot before the ailing leader died. He had been well aware of the killings under the Khmer Rouge. He described himself as ‘a good Khmer Rouge’. He hadn’t defected or changed sides, he said. He had surrendered.
He didn’t see the need for a trial and didn’t understand why only the Khmer Rouge should be held to account and not, for example, the United States. ‘I don’t believe it’s for justice,’ he said contemptuously.
He told me how Khieu Samphan, the former head of state under Pol Pot, was regarded by Cambodians as a gentle man. Although he belonged to the hierarchy, he didn’t kill anybody, he said. ‘Putting this man in court when others were responsible for killing people – what kind of justice is that?’
So who then did he believe should go on trial?
‘I’m not a lawyer or a historian,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘You see, all these people know nothing about the structure, even me.’
Several of In Sopheap’s siblings were killed during the purges, while he himself was implicated on at least six occasions by friends and comrades taken to S-21. ‘Ieng Sary told me,’ he said. And it was Ieng Sary who had saved him. ‘It’s very dangerous to have your personal secretary in prison.’ He told me that he knew for certain that one brother, In Sophann, had been taken to S-21. I gave him a copy of his brother’s confession. It was the first time he had seen it.
His eyes ran back and forth, while his finger ran down the pages. After some time he looked up and raised his eyebrows. ‘How can Pol Pot or Ieng Sary take this as something of a confession? There’s nothing here.’ His brother’s death, he said, was a result of internal conflicts within the regime; he was the victim of a power struggle.
‘I cannot accuse Pol Pot of bringing my brother to the prison. I cannot even accuse Mr Duch of taking my brother to the prison.’ He refused to accuse the leadership of any wrongdoing, ‘because it was very anonymous’.
As someone who had stayed in the Khmer Rouge right until the end and was still a supporter, did he feel in any way responsibile for the millions who had died, I asked. ‘During my work as ambassador I never defended the killing.’
‘But you didn’t condemn it either.’
‘I didn’t have all the elements to judge. Concretely, what evidence do I have?’ I looked at the confession on the table beneath his elbow.
It was a game which he would not or could not see beyond. Instead he chose to see the excesses of the Khmer Rouge period in the abstract, as though what happened had nothing to do with him. And this is what had enabled the Khmer Rouge to murder and kill without conscience. They could hide behind a piece of machinery, deaf to the screams of the people caught up in its grinding cogs.
In Sopheap had supported the revolution all of his adult life. To turn against it now would be too much and perhaps he knew it. Duch had his Christianity, a new structure to be able to face his past. In Sopheap had nothing.
‘There should be a trial,’ said Sokheang back at his home. ‘Everybody agrees with that.’
So why did people like In Sopheap have such difficulty acknowledging their responsibility, I asked.
There were two ways in which it worked, depending on the rank, he said. He gave the example of a recent riot in Phnom Penh which had been organised, most likely by Prime Minister Hun Sen, to look as though it was a spontaneous outburst of anger. The police stood by and watched as a foreign embassy was ransacked and torched. When asked why they didn’t intervene, the police said they hadn’t been given any orders to stop it. And no minister resigned. ‘If this had happened in France or in England or in America,’ said Sokheang, ‘at least the minister in charge of security would have resigned immediately. But here, nobody took responsibility. The Khmer Rouge used the same tactics to explain what had happened. They used to say that any decision of the party was a collective decision. The decision did not come from any one individual.’ That way they weren’t accountable, hiding as they did behind the faceless Organisation, and could believe the claim, possibly quite genuinely, that they were innocent of any wrong-doing. Much like the executions that had taken place in Sihanouk’s day, the idea of giving out one blank cartridge could absolve them of all guilt as long as there was even the smallest possibility that they weren’t responsible.
I reminded Sokheang that Ieng Sary had once said, ‘Let history be the judge.’
‘This is nonsense,’ said Sokheang. ‘As I said before, a crime is a crime, regardless of whether you killed one man, two men or three people or you killed a hundred people.’ He stopped for a moment, lost in thought. ‘I feel that I was responsible,’ he continued looking beyond the railing and into the darkness, ‘because I think that some of my friends who joined the movement and were killed later, joined because of my influence.’
How many of them were killed, I asked.
‘Several dozen,’ he said. Then, ‘Less than a hundred.’
In February 2002, Ke Pauk died of liver complaints. A former Khmer Rouge zone secretary, Ke Pauk had defected to the government in 1998 and was given the rank of brigadier-general in the Cambodian army. Involved in the massive purges of the Eastern Zone, he was considered one of the main candidates to be tried for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was Ke Pauk who had sent Duch’s brothers-in-law to Phnom Penh.
It was a bad omen for the advocates of justice as the negotiations for a tribunal of Khmer Rouge ground wearily along. Time was beginning to run out.
On a cool December morning in 2002, I dropped by Phnom Penh’s Municipal Court, where a former Khmer Rouge commander was being tried. A large crowd of bored-looking Khmer and foreign journalists milled about outside, awaiting news of the proceedings. Overweight Cambodian policemen in motorbike helmets swaggered around with AK-47s and an air of self-importance. Nothing much was happening and the longer I chatted with people the greater the feeling that the verdict would be delayed still further. I was told that Nuon Chea, or Brother No 2, had arrived to testify. I looked through the window at the assembled shadows inside, but couldn’t see him.
Sam Bith, the sixty-nine-year-old former commander, was being tried for ordering the 1994 kidnapping and murder of three backpackers; a Briton, a Frenchman and an Australian. They had been travelling on a train that was attacked by Khmer Rouge guerrillas and taken hostage on their way to Kampot in the south. Ten Cambodians were also killed in the attack. The backpackers were executed weeks after, when negotiations for their release and the payment of a ransom broke down. Their bodies were later found in shallow graves. Their Achilles tendons had been severed to prevent them from escaping. Later, Sam Bith had defected to the government side and was promoted to the rank of general. The British, French and Australian governments pressured the Cambodian Government to have him arrested. Briefly, Cambodia was a story again.
It was then announced that Sam Bith was unwell and that the case would be postponed until the following day. The assembled journalists groaned and gathered their gear, then crammed around the courtroom door, ready for Sam Bith. I kept an eye out for Nuon Chea.
When the doors finally opened there was a scramble of lenses to get a shot of Sam Bith. A van had drawn alongside as a mass of hands and bodies shepherded him into the back. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that another LandCruiser was making for a different gate. I broke from the crowd and ran to follow it out into a busy main street, the large shadow of an elderly man pressed against the frosted window. But it was too late. Nuon Chea had disappeared into Phnom Penh’s busy traffic.
The following week it was announced that Sam Bith had been found guilty of murder, kidnapping, membership of an armed group, robbery, terrorism and destroying public property. He was sentenced to life in prison and ordered, with another former Khmer Rouge commander, to pay fifty million riels (about £7,700) to each of the Khmer families. He had been represented by Duch’s lawyer, Kar Savuth.
The news was regarded as a triumph. ‘I’m delighted,’ said the British ambassador, who described the verdict as a major step ‘towards justice for the families of the three young men’. The ruling was described as ‘a milestone’ by the press. No mention was made of the ten Cambodians who lost their lives.
Most Cambodians I spoke to were unimpressed with the verdict, believing the case was an isolated example and the result of pressure from three Western governments, all of them major donors to Cambodia’s national development programme. As Sokheang told me, ‘We wanted to please the embassies.’
Sam Bith was led away to prison dismissing the verdict as ‘unjust’. Nuon Chea returned home a free man.