Under close guard in a military prison in Phnom Penh, a solitary old man awaits trial for one of the 20th century’s worst episodes of mass murder.

A tribunal backed by the United Nations to examine the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is due to get under way later this year after a decade of foot-dragging, political obstruction and prevarication.

Yet with thousands of killers still living freely, including some of the most important figures from the old regime, there is so far only one accused of crimes against humanity: a former maths teacher-turned-torturer called Duch.

He survived the fall of the regime to become a born-again Christian, although it has never been established exactly how repentant he is.

The man born Kak Kek lev in 1941 or 1942 was never a top party leader, but he did head the internal security organisation, Santebal. He ran a notorious interrogation and torture centre called Tuol Sleng in a converted Phnom Penh school, which sent about 14,000 men, women and children to their deaths.

One of his signed execution orders from that time was for 17 children who failed to inform the party of their parents’ alleged treachery. He insisted on inmates being meticulously photographed before their executions, a stark black and white record that is viewed by tourists who visit the Tuol Sleng museum today.

Only seven of the thousands of prisoners who entered the interrogation centre are known to have emerged alive. The rest were sent to the Choeung Ek execution site to be killed with a blow from a hoe, or a cut throat, to save bullets.

Duch was arrested because in 1999 a British photographer came across him in a refugee camp, where he was working for an American charity, and recognised him.

Duch told the photographer, Nic Dunlop: “I’ve done very bad things before in my life. Now it is time to bear the consequences of my actions.” Whether he still feels that is unclear. His lawyer has said that he was following orders and would have been killed had he refused.

His discovery was heralded as raising the prospect of a trial and a proper accounting for Year Zero, when the Khmer Rouge’s brutal Maoist dreams of creating a communist agrarian paradise degenerated into an orgy of killing.

From 1975 to 1979 an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians were executed or starved to death, a quarter of the population — a higher rate of killing than in Nazi-occupied Europe or in Rwanda. Officials with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, a mixture of Cambodian and international judges working for the UN and the Phnom Penh Government, still hope to charge as many as ten defendants.

Senior leaders, many of whom are in their eighties, may be too old and infirm to stand the expected three years of trial, however. One, Ta Mok, who was known as “the butcher”, died last year.

The three main survivors who may stand trial are Khieu Samphan, the former figurehead President, Ieng Sary, the Foreign Minister and Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue — all of whom are living freely in Cambodia.

There is speculation in the Cambodian capital that international donors may be satisfied with one conviction — Duch — if senior party figures are deemed too infirm to stand trial. This raises the prospect of the former Tuol Sleng commandant becoming a scapegoat.

Helen Jarvis, the tribunal’s chief of public affairs, said it had not been decided when the defendants would be indicted, so a planned July start now looks impossible. She said: “We are closer than we have ever been to holding the tribunal. There are some procedural obstacles, but I don’t see them as terminal.”

Prince Thomico Sisowath, many of whose royal relatives died at the hands of the regime, is scathing about the few likely defendants and believes the hearing will not be wide-ranging enough to examine the chain of command which facilitated the killings.

“My view is that the tribunal is stalled,” he said. “The international community wants it to be a showcase, but the Government wants it to be a tool to clear some of the current leaders.” Hun Sen, the Prime Minister, was a Khmer Rouge cadre who left the party before the mass murder started. Many other powerful ministers and businessmen have connections to the old regime.

Red terror

800,000 The figure that former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot put on the total death toll

1.7m Figure for total death toll from US “Yale Cambodian Genocide Project”

4 Number of years Khmer Rouge held power

$21m The amount Japan agreed to donate to support the UNbacked trials

Source: Yale Cambodian Genocide Project, BBC News, tourismcambodia.com

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