Cambodia: Into The Shadows

For 20 years now, Tuol Sleng has been a notorious memorial to the Khmer Rouge killers who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Bump down a broken back street in the capital of Phnom Penh, and you come upon a former girls' school, bare except for the rusted beds on which Pol Pot's men interrogated victims, and the U.S. munitions cans they used as toilets. Display cases are littered with the hoes and shovels and iron staves they used to brain people to death; along the walls, hundreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed or terrified, recalling the people, often children and often themselves Khmer Rouge executioners, who were executed here. One large wall is dominated by a map of Cambodia made up entirely of skulls. Outside, in rough letters, the regulations of the place are written out by hand, in English and Cambodian: "While getting lashes and electrification, you must not cry at all."

The Museum of Genocidal Crime, as the road signs call it, has long been one of the principal tourist sites in Phnom Penh, long enough for locals to have stubbed out scores of cigarettes in the eyes of Pol Pot in one photograph. But this spring the monument to the past came into the news again when the man who had overseen the torture for four years, Kang Khek Ieu, generally known as Duch, was suddenly discovered, by foreign journalists, in a western Cambodian village. He was running a crushed-ice stall in the countryside and had certificates of baptism to prove his status as a born-again Christian. The man who oversaw the execution of at least 16,000 of his countrymen had papers from American churches testifying to his "personal leadership" and "team-building" skills.

Like many of his Khmer Rouge comrades, Duch, now 56 and in detention, had been a teacher (educated, it seems, in schools funded by U.S. foreign aid); unlike them, though, he admitted that he had "done very bad things in my life." More recently, he claimed, he had been working for international relief organizations, helping out in local camps. "He was our best worker," said a refugee official when told that the man who had tried to protect children from typhoid was the notorious torturer who had once written "Kill them all" over lists of nine-year-olds.

Thus life hobbles on in a still bleeding, often broken country in which every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself lost in a lightless labyrinth of sorts, in which every path leads to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. Last year Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in for a while to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as the Butcher, was captured in March and now awaits trial. For the first time in more than a generation, there are no Cambodians in refugee camps across the border in Thailand, and the Khmer Rouge, held responsible for the death of 1.7 million Cambodians during their four years in power alone, are silent.