(Photo: One of the rare photos of Duch in his Khmer Rouge days. Provided by the Documentation Center of Cambodia.)

By Isabelle Roughol

Thirty years after Vietnamese forces ousting the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh discovered the horrors of the S-21 detention center, its director Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his revolutionary nom de guerre Duch, will now stand to face justice.

Almost a decade after he was arrested and following 18 months of investigation, Duch’s initial hearing in the Trial Chamber of the Khmer Rouge tribunal will mark the much-awaited start of the court’s first trial.

“It’s the beginning-maybe not quite the beginning, but it’s certainly the most public embodiment of the process to bring some justice to the Cambodian people,” said Robert Petit, the court’s international co-prosecutor. “We’re all very much mindful of the importance of it.”

ALMOST STARTING

It’s maybe not quite the beginning because the hearing on which media and public attention has been focused is purely procedural. It is likely to be far less dramatic a curtain-raiser than some might expect. Petit said he feared expectations ran too high, which is why the court felt the need to issue a statement to clarify the process.

“Neither the Accused Person, nor any witnesses, experts, or Civil Parties will speak at the Initial Hearing on any matters of substance,” the Jan 23 statement read.

Anne Heindel, legal adviser at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, agreed. “It’s going to start looking like a real trial a month later,” she said.

The Trial Chamber will first consider the list of potential witnesses and experts submitted by the prosecution and defense teams, as well as the applications of civil parties, according to the internal rules of the Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia. The judges will determine if all the proposed witnesses and civil parties are relevant to the case, and deal with technical matters such as how many days a week the court will convene.

The parties may also raise preliminary objections as to the jurisdiction of the courts or other reasons why Duch’s prosecution should be terminated, according to the rules.

“Duch may very well raise an objection to the jurisdiction of the court based on his eight years of detention,” Heindel said. Because his rights were violated by such a long pretrial detention, his defense team could argue that the whole court’s proceedings were “tainted” by it and should be dismissed, she explained, adding however that this was very unlikely.

Once the Substantive Hearing gets started, in late March or April, Duch will be the first to take the stand.

A PECULIAR DEFENDENT

Duch stands out as a defendant: he recognizes some responsibility for the crimes committed at S-21. The degree of responsibility he holds will be the crux of the matter.

“Our client has always said he was ready to explain himself before the Judges and the victims. That is what he will do,” Duch’s French lawyer, Franìois Roux, wrote in an e-mail.

Duch gave an interview in May 1999 to the Far Eastern Economic Review that revealed he was living in Samlot, near Battambang. People there knew him as Ta Pin, a Christian convert, teacher and aid worker, and described him at the time as kind and well mannered.

“He explained that he was led to speak out in 1999 because ‘it was impossible not [to] tell the truth about S-21′ after he heard that ‘Pol Pot denied the existence of S-21 and claimed that it was an invention of the Vietnamese,’” the 45-page indictment against Duch noted.

Duch went into hiding after the 1999 interview but was found and arrested May 9 of that year. He was initially charged by the Military Court of Phnom Penh, which kept him in detention by regularly filing new charges against him: first, crimes against domestic security in May 1999; then genocide in September 1999; then crimes against humanity in 2002; and finally war crimes and crimes against internationally protected persons in 2005.

On July 31, 2007, the newly created ECCC took custody of Duch. The mixed national and international court was starting its work, 10 years after the UN and Cambodian government began negotiating its creation.

THE CASE

Duch’s trial will be an opportunity to establish the facts of history in a way that scholars have not yet done, looking at physical crimes on the ground and confronting several versions of events, said DC-Cam Director Youk Chhang.

“I think victims and perpetrators tend to have selective memory. It will be interesting to have both sides speak in front of a court,” he said.

Duch’s indictment details the establishment of the S-21 detention center as well as the related Choeung Ek killing fields and Prey Sar, or S-24, reeducation camp, and the alleged crimes that were committed there.

S-21 became fully operational in October 1975 and Duch became its chairman in March 1976. The prison applied the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s policy of systematic “smashing,” or killing, of suspected enemies. S-21 had a political mission, first to eliminate opponents such as supporters of Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic, then to carry out internal purges.

Detainees were systematically interrogated and tortured to obtain confessions, according to the indictment. The confessions did not serve to prove guilt, which was assumed, but rather were extracted for political purposes and justification of the regime’s actions.

The indictment contends that there was no way out of Tuol Sleng, but DC-Cam documents that surfaced after the close of investigation showed that at least 177 detainees were released.

The prosecutors established that at least 12,380 men, women and children were executed at S-21, but as records may have been lost and some prisoners not registered, the numbers are likely higher. They also argue that Duch had to sign off on every execution. When one “enemy” was identified, their entire family, including children, was almost systematically marked for execution too.

Duch is charged with crimes against humanity-namely murder, extermination, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, rape, persecutions on political grounds, and other inhumane acts-as well as with grave breaches of the Geneva Convention of 1949, which regulates the treatment of prisoners of war. Charges of murder and torture under Cambodian national law were also added. He is prosecuted for directly committing, ordering, planning and instigating the crimes as well as for his responsibility for the crimes of his subordinates.

Duch is also a suspect in the ECCC╒s second investigation, along with four former Khmer Rouge senior leaders also in detention: Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two in the regime; Khieu Samphan, the formal DK head of state; and Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, both ministers in the regime. That case concerns all serious violations of international humanitarian law and Cambodian law under Democratic Kampuchea.

In his defense, Duch said he was “both an actor in criminal acts and also a hostage of the regime,” according to the indictment. He said he became paralyzed with fear as he progressively realized the criminal nature of the regime, to the point of spending day and night sleeping or just sitting in S-21’s sculpture room. He added he had tried but failed to escape his post and feared retribution against his family.

“The defense team will participate, where it is concerned, in this judiciary mission,” Roux, Duch’s lawyer, said. “While having the greatest respect for the victims, but also while defending with conviction the right of the accused to an equitable trial, which means a trial that takes into account all aspects of the context in which the facts occurred and that doesn’t make of the accused the scapegoat of the tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea.”

(DROP CAP)

Duch’s case is arguably easier than the second case under investigation, which is more spread out in time and place and which, as Petit said, requires ╥linking architects to their works.╙

“Things are so complicated in Cambodian history. The Duch case is less complicated. It’s one place; he did this and that. The other cases will be bigger picture,” Heindel said. “It’s a good story for the court to tell Cambodians. It’s so straight-forward.”

Although from a legal standpoint, the tribunal will be solely concerned with the guilt or innocence of one man, the stakes of this first trial reach further.

Because it is less complex and because it is the first, Duch’s case is likely to serve as a legal practice range for all parties at the ECCC. Points that the internal rules have left up to interpretation will be clarified. For instance, will judges do most of the questioning of witnesses, as is the practice in the French civil law system, or will they leave the prosecutors to battle it out with the defense in the common law style used in the US and Great Britain?

“We’re going to learn how it works, how this particular chamber will judge,” Petit said. “It is clear that in this aspect, it will be a seminal trial for us.”

The prosecution expects the trial to last a full 12 weeks from the beginning of the Substantive Hearing. It would take four out of the five judges to hand out a conviction, and the verdict must be issued within 90 days after the closing arguments. That means if all goes according to previsions, Duch’s judgment will be rendered before the end of the rainy season.

For victims and the rest of Cambodia, the trial can bring a welcome sense of justice, although it is too soon to determine what impact it will have on the country’s culture of impunity and on the Cambodian people’s expectations of a court of law, all interviewed agreed.

“It’s certainly important for Cambodian history that a process you can see, you can hear is finally happening,” Youk Chhang said.

Duch’s case, he added, is also much less significant to most Cambodians than those to follow: the trial of the senior leaders who stand accused not of at least 12,380 deaths, but of the 1 to 2 million estimated deaths of Democratic Kampuchea. Why Duch alone is being prosecuted, and not the directors of the 197 other detention centers around the country, is another question that will need to be answered, he added.

Beyond the historical blanks to fill and the sense of justice to regain, Duch’s trial and others to come can address the hardest questions to face.

“I don’t think it’s going to change how we think of the Khmer Rouge regime, but it’s going to show it was done by human beings,” Youk Chhang said.

“It’s important for us to understand ourselves, the living, because these were human beings. Perhaps when he accepts responsibility, we’ll start to understand it’s a human responsibility and God cannot take it away.”

(Photo: Visitors to the prison-turned-museum look at photos of the prisoners of the S-21 detention center. S-21 was discovered by Vietnamese troops in January 1979. About 16,000 people are estimated to have been killed there. 10 December 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol

From the jungles of Kompong Cham province to the living room of a royal residence, Cambodians who could get their hands on a radio in January 1979 listened attentively for news of a military advance against the Khmer Rouge in Eastern Cambodia. Vietnamese troops with a small contingent of Cambodians—the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, mostly disaffected Khmer Rouge soldiers who had only recently fled internal purges—launched an attack on Christmas Day 1978 and were rapidly making their way through eastern Cambodia.

Khieu Kanharith, now Minister of Information, was in a youth brigade in Kampong Cham and in charge of listening to radio broadcasts and making daily reports to the head of the labor camp, he said. Distant broadcasters told him of the front’s creation in early December and of the troops’ advance until he himself could hear the cannons.

“On 7 January, the Khmer Rouge radio went silent. On the morning of 8 January, I heard from [Voice of America] that Phnom Penh fall,” he said.

In Phnom Penh too, foreign radio brought news of the Vietnamese advance.

“And it is thanks to these radio broadcasts that I am aware of the situation of our country: creation of the front of HE Heng Samrin [who led the UFNSK] and ‘liberation’ of wide swaths of the Cambodian national territory, in the South, South East, South West,” wrote Retired King Norodom Sihanouk in notes published on his Web site in December 2006.

“My son (the future King) N Sihamoni and I exchange in silence and with a wide smile of hope and joy the birth and expansion of the liberation front presided by HE Heng Samrin.”

Sihanouk did not get to see Phnom Penh’s fall as with the thunder of cannons approaching, he was put on a plane to China the previous night.

On Jan 7, 1979, the Vietnamese and Khmer rebel troops entered a deserted Phnom Penh without encountering much resistance. They arrived in a desolate city that had been emptied of its residents since the Khmer Rouge’s takeover on April 17, 1975. The few leaders and workers that remained in the capital under the Khmer Rouge’s reign had left hurriedly. In his book “Brother Enemy,” Nayan Chanda describes banquets meant to celebrate a Khmer Rouge victory left to rot away as the famished workers who were about to eat them were forced to evacuate.

Photos of the time show a ghost town with trash piled up in the streets the only sign there might have been humans there. Garbage was thrown behind roadblocks on secondary roads, according to Khieu Kanharith, who said he entered Phnom Penh about two weeks after the Khmer Rouge left it. Other streets were used as storage space, he said: plates and silverware were piled neatly in front of the current Ministry of Health on Kampuchea Krom Boulevard.

“And if you want to have clothes, it’s another area. If you want to have rice, it’s [the] Old Market,” Khieu Kanharith recalled.

“Very clean, very in order,” he added.

Things weren’t so orderly outside the city; thousands of former city dwellers had converged toward Phnom Penh but were kept out of the city. Vietnamese troops blocked the way and only those hired by the newly installed administration of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea could enter the capital.

Turn Saray, now ADHOC president and then a young father, made the perilous journey to the city with his family aboard a small boat, pausing along the way to earn their daily rice and avoid remaining pockets of Khmer Rouge. They were not allowed in the city, and outside Phnom Penh, he said, the atmosphere was that of a refugee camp, with too little food, water and medicine.

“I slept on the ground for a few months because there were not enough houses. My entire family slept on the ground,” he said.

Getting regular income was difficult, but at least, unlike under the Khmer Rouge, families were now free to be entrepreneurial to survive, he said. He earned his family’s rice by transporting people on his boat, bartering and taking a collection of odd jobs.

For Turn Saray, January 7 is not only the liberation of Phnom Penh; it’s the day of his personal liberation. Forced to accompany Khmer Rouge soldiers in their retreat through the forests of northern Kratie province, his family did their best to lag behind, under the pretense that the children and elderly could not follow and in the hope Vietnamese troops could catch up and liberate them. They did. Others, in the tens of thousands, were forced to accompany their captors to the Northwest, eventually landing in refugee camps along the Thai border.

“January 7, to me and my family, signifies a liberation, the day of liberation from the atrocity of the Khmer Rouge. But seeing many Vietnamese troops, we also had the feeling that our country would be dominated by Vietnam,” Turn Saray said, adding that nonetheless, joy overcame fear.

Pen Sovann, one of the founders of the front, a former prime minister in the 1980s and now an HRP member, said Cambodian rebels alone were not strong enough to topple the Khmer Rouge and needed Vietnamese help.

“The agreement was to establish friendships for mutual understanding, not to abuse the border, not to interfere with each other,” he said of a treaty between the PRK and Vietnam signed Feb 18, 1979.

“But on the contrary after the liberation, they abused the territory and they wanted this part and that part of Cambodia…. They wanted to colonize us and to control us,” he added. The Vietnamese troops remained in the country until 1989.

The significance of Jan 7, 1979—the symbolic date of both the fall of Cambodia’s most cruel regime and the onset of a decade of foreign occupation—remains a point of contention 30 years later.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, then 26, was part of the Cambodian front that ousted the Khmer Rouge, and the government, political heir of Jan 7, made the date a national holiday.

“January 7 was a historical day. It gave us a new birthday, and I want everyone to remember it in their hearts,” said CPP lawmaker Cheam Yeap.

This year, the 30^th anniversary will be celebrated with a rally expected to bring 20,000 students to Olympic Stadium. That drew the ire of opposition leaders who say there is too much ambivalence about the date to make it a day of national celebration. They prefer the anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on Oct 23, 1991, which is not a national holiday anymore.

“April 17 [1975] and January 7 [1979] are inextricably associated: both of them are communist Frankensteins. Celebrating January 7 without having in mind a broader historical perspective, is playing into the hands of the current Phnom Penh regime whose only raison d’etre was to ‘free’ the Cambodian people from the Khmer Rouge with communist Vietnam’s decisive but not unselfish help,” SRP President Sam Rainsy wrote in an e-mail.

Even 30 years after the fact, one’s position in the “liberation v invasion” debate is a quick identifier of their political alliances.

NRP spokesman Suth Dina once vehemently opposed the anniversary as former president of the Khmer Front Party. Now the NRP has realigned with the government, Suth Dina said he and the party would no longer oppose the national holiday.

“The overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime and the assumption of control of Cambodia by the Vietnamese in support of their Cambodian protégés is a notably ambiguous issue,” historian Milton Osborne noted in an e-mail. “Deciding where an observer stands on that issue determines how one describes what took place, and its significance.”

Additional reporting by Yun Samean

(Photo: The Cambodian flag flies over the Preah Vihear temple, at the center of a border dispute with Thailand. 7 November 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol

A border left ill-defined by a century-old French treaty lead to armed clashes between Thailand and one of its neighbors, killing 1,000 people on both sides.

The scenario may sound eerily similar to the current standoff between Thailand and Cambodia, but the fight in question took place in the 1980s, when Thailand and Laos had their own bloody dispute over a contested piece of border territory.

After sporadic fighting in 1980 and again in 1984 over three border villages that both countries claimed, the Thai and Lao armies engaged in a contained battle from December 1987 to February 1988.

Thailand’s disagreement with Laos over the small disputed area in Laos’ Xainyaburi province stemmed from different interpretations of the same early 20th century border treaties, especially the 1907 French-Siam convention that used natural watersheds to delimit the borders between the Siam kingdom and France’s Indochina. These are the same treaties that Thailand is today disputing with Cambodia over territory around Preah Vihear temple.

Thailand didn’t negate the 1907 treaties, but argued over which Mekong tributary actually formed the border between with Laos, wrote Ronald Bruce St John in “The Land Boundaries of Indochina,” which was published in 1998 by the International Boundaries Research Unit.

Corruption also played its part in the 1987 hostilities, claimed Robert Karniol, a defense analyst writing for Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper.

“Basically, a Thai company was harvesting timber in this area, having facilitated this by paying off both Thai and Laos army personnel. The fighting flared when the company, on Thai army advice, stopped paying the Laotians. It ended when they started paying again,” Karniol wrote in an e-mail.

After the fighting, and the 1,000 casualties, the border returned to a status quo with Thailand and Laos later forming a joint commission to demarcate the border, whose work is apparently nearing completion 20 years later.

But the short conflict was militarily significant as Laotian forces proved stronger than expected, Karniol added.

“[T]he fighting soon deteriorated into a stalemate as heavily favored Thai forces failed to push a dogged Laotian defense off Hill 1428,” St John wrote. “It was only after suffering combined casualties of more than 1,000 troops that Thailand and Laos agreed to a cease-fire,” he said.

Laotian troops were battle-hardened by years of fighting anti-communist forces and were well supplied by their Vietnamese allies, said Tim Huxley, executive director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies-Asia based in Singapore. On the other hand, Thai forces were well equipped but poorly led, as “constant politicking in Bangkok” distracted senior officers, he wrote in an e-mail.

The conflict ended when it had escalated to such a degree that the only way out for both sides was a full-scale war, Karniol said. Fortunately, Thailand chose to cool down the confrontation, and though the border with Lao has remained a touchy subject, tensions subsided as Thailand’s economic investment in Laos grew in the following years.

Similarities regarding the political and historical circumstances of the Thai-Lao clash, known as the Baan Rom Klao conflict, and the current dispute between Thailand and Cambodia are striking, but that’s where the likeness ends.

The Baan Rom Klao conflict unfolded in a world where East and West were still a relevant distinction. Allies of both countries, the West and Eastern bloc, played a role they are unlikely to play today if the conflict near Preah Vihear temple escalates.

Vietnam equipped and trained Laotian forces and also frequently clashed with Thai forces in the 1980s on the Thai-Cambodian border, following its occupation of Cambodia after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, Huxley said.

News reports of the time recount Thailand accusing Laos of having brought in fighters from fellow communist state Cuba, though Vientiane denied it at the time.

“[C]ontemporary Cambodia is neither as well-armed as Vietnam was by the Soviet Union during the 1980s, and unlike Laos in the late 1980s it does not have Vietnamese support,” Huxley added.

Thailand, on the other hand, has enjoyed decades of military cooperation with the US.

But the international community appears to be steering clear of Thailand’s current dispute with Cambodia, at least as far as the public can see.

Foreign governments have at best expressed concern and urged for peaceful bilateral resolution though Cambodia has on several occasions threatened to take the issue to the UN, without consequences.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an Oct 15 statement after fighting killed three Cambodian soldiers at the border called for bilateral talks only.

In Asean, Malaysia voiced concern, but Foreign Minister Rais Yatim said Wednesday that his country would not intervene or play a mediator role in the dispute, according to Malaysian national news agency Bernama.

So far, Cambodia and Thailand stand alone, face to face.

“There might be some comparison drawn with the Baan Rom Klao conflict in the sense that a minor scuffle can threaten to escalate into a larger conflict,” Karniol said of the current Thai-Cambodia standoff.

“But, ultimately, cooler heads prevailed then and are likely to prevail now,” he said.

Qian Hai, spokesman of the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh, expressed a similar sentiment.

“They’re both our good friends [Cambodia and Thailand],” Qian Hai said by telephone Thursday.

“They can settle down their dispute through negotiations, we hope,” he added.

(Photo: A classroom turned torture chamber at the former S-21 Khmer Rouge detention center. 10 December 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol and Prak Chanthul

The 500 seats of the tribunal’s public room were filled Monday morning as the first trial for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime opened in Phnom Penh. Ambassadors and other dignitaries sat in the front, with NGO workers and other foreign visitors sprinkled throughout. But the majority in the room were Cambodians of all ages, some civil parties and victims, others students visibly too young to have known Democratic Kampuchea.

They spoke in low voices while waiting for the judges to enter. Duch, the former chairman of the S-21 detention center, whom they came to see, sat between two guards.

“He’s there, in the white shirt,” said one man, pointing.

“He must really feel like an animal in a cage,” his neighbor said of the glass wall separating the court from the public, reminiscent of those that isolate dangerous predators in metropolitan zoos.

Duch scanned the audience with a peaceful gaze that didn’t betray he stands accused of crimes against humanity and at least 12,380 deaths. It was the only chance for many to get a look at the fabled man; once at the bar, he had his back to the public for the remainder of the day.

“The trial has been delayed for many years already,” said Dy Ratha, 62, of Phnom Penh. “I want Duch to say everything. I will be satisfied if he speaks the truth. His confession will mean that the court will have found some sort of justice for me.”

Duch spoke, politely answering Presiding Judge Nil Nonn’s questions about his identity, and later reading along and taking notes as his indictment was recited. His apparent lack of reaction—only a momentarily heaving chest possibly betraying emotion—irritated some.

“He didn’t feel any shock, but we looked at him with shock,” said Yim Ing, 45, who lost three relatives to the Khmer Rouge and traveled from Prey Veng province for the trial.

The 3-hour reading of Duch’s 45-page indictment bored some to the point of dozing off, but not those for whom the exposé of torture and executions was a reminder of experiences lived. In an otherwise silent courtroom, a woman cried out and held her head in her hands, refusing a neighbor’s offering to help her outside for a break. Tears welled up in the eyes of other women by her side. Dy Ratha said she chose to pray during the reading.

The court’s decision to adjourn at 3 pm, pushing opening statements to today, sparked a murmur of disappointment in the audience. One man cried out at the court.

“I’m shocked that the whole day isn’t being used,” said Amnesty International’s Cambodia researcher Brittis Edman, who explained she was concerned that victims who have made the expense of traveling here for the hearing would be frustrated. But, she added, the day remained positive.

“It’s more of a historical day than a disappointing day,” she said.

The day was not only significant for the survivors of S-21 or the relatives of those who didn’t leave the prison camp alive.

“To me, [Duch] represents all the Khmer Rouge,” said Oum Nuphea, who was 10 years old when the communist soldiers entered Phnom Penh. His father, a pilot and colonel in the republican army, was sent for reeducation and never returned.

“He didn’t go to S-21, but in camp S-X, somewhere,” said Oum Nuphea, now 44 and a pilot too. His mother also died, as well as three siblings. After 3 years and 10 months of forced labor. He said he expected explanations from Duch, maybe an apology, but that what matters to him is a guilty verdict.

“I’m coming back here. I am happy to turn the page,” he said. “A never-ending story is not good for people.”

(Photo: cover of the survey and report “So We Never Forget.” Copyright: UC-Berkeley Human Rights Center.)

By Isabelle Roughol

A survey of public opinion released Wednesday found that while most Cambodians are interested in finding justice for victims of the Khmer Rouge, 85 percent say they have little or no knowledge of what the Khmer Rouge tribunal is actually doing.

Confidence in the tribunal runs high, however, with Cambodians roughly twice as likely to trust the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia as they do the national courts, according to the survey conducted by the Human Rights Center at the University of California-Berkeley.

But fewer than 1 in 10 of those surveyed knew that five Khmer Rouge regime suspects are awaiting trial at the ECCC, and only 3.3 percent of respondents could name the detainees.

More than a third of the respondents said they didn’t know what to expect from the court. More than half, however, knew the tribunal is a mixed national and international court.

“People are saying they want to know more about the court, they want to wish it well, but they don’t know much about the court,” said Eric Stover, one of the researchers.

“The problem is outreach always seems to be the poor orphan that’s left out of the funding pocket,” Stover said, adding the ECCC should do more to communicate and not leave it up to NGOs.

The survey, which was presented at a workshop Wednesday in Phnom Penh, was conducted in September and October on a sample of 1,000 people in 125 communes. It covered knowledge and expectations of the ECCC, as well as attitudes and feelings about the Khmer Rouge era. ECCC staff will be briefed separately about the findings today.

The question is, “Shouldn’t people be more aware at this stage when trials are about to start?” said Patrick Vinck, also a researcher.

“It’s very important. These trials won’t have any meaning if people don’t understand what’s happening, don’t know what’s happening, don’t take ownership of it,” he added.

The main reproach made to the ECCC was its slow pace-almost one in three respondents recommended that it speed up trials-a concern that may now be alleviated by the recent announcement that the trial of S-21 detention center chairman Duch will start Feb 17.

About two-thirds of respondents thought judges would be fair and the court neutral. Corruption was a concern for only about 3 percent of respondents, but allegations should be immediately addressed so perception of the court remains positive, researchers said.

ECCC Public Affairs Chief Helen Jarvis, who is responsible for the court’s outreach, maintained the results of the survey were positive. She also challenged the validity of some of the survey’s results, saying that people may have shown “modesty” when answering.

“I am quite encouraged by the level of expectations and confidence in the court. If we compare with confidence in other institutions such as the court system and the media, it’s very positive,” she said.

Based on the survey results, the type of outreach efforts by the ECCC would not change, but their frequency would probably increase, she said, citing efforts such as public service announcements and a TV spot in the making.

The survey also found a lingering bitterness about Democratic Kampuchea and a strong desire to see those responsible for violence punished: 82.9 percent still feel hatred toward the regime, 37 percent want revenge, 71.5 percent want to see them hurt or miserable. And half of those born after 1979 still feel victimized by the regime.

“Very few people said ‘forgive them.’ Very few people said ‘forget it, we want to move on,’” Vinck said.

The study also shows that four out of five Cambodians want to know more about the Khmer Rouge, with all their current information coming from personal experience or friends and family, and little from schools or the media.

Expectations therefore run high for the ECCC to both administer severe punishments and unveil the truth about the regime, particularly how Cambodians could kill so many fellow Cambodians, researchers explained.

“One of my greatest fears is what I call ‘great expectations,’” Stover said, adding that many people might expect from the tribunal what is in fact the work of a truth commission.

“When people go to testify in a court, they don’t go just for eyewitness reports, they want to know why. Courts want only the facts.”

(Photo: The White Building in Phnom Penh. Designed as a model of modern, middle-income housing by Vann Molyvann in the 1960s, the decrepit building is now the symbol of the country’s urban ruin. 22 August 2008. By Isabelle Roughol.)

By Isabelle Roughol

It’s been two years since Vann Molyvann last stood here. He doesn’t like to see his masterpiece “because of all this,” he says, pointing with an air of disdain to a non-descript concrete box building standing on what should have been the 40-hectare, green grounds around the Olympic stadium. Now that much of the land has been sold off and built on, Vann Molyvann feels his vision for the sports complex, which he built in 1963 and 1964, has been compromised. So he stays away.

Narrating a tour of Phnom Penh organized by the French Cultural Center on Sunday, Vann Molyvann—the figurehead of the New Khmer Architecture movement of the 1960s—expressed deep concern for the state of urban development and the future of the capital.

“I am very worried. Look at the catastrophe that is happening here,” he says looking around the stadium grounds. “It is in danger of disappearing—this stadium,” adding the land there could go for $1000 per square meter.

Asked if he thinks the stadium could be razed to make way for development, he adds, “They are capable of destroying everything.”

Yet , while in the stands overlooking the football field, he points—with the knowing smile of a man who has seen what is now history—to the spot where General Charles de Gaulle made his 1966 Phnom Penh speech. He reminisces about the buffalo carts that carried the earth to build the stadium mount and the shaky introduction of motor vehicles. (A man flipped a construction truck into a pond and had to leap out “like a frog.”)

At every one of his works on the circuit—the Foreign Language Institute, the Olympic stadium, the Chaktomuk Theater and the Senate—he speaks with pride of his creations.

“He is someone who is fascinated and fascinating,” said Alain Arnaudet, director of the French Cultural Center, by telephone Friday. “It is rare to have the chance to bring together in the same place an architect and his work.“

The rarity of the occasion wasn’t lost on many: When the two planned busses quickly filled, Vann Molyvann enthusiasts took to motos and tuk-tuks, forming a motorcade of sorts for the 81-year-old architect.

“Vann Molyvann is my superstar,” said Yam Sok Ly, a 24-year-old architecture student at the Royal University of Fine Arts who found a seat on a bus. “It’s not because he is famous; it’s because of his ideas,” he said, adding he was inspired by Vann Molyvann’s use of natural ventilation and hoped to create “a building that’s really suitable for Cambodia, not a building that’s suitable for air con.”

But in most of the buildings shown, natural ventilations had been cut off with glass windows and open spaces filled up with more construction. At the Foreign Language Institute, for instance, Vann Molyvann had designed science labs with openings in the ceiling to shine natural light on each lab bench. With the room transformed into a language classroom, the architect’s choice now makes little sense.

With humor, Vann Molyvann apologizes for such modifications. He laughs off the destruction of his building for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers—“Here is the New Khmer Architecture,” he said jokingly, pointing to the glass structure of the new, Chinese-made building.

But his smile fades when the conversation invariably returns to the current evolution of the capital.

“Everywhere [in the world] you have parks that are not sacrificed to build Chinese blocks. That doesn’t exist in civilized countries,” he says of the filling of Boeng Kak lake.  “Internationally, there is absolutely no government that expropriates land to serve private interests.”

Things could be different, Vann Molyvann argues. In the doctoral thesis he recently defended at a Paris university and that he is making into a book, Vann Molyvann presents a development plan for Phnom Penh, Siem Reap-Angkor and Sihanoukville that centers on water: irrigation, potable water distribution, flood control and the development of coherent cities around their water points. (Vann Molyvann will present this thesis at a lecture in French and Khmer at 6.30 pm Thursday at the French Cultural Center.)

“We tried, for the city of Phnom Penh in particular, to develop normally with an urban plan…. We thought we were going toward a strong democratization of Cambodia,” he says of the early 1990s, when he returned from exile and helped draft building and zoning codes that could improve and preserve capital. But, “there’s no political will to enforce them.”