Victim's kin hoped Duch would suffer
A brother of a New Zealander killed by the Khmer Rouge faced the man who ordered his death.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The brother of a New Zealander tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge three decades ago told the man who ordered the execution yesterday that he wished him a similarly gruesome fate.
Kerry Hamill was 28 when his yacht was blown off course into Cambodian waters in 1978, and he was captured by the radical communist regime. He and a shipmate, Briton John Dewhirst, were taken to Phnom Penh's S-21 prison and later killed.
Kerry's brother, Rob, wept as he testified at the trial of S-21's commander, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch - the first of five senior Khmer Rouge defendants to be tried by a U.N.-assisted tribunal and the only one to acknowledge responsibility for his actions.
"Duch, at times I have wanted to smash you, to use your words. The same way that you smashed so many others," Rob Hamill said, sitting in a suit and tie, his hands folded before him. "Smash" was the euphemism the Khmer Rouge used when ordering executions.
"At times, I have imagined you shackled, starved, whipped, and clubbed, viciously," said Hamill, referring to some of the horrors faced by prisoners. Duch sat behind him, expressionless.
"I have wanted you to suffer the way you made Kerry and so many others" suffer, Hamill said.
About a dozen Westerners and other foreigners were among the estimated 16,000 people held at the prison before being killed. The regime's radical policies while in power from 1975 to 1979 caused the deaths of about 1.7 million people nationwide by execution, overwork, disease, and malnutrition.
Rob Hamill, 45, a rower who represented New Zealand at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, said his family learned of Kerry's death 16 months after he disappeared. Their parents read in a newspaper that he was executed after two months at S-21.
Asked by judges for his response, Duch repeated his earlier testimony that he received orders to kill the foreigners and burn their bodies. He asked for forgiveness from the victims' families and said he was not offended by being blamed.
Duch is charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture, and murder.