Kerry Hamill’s “true” confession is brilliant. He confesses to being a CIA spy who was trained by such luminaries as Ray Davies (lead singer of The Kinks), Colonel Sanders (bespectacled old American with a bow-tie who set up KFC), and Professor Pepper (probably a reference to the Beatles album). He says he was taught communication skills by a Mrs S. Tarr (his mother’s name was Esther) and psychological training by a Major Ruse (meaning a con, of course). To have the presence of mind to make all that up whilst being tortured is hard to comprehend. No wonder his brother broke down in tears when he explained the genius of the confessional rubbish to Duch during the trial in 2012. Duch started off as a Maths teacher, then became the man who tortured and killed people for a living, then was discovered in 1999 hiding in a Christian Aid centre in the Cambodian jungle. He got his sentence increased to life after he had the nerve to appeal that the original sentence of 19 years was too harsh! If you see the Killing Fields museum a few km South of Phnom Penh where Duch sent them to executed after extracting his confessions you’ll know why he deserves to never see the light of day again. At the Choeung Ek Killing Fields they have found over 8000 skulls but believe there are several thousand more still in the ground. 5000 skulls are displayed in the glass walled Stupa in the middle of the Killing Fields site. Bullets were too expensive so people were clubbed to death, or had their throat cut then pushed into the mass grave to bleed to death and covered in DDT to speed up the decomposition. Pol Pot believed that “To kill a weed you have to remove it, roots and all”, which means that the entire family of every traitor has to be killed because it is “better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake”, so he killed everyone. To kill children and babies (so that they can’t take revenge) the executioners picked them up by the feet and smashed their head against a tree then threw them into the pit. We know this because they found thousands of fragments of bone and hair and flesh ingrained in the bark of a big tree next to a mass grave. Pol Pot died naturally in 1998 before he could be brought to trial.
If you want to read Kerry Hamill’s S21 confession go to
http://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/default/files/documents/courtdoc/00090609-00090621.pdf
After a day listening to the audio guides at S21 and Choeung Ek which included some eye witness accounts of terror, and seeing the way a high school building was converted into a torture factory, the cells where people were chained up which used to be classrooms, the gallows from which they were strung up which used to be a school exercise beam, the paintings from survivors which depict the suffering, and the photographs which the Khmer Rouge took of all their detainees (despotic genocidal maniacs always keep immaculate records – the Nazis were the same), I’m a bit lost for words.