Kaing Guek Eav
Nov 17, 1942) was a leader in the Khmer Rouge during its rule of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. He is best known for heading the Khmer Rouge special branch and running the infamous Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp in Phnom Penh.
Early years
Kang Kek Iew was born in Choyaot village, Kampong Chen subdistrict, Kampong Thom Province, and is of Chinese-Khmer ancestry. A star pupil in his school, he passed his Brevet d'Etudes Secondaire de Première in 1961 at the age of fifteen.
He finished the first half of his Baccalaureate in 1962 at the Lycée Suravarman II in the town of Siem Reap. The same year he was offered a place in the prestigious Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh where he completed his Baccalaureate in mathematics, scoring second in the entire country.
Induction into the Khmer Rouge
In 1964, Kek Iew began studying for his teaching certificate in Mathematics, a subject he loved, at the Institute de Pédagogie.
The Institute was a cradle of activism under the directorship of Son Sen who was later to emerge as the Defence Minister of the Khmer Rouge and Duch's immediate superior.
On August 28, 1966, Kek Iew got his teaching certificate and was posted to a lycée in Skoun, a small town in Kampong Cham Province. He was a good teacher, remembered as earnest and committed by his pupils.
Following the arrest of three of his students, he fled to the Khmer Rouge base in Chamkar Leu District where he was accepted as a full member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.
A few months later, he was arrested and tortured at the Prey Sar prison by Norodom Sihanouk's police for engaging in communist activities. In 1970, when he was released following the amnesty granted to political prisoners by Lon Nol, he joined the Khmer Rouge rebels in the Cardamom Mountains bordering Thailand.
In the Maquis
In the zone under the control of the Khmer Rouge, Kek Iew took on his nom de guerre Comrade Duch (IPA:) and became a prison commandant.
In the forests of Amleang, Thpong District, Duch set up his first prison, code-named 'M-13'. Two years later, he also established a second prison 'M-99' in nearby Aoral District.
Assisted by his two deputies, Comrade Chan and Comrade Pon, Duch began perfecting his interrogation techniques and the purging of perceived enemies from the Khmer Rouge ranks.
Prisoners at these camps, mostly from the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, were routinely starved and tortured to extract real and made up confessions. Few prisoners left the camps alive.
While in the maquis, Duch married Chhim Sophal, aka Rom, a dressmaker from a nearby village.
Leading the Santebal and Tuol Sleng
After the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975, according to Duch, his request for a transfer to the Industrial Sector of government was denied .
The Tuol Sleng prison camp was initially headed by In Lon aka Comrade Nath with Duch acting as deputy. By May 1976 all the prisons in Phnom Penh were consolidated and relocated to Tuol Sleng.
Throughout this period Duch built up a large archive of prison records, mug shots and extracted "confessions".
On January 7, 1979 Duch was amongst the last Khmer Rouge cadres to flee Phnom Penh after it fell to the Vietnamese army. Though he was unable to destroy much of the prison's extensive documents, he saw to the execution of several surviving prisoners before he fled the city.
After the fall
Duch reached the border with Thailand in May 1979.
At the border, he learned to speak Thai and taught himself English. He later taught English and Mathematics at a refugee camp in Borai just inside Thailand.
In June 1986, Duch was sent to China to teach as a Khmer language expert at Beijing's Foreign Language Institute.
He returned to the Thai-Cambodia border a year later and changed his name to Hang Pin. He worked as a senior bureaucrat just inside the Cambodian border at Pol Pot's secretariat at Camp 505.
He was known as a good teacher, but one with a fiery temper.
In 1995, following an attack on his home that killed his wife, Duch sold all his possessions, secured a transfer to Svey Check College, and moved there with his children. Shortly after his wife's murder, Duch began attending the prayer meetings of the Golden West Cambodian Christian Church held in Battambang by Christopher Lapel, an evangelical Khmer-American.
In 1999, Nate Thayer, who had previously interviewed Pol Pot and Ta Mok, and Dunlop interviewed Duch for the Far Eastern Economic Review.