FROM: THE BBC’S OUTLOOK PROGRAMME

INTRO: Seventy-eight-year-old Cambodian rice farmer Uch Sorn is one of just a handful of survivors of the notorious Khmer Rouge prison camp known as M-13.

Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, died in the camp in the 1970s. It was run by Comrade Duch, who recently became the first former Khmer Rouge member to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Uch Sorn testified against him at the United Nations-backed tribunal in the capital Phnom Penh.

Forty years after his release, Uch Sorn took our reporter Robert Carmichael back to the site of M-13.

CARMICHAEL: So we’re walking off the main road, which is a dirt road, into the bush, which is where Mr Uch Sorn was taken in 1973 – and this was to the prison M-13 that Duch was running at the time. Uch Sorn has been back here only once since then, and that was when the prosecutors from the war crimes court brought him here to take his testimony. We’re just going to move to the side of the road – there’s a tractor coming down here with some barrels on it.

CARMICHAEL: I asked Uch Sorn whether, back then, he’d had any interest in politics – whether he’d favoured the U.S.-backed government in Phnom Penh or Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge movement, with which it was fighting?

UCH SORN (TRANSLATOR): No, I did not care about the politics. I was scared of being dead. At the time I knew for sure that I would only die.

CARMICHAEL: The site where M-13 was based during Cambodia’s bitter civil war is about a mile off the road, not far from Uch Sorn’s village. Phnom Penh is about 40 miles to the southeast. This area fell under Khmer Rouge control in 1970, and Uch Sorn, and his family spent the next three years obeying the Maoist movement for fear of execution. The regular bombing raids that the U.S. was carrying out against the Khmer Rouge were another constant risk. It was after one such raid in March 1973 that the Khmer Rouge arrested Uch Sorn and two friends, and took them to M-13. He explains what happened next.

UCH SORN: I saw a lot of prisoners and I saw a lot of sticks. You know, those sticks they used to hit the prisoners. The first night I didn’t know how many [prisoners], really. But throughout my time there I saw there were hundreds of prisoners. They dig a big hole three or four metres deep.

CARMICHAEL: Uch Sorn scratches the ground with his walking stick to illustrate the dimensions of the pits.

UCH SORN: Like a square. A square pit – and all the prisoners were inside.

CARMICHAEL: So how many prisoners would fit into one of those square pits?

UCH SORN: Quite a lot – maybe 20 to 30 prisoners.

CARMICHAEL: Uch Sorn and his friends were accused of being spies, a capital offence. He told me he was hauled before Duch.

UCH SORN: Duch asked questions, I answered until Duch hit the table. He intimidated me, and then I told him I would rather get killed by shooting because I am innocent. I did not confess to being a spy.

CARMICHAEL: Duch didn’t take Uch Sorn’s word – he was far too meticulous for that – but he did speak to people from his village and was eventually convinced. Quite why he let him live, though, is a mystery – after all, by 1973 Duch had ordered hundreds killed, and would go on to do the same to at least 12,000 more people at S-21 prison in Phnom Penh. Freeing Uch Sorn, however, was out of the question, because M-13’s very existence was a secret. So Duch put Uch Sorn to work.

UCH SORN: At that time, you know, this area is a torture camp so if any people see, even the villagers see, they would spread the news. So if anyone come, they arrest and they consider as enemy. So no one would survive when they come here. Yeah. You come, you die.

CARMICHAEL: So we’re getting back into some thicker bush here.

UCH SORN: When I see here, I feel painful because Khmer killed Khmer.

CARMICHAEL: It is very overgrown here, and there’s a lot of thick bush. There’s always a concern in rural Cambodia for land mines, so we’re not going to go into that area of thick bush, which is where Mr Sorn says the pits where they were held were. Those pits were about three metres deep, he said. And that’s where dozens of prisoners were held at a time.

CARMICHAEL: After Duch chose not to have Uch Sorn killed, he put him to work keeping the site clean, growing rice and digging mass graves. For the prisoners, shackled to metal bars at the bottom of the pits, death was the only escape – whether through execution, torture or starvation. Uch Sorn’s two friends did not survive M-13.

UCH SORN: They just buried [the dead prisoners] around here, and you know in one morning maybe I see seven people die. And then at least three or four hundred I saw they were buried when I was here. They were very thin – die by starvation or being killed or die during interrogation.

CARMICHAEL: Hundreds of prisoners died at M13, and quite possibly thousands, in the four years Duch ran it prior to its closure in 1975. But the rules of the UN-backed tribunal meant Duch was not charged with any of the crimes committed at M-13, only for his role in the torture and murder of more than 12,000 people at the far larger S-21 centre in Phnom Penh between 1975 and 1979. Just a handful of people survived either of Duch’s prisons – so why does Uch Sorn think he was spared?

UCH SORN: Because Cambodia is a Buddhism, you know, Buddhist follower, so if I take that into consideration, that is my fate, you know. My good fate.

CARMICHAEL: Duch was sentenced to life in prison. What do you think of the sentence that was handed out?

UCH SORN: I think the sentence is correct – you know, it satisfied the people, the victims. And if just sentenced him to 10 or 20 years, that’s not enough to compensate what people got hurt. And yeah, with this sentence, the Cambodian people get satisfied by it.

CARMICHAEL: In January 1979, Pol Pot’s murderous regime was driven from power by an invading force of Vietnamese troops and Khmer Rouge defectors, and Cambodia’s scattered survivors started returning home. Among them was Uch Sorn, and once again he was fortunate – his wife and all five children had survived in a country where almost every family lost someone. His family had long assumed he had been killed. Uch Sorn’s testimony to the Khmer Rouge tribunal in 2009 helped to paint a picture of the cruelties of Pol Pot’s revolution, and the reliance such regimes place on brutal men like Comrade Duch.

END