Covering the historic Duch war crimes trial in Cambodia
Maggie Tait is a journalist with the New Zealand Press Association. She travelled to Cambodia in late March 2009 to cover the start of the current war crimes trial against the notorious former Khmer Rouge leader, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch. This is the report of her Asia:NZ-funded assignment.
My trip to Cambodia was primarily to cover the start of the historic public trial of Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, who commanded Phnom Penh's notorious Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison. Up to 17,000 men, women and children were tortured at Tuol Sleng before being taken to a killing field to be butchered.
The trial was the first of senior leaders in the Khmer Rouge regime under which 1.7 million Cambodians died to be heard before the especially set up Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
The trial was of special interest in New Zealand as one of the five judges on the United Nations-backed tribunal was our former Governor General and High Court Judge Dame Silvia Cartwright.
New Zealand Olympic rower Rob Hamill's brother Kerry was tortured at the prison before he was executed, after the yacht he and two others were sailing strayed into Cambodian waters in 1978.
I spent my first couple of days in Phnom Penh setting the scene for my assignment by going to a local theatre to see a film, Cambodian Dreams, made by expatriate New Zealander Stanley Harper, about a family divided by the Khmer Rouge regime.
I also visited Tuol Sleng prison where so many had died. It was eerie wandering on a sunny day peering into tiny cells where blood spots still flecked the floor. My guide and I talked about her family and what they went through under the regime.
On Monday the court hearing opened. The ECCC is an impressive modern building some 15km out of the Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city. International and local media gathered in rooms with live feeds or in the court room. With temperatures in the 30s outside, the courtroom, the largest in the world according to officials, was over air-conditioned.
On the first day the public gallery was packed to its 494-capacity with media and local people including families of those killed in Tuol Sleng. There were also a small number of actual survivors. Behind thick plate glass the court was on a raised platform and curtains opened and closed between public sessions with the judges sitting at a high dais in the back. The sense of theatre was enhanced by the high calibre of the defence and prosecution lawyers. Also behind the glass were civil party lawyers.
Duch was tidy in a white shirt and dark trousers. He looked thin and old but alert. He spoke clearly when answering questions about his personal details and different names he was known by.
After lunch the indictment was read out. Having interviewed several Cambodian refugees now living in New Zealand the dry legal reading out of charges against Duch was familiar material. The day got a bit bogged down in legal arguments and the court only ended up sitting for a few short hours on its first full day. Outside the court I met Cambodian people affected by the regime and representatives from agencies like Amnesty International. I also met a Kiwi who moved to Australia as a boy who had been a friend of Kerry Hamill and after a bit of convincing he agreed to be interviewed in the evening.
Day two was the big one - Duch addressed the court. He apologised but maintained he had always acted on orders. The defence made their opening remarks. 
The public must have known something I didn't when they didn't show up to court on Wednesday. Most of the journalists had gone too. The lawyers spent much of the day arguing about process over agreed points. In the end the judges asked for all agreed points to be read into the record.
It showered during the day, unusual for this time of year, and on the bus back to town a Cambodian official told us that people thought the rain was the souls of the thousands who lost their lives after being jailed at Tuol Sleng.
Throughout the week I interviewed Rob Hamill for various stories and on Thursday started the day with a phone interview and wrote a story after getting further information from the civil party lawyer looking after him.
During the day I visited an anti-mining organisation and interviewed Veng Sereyvuth, an MP who was once a taxi driver in New Zealand. On Friday I spent a long hot day visiting villages where woman weave fabric from absolute scratch under the Cambodian Sector-Wide Silk Project. It was a great opportunity also to see village life outside of the main city and reminded how poor the country really is.
On the way back my kind hosts from took me to visit Choeung Ek, the killing field where prisoners from Tuol Sleng were executed and dumped in mass graves. It was eerie walking over the grass with fragments of people's clothing poking through the dirt and dips in the ground where the mass graves were sited while children played and laughed at a nearby school.
For my last day, Saturday, I took a return trip to Siem Reap to see the temples. My guide was an incredible woman who runs a charity to educate children. She showed me her temples and the damage caused during fighting during the Khmer Rouge period. At the end of the day we sat on a terrace and she told me of her own harrowing experiences under the regime.
Spread out behind us was a temple that French archeologists had taken down carefully piece by piece in order to re-erect it and make it stable. When the Khmer Rouge took power all the meticulous records of the ancient wonder were destroyed and time and weather have erased numbering on the stones. The loss of the treasure to the brutality of the regime is a good image for the country as a whole which is struggling to put its pieces together again.
