PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- A voice from beyond the mass graves of Cambodia's killing fields has been found in the mountain of evidence being prepared for the likely trial of Khmer Rouge leaders.
The audiotape of a "confession" by guerrilla officer Chan Nhoung more than 20 years ago is the first such recording to be discovered by genocide researchers documenting the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror.Nhoung, who was arrested for treason in 1977, was one of an estimated 20,000 suspected political enemies jailed at the Khmer Rouge's infamous S-21 detention center.
After telling a surreal life story that was probably extracted under torture, he was put to death outside Phnom Penh.
The recording was discovered by researchers who are going through new evidence being turned over to them, as hopes build some Khmer Rouge leaders will be held accountable for the deaths of some 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
By itself, the tape may not be much use to prosecutors who will have access to thousands of handwritten confessions. But to historians, it is a fascinating piece in the puzzle of the Khmer Rouge's brutal experiment in radical communism.
"I feel this is coming alive, that a prisoner that was accused and killed by this unfair court of the Khmer Rouge is coming alive and talking to me and still telling me that what happened to him was unjust and unfair," says Youk Chhang, director of the leading research group, the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
The tape, yellowed with age and labeled with revolutionary jargon, was given to the center by an anonymous source along with a stash of documents. Youk Chhang does not doubt its authenticity.
Like most victims of S-21, also known as Tuol Sleng, a school turned into a prison and torture center, Chan Nhoung confesses unlikely tales of CIA spies, Vietnamese plots and internal enemies bent on undermining the revolution.
"I was involved with the enemy -- I joined the CIA with a man named Bun Chamroeun, my contact," Nhoung says in the tape. "Brother Pi interrupted. He said it's not a problem . . . that in our unit, all the cadres are involved."
The prisoner concludes that he attempted to flee to neighboring Vietnam. After several nights on the run, he was arrested trying to steal a bunch of bananas.
The tape does not contain screams or the sounds of torture, but the exhausted voice exemplifies how Tuol Sleng's wardens employed terror to extract a mix of truth and fantasy. New names mentioned in confessions were the next to be arrested, tortured and killed in bloody purges.
The Documentation Center knew that interrogators taped some confessions -- often because the prisoner was illiterate -- but this is the first discovered since the center was founded in 1995 to amass evidence that could be used to try Khmer Rouge leaders.
Youk Chhang says the voice encourages him to continue combing through the material that has poured into the center since Cambodia and the United Nations began seriously discussing a tribunal last year, after the Khmer Rouge's long guerrilla war collapsed. The movement lost power to a Vietnamese invasion in 1979.
In the last three weeks, the Documentation Center received 150,000 pages of documents and hundreds of photographs from two sources -- anonymous individuals who Youk Chhang says recently contacted him in hopes that enough evidence will be found to convict every surviving Khmer Rouge leader.
"They are too afraid to support (our work) publicly. They want to go through us," Youk Chhang says. "It shows the momentum . . . for a fair trial is there."
Prime Minister Hun Sen is rumored to want a tribunal convened by April 17, the 25th anniversary of the day the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh and evacuated the capital's population to labor camps.
But negotiations with the United Nations have proceeded at a snail's pace, inching toward an agreement for a Cambodian trial with enough U.N. involvement to ensure justice.
Whenever one is convened, Youk Chhang says there will be all the information needed by a prosecution or defense. The center's staff has been increased, more field research is planned, new documents are being translated and the computerized evidence database is being updated.