In harrowing testimony yesterday at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, a witness described hearing about guards at the Au Kanseng Security Center in Ratanakkiri province disemboweling a sick and dying prisoner there so Khmer Rouge security officials could eat her gallbladder.
Answering questions for Case 002/02, Moeurng Chandy, a 62-year-old Takeo province native, described her life in Au Kanseng after being brought there in June of 1977. She spent the first two years of the Khmer Rouge regime takeover working on a rubber plantation near Ban Lung town. Along with three other women, she was arranged to marry a man in the village. She ended up with Phon Thol, who also testified at the court yesterday. The two have since divorced.
She was unsure of why she and her husband were brought to the prison, but testimony from other witnesses and research into the Khmer Rouge leadership found that Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and Son Sen, three of the most senior officials within the Khmer Rouge at the time, had ordered that all workers at Ms. Chandy’s rubber plantation be arrested and brought to the prison in June of that year out of fear that a revolt was fomenting. Detainees estimate that 400-600 prisoners were held there at its peak.
“I didn’t know what I did. One day at a village committee meeting, the village chief said Thom, who was running all of Ratanakkiri, ordered me in. They put me in a truck after,” she said.
Three pairs of men and women joined her and her husband on the drive to the prison, which was about an hour or two away, according to Ms. Chandy’s testimony. “Once I got off the truck I knew I was being taken to a prison. The location was isolated and I saw people locked inside,” she told the court. “When I arrived in the area, I realized I would die. I did not know why I was sent there, but I thought that would be the end of my life.”
It was only after arriving at the prison that she realized she was pregnant. In early 1978, with only a single medic and her cellmates to help her, she gave birth to a baby girl. Once she regained her strength, she was assigned to work in the kitchen to cook rice for the prison guards.
“I had no breast milk, so I had to feed my child palm juice. The situation was miserable,” she said.
Ms. Chandy was eventually moved from a locked cell to an unlocked room with a guard on the outside. She described a number of atrocities committed at the prison, some of which she said she saw firsthand.
Groups of 10-20 Jarai people from a village along the Vietnamese border were detained at the prison during her time there. She said the women were put in her facility and tied together by a single rope. After 10 days, the prison guards told them that they would be sent back to their village. Some of the women had small children with them, half of whom could not walk without their mothers.
Three days after watching this from her prison cell, she said she was picking vegetables in a garden when she saw a pit created by a bomb dropped from a B52 airplane. In the pit, she could see the bodies of people wearing the same clothes as the Jarai who were detained in her facility.
“I smelled the decomposing bodies. I could tell they were Jarai from their clothing. I was talking to myself, asking if I would also share the same fate,” she said. “The pits were eventually covered, and the clothes of the Jarai were distributed to other prisoners in my building.”
The leader of the prison guards, Ta Ouy, stuck out in her memory as particularly cruel and vengeful. She witnessed him murder a young woman, and had to hold back tears as she described the scene.
“I saw him walking a woman to a field as I was picking vegetables. She was begging him for her life, but he hit her with the butt of his rifle,” Ms. Chandy told the tribunal. “I did not know her, or where she was from, but I remember her begging for her life as he smashed a hoe on her repeatedly.”
Ta Ouy was well known around the prison for his depravity, and especially by the kitchen staff, the witness said. Ms. Chandy said it was widely rumored around the facility that the prison guards had removed the gallbladder from a dying prisoner and ate it.
“The kitchen was along a road I used to walk. One person was so cruel and brutal. He used a bamboo stick from the wall to cut open bodies and remove the gallbladder. These people were dying,” she said. “Every time Ta Ouy left the kitchen, he said that he ate human gallbladders.”