Khmer Rouge Survivor Paints Atrocities

American historian Peter Maguire walked to the top of the stairs and, for a few awe-packed seconds, found himself believing in ghosts.

But the sprightly figure before him, Bou Meng, was very much alive. He was sitting quietly on the floor, methodically painting images of the repression and suffering that he witnessed in the 1970s as a rare survivor of the Khmer Rouge gulag.

Unseen by genocide researchers for more than 15 years and reported dead, Bou Meng had not only resurfaced but was willing to deliver eyewitness testimony against his former torturers should a tribunal be convened to judge Khmer Rouge leaders.

“It’s as if he was resurrected for a third time,” said Yin Nean, a researcher at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, who had searched unsuccessfully for Bou Meng.

The painter, 61, had been reported dead in the October 2001 issue of the magazine published by the center, which has been amassing information about the reign of the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge, during which some 1.7 million Cambodians were executed or died from disease, starvation or overwork.

Bou Meng is one of only 14 people known to have survived the Khmer Rouge’s central torture center and prison in Phnom Penh, known as S-21. More than 14,000 prisoners died or were slaughtered there.

The prison was a former high school compound of three-story buildings. With its tiny detention cells built inside classrooms and chambers for brutal interrogations, S-21 was a waiting station for death.

Prison guards inflicted gruesome torture to break down prisoners before forcing written confessions to fictitious crimes. Guards trucked them later to “killing fields” on the outskirts of town, delivered fatal blows with farm hoes to the back of the neck and lower skull, and let their victims crumple into ditches.

Bou Meng escaped death because he was useful for propaganda. His artwork included portraits of Pol Pot, the regime’s secretive leader who was toppled in January 1979, when Vietnamese troops routed the Khmer Rouge and seized control of the desperate nation.

“To imagine what he went through and to see him painting like this years later shows the strength and resilience of the human spirit,” said Maguire.

Bou Meng painted in a rural community before fleeing to the jungle to join the communist revolution in 1971. Like many poverty-stricken Cambodians, Bou Meng heeded King Norodom Sihanouk’s radio pleas to help the communists resist a U.S.-backed regime that had ousted him the previous year.

The painter said he prepared Marxist banners during the civil war that ended in Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975. He was then given a job drawing technical subjects. But as the paranoid regime crumbled, Bou Meng was arrested and tossed into S-21 in August 1977, accused of working for the CIA.

“They asked me when I joined the CIA,” Bou Meng recalled in a recent interview, eyes tearing up. “But I didn’t know how to answer.”

He lost all but a few teeth and part of his hearing, and scars remain on his back from beatings. Bou Meng’s first wife was sent to S-21 with him. He never saw her again, nor the two children he left in a village before his imprisonment.

Finally free, he returned in 1981 to work at the prison, which had been turned into a popular tourist attraction called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Bou Meng said he “disappeared” in 1987, wanting to paint more and live in the countryside.

In the 1990s, Bou Meng drifted from one small town pagoda to another, painting murals of traditional Buddha stories. He earned a meager living but gained merit for his next life by such good deeds, he said.

The magazine’s report of Bou Meng’s death went unnoticed for more than a year until a monk showed him the article Jan. 21. Bou Meng was shocked, considering it a bad omen.

A day later, he was standing in the Documentation Center, confronting director Youk Chhang, whom he’d never met.

“ ‘I am Bou Meng. I am not dead; I am alive,’ he told me,” Youk Chhang recalled.

Yin Nean, the researcher, said Bou Meng’s second wife -- from whom he was divorced -- had reported that he had died after falling off scaffolding while painting at a pagoda. Bou Meng said his ex-wife bore him a grudge.

“I want to testify,” Bou Meng said of a possible Khmer Rouge trial, which finally appears likely 24 years after the collapse of the grim regime.

Key elements of a proposed United Nations-assisted Cambodian tribunal were tentatively agreed to March 17 after six years of negotiations. Formal approval is still needed, but it is hoped that the tribunal can begin work next year, officials said.

No one has faced trial in any court for the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. Pol Pot died in 1998, but most of his top lieutenants are alive.

Those known to have survived S-21 have not done as well.

Of seven survivors in a photograph from 1979, four have died. In recent years, researchers have located seven others, but less is known about them because most were not recorded in prison logs. One of those seven has died.