The record of Bou Meng’s suffering is inscribed on his body. A man of stunted stature, his sunken, toothless mouth and mangled ears testify to frequent beatings and torture. Decades-old scars from rattan sticks and whips are etched into his back and shoulders. Although the 68-year-old is animated – his speech is punctuated by broad, frantic gestures – he is equal parts anger and grief, a firestorm of emotion.

Bou Meng is one of only a handful of prisoners to have survived the S-21 detention and torture centre in Phnom Penh. He testified before the Khmer Rouge tribunal in July.

‘I never saw my wife again,’ Bou Meng told judges as his former captor, the chief of S-21, sat just feet away. Kaing Guek Eav went by the revolutionary named ‘Comrade Duch’ and is the first defendant to face trial at the UN-backed court. Khmer Rouge cadres separated Bou Meng and his wife when they arrived at S-21; for months, Bou Meng says, he was accused of conspiring with the CIA and KGB and violently interrogated. He remembers watching blood flow from his body to the ground beneath him and falling unconscious when electrical wires were placed near his genitals. He was only saved from execution when the Khmer Rouge discovered he could paint exact likenesses of ‘Brother Number One’ Pol Pot.

‘I was a victim and the scope of my suffering was incalculable,’ said Bou Meng, who brought a picture of his lost wife to the court hoping to learn more about her fate. ‘I was almost killed. We were treated like animals.’

Among his tormentors, he told judges, was Comrade Him Huy.

‘Cruel Him’ was known to many prisoners as a particularly violent staffer at S-21, though there is some uncertainty about his actual duties. While victims have reported that he was one of the detention center’s chief executioners, he maintains that he killed only a few people and primarily assisted in guarding and transporting prisoners to their deaths.

But when Him Huy himself took the witness stand several weeks after Bou Meng, with his plain, courteous country language and ill-fitting suit jacket, he appeared far from menacing. He told judges that while prisoners and lower-ranking staff may have feared him he was terrified that he would be purged by Duch and believed there was no escape from S-21.

‘Even if I tried to flee S-21, I would have ended up being arrested. Because where would I go?’ he asked. Into enemy Vietnamese territory? Leaving his family behind to perish at the hands of the Khmer Rouge?

‘We are all victims,’ he continued, lamenting the suffering of S-21 staff.

A questionable statement, perhaps. How could a man who killed dozens, possibly hundreds, of people, consider himself a victim? And while co-opting the use of this term may be inappropriate for Him Huy, the time I have spent reporting the Khmer Rouge tribunal has convinced me that casting perpetrators as one-dimensional monsters is not only inaccurate, it obscures the complex nature of culpability for Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Dubbed the ‘Red Khmers’ by King Norodom Sihanouk, the Marxist guerilla movement came to power in 1975 after years of fighting a revolution from the country’s jungles. The Khmer Rouge had recruited heavily from areas devastated by US bombing and many of the troops were young and illiterate and never understood the basics of communist ideology. For the most part, low-ranking Khmer Rouge believed they were fighting to liberate their country, and to protect Cambodia from Vietnamese encroachment.

But in the paranoid and arbitrary government established by the Khmer Rouge, no one was safe, not even the movement’s most loyal followers. The smallest mistake, most remote unsavory relation or slightest perceived lapse in ‘revolutionary consciousness’ could lead to death. The result, according to Rutgers University Professor Alex Hinton, a specialist in the anthropology of mass atrocity, was that ‘today’s perpetrators became tomorrow’s victims’.

While the Khmer Rouge did target certain ethnic groups – such as the Vietnamese, Chinese and Cham Muslims – the vast majority of the 1.7 million people who lost their lives under the regime were fellow Khmers. S-21 is actually a microcosm of this phenomenon. Although the facility was originally used to ‘smash’ foreigners and members of the old regime, it quickly became a vehicle for widespread political purges.

Internal purges are by no means unique to Cambodian communism. But what is particularly tragic about the Cambodian case, claims Hinton, is that such extensive purges were carried out ‘not just among the officials of the regime but also all the way down to the village level.’

In the minds of local leaders desperate to account for the regime’s failings, a lost cow or poor harvest became evidence of ‘hidden enemies’ sabotaging the revolution from within.

It is hard to know what any of us would do under these conditions. A few very brave souls might buck the status quo, but they would most likely pay for resistance with their lives. I believe the majority of people would sacrifice their ideals, to varying extents, in order to survive.

Him Huy, no doubt, is one of those people.

After seeing Him Huy testify, I wanted to talk to him in person, to learn how he copes with his past and whom he blames for the disastrous Khmer Rouge years. Huy Vannak, a reporter with Radio Free Asia, arranged a meeting for me. He began working with Him Huy and other perpetrators a number of years ago as a staffer at the Documentation Center of Cambodia and he has stayed in touch with some of them.

Huy Vannak wouldn’t really consider Him Huy a ‘friend’, he says as we drive the two hours to his house outside of Phnom Penh. But he stops by to visit whenever he is in the area and has brought some books for Him Huy’s nine-year-old son.

‘I’ve known him since he was a baby,’ he explains, ‘and his family is poor.’

Him Huy lives in a typical Cambodian stilt house just off one of the country’s highways. Downstairs are several cows he takes care of for another villager. He is paid for the work and can keep any calves born to the animals.

As we arrive, several of his nine children gather to stare. One, who is wearing an oversized John Cena T-shirt – professional wrestling is hugely popular in Cambodia – shyly accepts the books Huy Vannak has brought for him. Another of Him Huy’s sons is less interested in our presence. Him explains that he has ‘a lung problem’ (most likely asthma) and the boy’s bony chest heaves as he tries to breathe. His mother scrapes his back repeatedly with a jar lid – a folk remedy known as ‘coining’ – leaving long red streaks on his small torso.

Him Huy asks us to come upstairs and we climb a ladder into the house’s only room. As we sit on a new straw mat, he offers us tea and warm corn cakes. Immediately Him Huy strikes me as a charismatic person. He jokes with Huy Vannak about the court-issued jacket he wore to testify and when he laughs, the network of fault lines on his face crinkles into an all-consuming smile.

His demeanour becomes far more somber, however, when we start discussing Duch and S-21. Him Huy says he never wanted to join the Khmer Rouge, but because he came from an area that supported the guerilla movement, he had no choice. He left home to fight when he was around sixteen and tried to run away several times. Like a schoolboy, he says he even faked illness and fabricated family problems because he missed his mom and her homemade Khmer cupcakes.

Although his superiors told him and other young troops they were ‘fighting imperialist forces,’ Him Huy says he never understood Khmer Rouge ideology.

‘I was too young to understand,’ he says. ‘I asked, “What are imperialists? What is capitalism?” And they told us, “They are the groups that make the difference between rich and poor.”’

Him Huy fought with the Khmer Rouge for several years before they took control of the country. He says he does not know why, in 1976, he was assigned to work as a guard at S-21. Despite Bou Meng’s testimony, Him Huy maintains that his role in torture and executions was minimal and that he was only promoted because his superiors were repeatedly purged.

‘I was afraid for my life too,’ he says. ‘My colleagues were arrested and I did not believe they were enemies of the revolution. We ate together, worked together, and they were killed for no reason.’

As we talk, I notice that several of Him Huy’s children have gathered to listen to our conversation, lying on the floor and lingering in the doorway. Does he mind discussing his past so openly? I wonder. Is he worried he or his children will face discrimination from other villagers?

‘My children do not blame me, because they know I had no choice at that time. Even the villagers do not blame me. They feel sympathy for my situation.’

Him Huy does not think Duch would fare as well in his village, however.

‘If the court ever releases him, he would be killed,’ he says, with sudden anger in his voice. ‘I am still furious with Duch. Even in the court, I did not want to look at his face. It brings back too many painful memories of when I was ordered to arrest my comrades.’

When we’ve finished our interview, I ask Him Huy if I can look around his house. Studio portraits of family members cover the walls, many featuring babies posed with colourful fruit and flowers. They look like the pictures I have seen in dozens of other Cambodian houses.

Him Huy walks us down the dirt path back to our car and thanks us for coming. He stands at the highway’s edge, smiling and waving, as we begin the drive back to Phnom Penh. In so many ways, he is completely unremarkable. If he hadn’t been a certain age at a certain time in an area of Cambodia that supported the Khmer Rouge, he probably would have never become a killer.

Our meeting brought to mind my conversations with Theary Seng, a Cambodian-American activist who lost both her parents to the Khmer Rouge. Immigrating to the US as a child after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea, Seng completed her law degree in America before relocating to Cambodia five years ago. She was formerly the executive director of the Center for Social Development, a human rights organization based in Phnom Penh, and has been a vocal advocate for victim’s rights at the tribunal.

‘Is the Khmer Rouge not I, but one degree removed at birth?’ Seng asked during a recent public forum, highlighting the role that chance and circumstance played in the movement’s recruitment. Had she been born in a rural area that supported the Khmer Rouge – and not to an educated Phnom Penh family – Seng herself could have been a young cadre. ‘There is depravity in each of us. We can perpetrate the violence we are denouncing.’

I have known her since I first came to Cambodia in 2004 and Seng has always impressed me as someone with a thorough understanding of the various actors responsible for the Cambodian tragedy – from high-level international powers to low-ranking Khmer Rouge village leaders.

Clearly, only a tiny percentage of those at fault will ever be held accountable legally. The tribunal itself is limited in scope. Its mandate is to try ‘senior leaders’ and ‘those most responsible’ for atrocities committed during the period of Democratic Kampuchea, from 1975 to 1979. What about the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians killed before 1975 in US bombing raids, former Khmer Rouge supporters often ask. Or the Chinese government, which funneled weapons and technical support to Democratic Kampuchea?

It may be a dissatisfying answer, but no, they are not on trial.

‘Justice has always been selective,’ Seng told me, ‘and given the massive scale of these crimes can only be symbolic.’

But organizations like CSD have used the tribunal as a catalyst for outreach and education throughout the country. International actors may be unwilling to step forward and acknowledge their culpability, but Seng says that doesn’t mean average Khmers Rouge shouldn’t take responsibility for their actions. The guilt of others does not absolve you of your crimes.

‘Whatever the international political situation, at the end of the day it was Cambodians killing Cambodians,’ Seng says. Following Seng’s logic, even low-ranking cadres, like Him Huy, should move beyond merely blaming their superiors and claiming they ‘had no choice’. Indeed, they may have been killed if they had disobeyed orders. But they still made a choice, however difficult, and that decision comes with consequences.

I, and others, would probably feel uncomfortable condemning people who are forced to make such horrendous decisions. This is why, as Seng says, we should approach our judgments of former Khmers Rouge with ‘a sense of humility. If we had been in their position, maybe we would have done the same thing.’

In turn, those who committed crimes – even under threat of death – should find ways to reconcile with their pasts, and with those who they have made suffer. Cambodia’s national court system is notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional, so a far-reaching legal solution is not the answer. But there are other, perhaps culturally resonant ways, to achieve a sense of justice and healing.

For example, the mother of Youk Chhang, the head of DC-Cam, was deeply moved by the apology she received from a former Khmer Rouge village chief. The man had overseen the area where several of her relatives disappeared. After the regime fell, he rode his bicycle all the way to Phnom Penh, carrying offerings of meat and bananas, to ask for forgiveness.

‘Her attitude is a very Buddhist one and his act put her heart to rest,’ Chhang wrote in an essay for DC-Cam.

I believe both victims and perpetrators could benefit from such homegrown acts of forgiveness and reconciliation.

After a long day of testimony at the tribunal, during which he said he was too excited and nervous to eat his lunch, Bou Meng praised the court for its work. My ‘chest seems to be lighter’, he told judges, even though he understands that they cannot provide flawless justice.

For him, having a former S-21 staffer tell him where his wife was killed and buried would also bring a good deal of closure. He cannot perform a traditional Cambodian cremation because it would be too difficult to identify her bones. But, Bou Meng told Duch at the tribunal, if he could find out where she spent her final moments, he would ‘go to that location to get the soil from there to pray for her soul’. Both Duch and Him Huy maintain that they do not know exactly what happened to her.

‘Only the spirit of the earth knows where the soul has gone,’ Bou said of his lost wife, ‘or where the bodies are buried’.

He is still waiting for someone to come forward.

Click here to see the photographs that accompany this dispatch

This slideshow accompanies Elena Lesley’s dispatch from Cambodia. To read the caption of each photograph, drag your cursor down the top of the screen. Photographs by Elena Lesley and Joel Rozen.

Chit Leang does not know his real name or his age or who his parents were. He was a small child in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, he tells me, and his memories from that time come back as disjointed images. We talk outside his modest restaurant, our faces damp from the mid-day sun, and Chit describes, in vivid detail, the gunshots that called him to lunch each day and the flat plates on which his Khmer Rouge comrades spooned out watery rice porridge. What happened to his entire family, Chit does not know. Like so many other Cambodians, they disappeared.

Today Chit’s open-air restaurant sits along a new, paved road in Anlong Veng, a border town in Cambodia’s north that remained a Khmer Rouge stronghold into the late 1990s. Chit moved here two years ago, for purely business reasons. Friends had told him that a planned border checkpoint in the area would see an influx of tourists from Thailand, en route to the Angkor Wat temple complex, and Chit set up shop, selling noodle soup and Angkor beer to the growing packs of travellers. Along Veng, which just a few years ago was a jungle strewn with landmines, is undergoing a building boom.

Pol Pot’s grave is a short walk from Chit’s restaurant. The site is unmarked from the main road and it was Chit who showed me where to find the narrow path that leads to the grave, a mound of dirt covered by a rusty corrugated metal roof. Flowers and sun-faded glass bottles frame the place where Pol Pot was supposedly cremated in 1998, on a heap of rubbish and old tyres. An old man in poor health, he died in his sleep.

It was a quiet end for a man responsible for the destruction of his country. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge killed a quarter of Cambodia’s population – roughly two million people – through overwork, starvation and execution. Chit’s family were among the victims. Yet Chit remains friendly with his next-door neighbour, the grandson of an infamous Khmer Rouge military leader nicknamed ‘the Butcher’. And he politely serves customers who come to pay their respects at Pol Pot’s grave, those faithful Khmer Rouge holdouts who light incense and carry offerings of fruit and chicken. ‘They have their understanding and I have mine,’ Chit says.

After suffering through the nightmare of Khmer Rouge rule and a decade of civil conflict, most Cambodians have adopted a similar survival strategy – try to feed your family and refrain from becoming actively involved in politics. Although none of those responsible for Khmer Rouge atrocities had been punished for their crimes, the people of Cambodia understood they had to move on. Their momentum pushed the country forward, but crookedly, like a broken bone that heals without a cast. They opened shops and restaurants amid rubble and landmines. They struggled to raise children – roughly sixty percent of Cambodians were born after 1979 – who don’t learn about the Khmer Rouge in school and have trouble believing their parents’ and grandparents’ stories. Much of the population just tried to forget, to ‘dig a hole and bury the past and look to the future,’ as Prime Minister Hun Sen told them to do in 1998, after a series of senior leaders defected from what was left of the Khmer Rouge movement.

In this climate of pragmatism, some Cambodians believe that spending millions of dollars to put on trial a handful of elderly former leaders is absurd. It has been nearly thirty years since the Vietnamese ousted the Khmers Rouge from power. But domestic and international political interests have prevented the trials from happening until now.

Throughout the 1980s Cold War era, China and much of the free world continued to support a re-packaged Khmer Rouge coalition force as a means of weakening Vietnam and its ally, the Soviet Union. It wasn’t until 1997 that Hun Sen requested UN assistance in creating a Khmer Rouge tribunal, some say to delegitimize the country’s ongoing Khmer Rouge insurgency. When the guerilla movement essentially died the following year, along with Pol Pot, Hun Sen began to insist that putting former Khmer Rouge leaders on trial would jeopardize the country’s fragile peace. The international community continued to push for a court and, after years of negotiations, the tribunal began its work in earnest around two years ago. Since then, five former leaders have been taken into custody and the first trials are expected to start in late September. Still, given that most of the defendants are in their seventies and eighties, any justice meted out by the court will be largely symbolic.

That doesn’t bother the tribunal’s supporters, who believe a verdict on the Khmer Rouge period must be rendered before Cambodia can truly advance. For years, former Khmers Rouge have lived freely in the country, often side by side with those they persecuted. The country’s lack of historical accountability has created a lawless society, where rampant land grabbing forces the poor off of their newly valuable property and justice always has a price tag.

When I first came to Cambodia as a journalist in 2004, I saw the Khmer Rouge’s insidious legacy everywhere. In the twisted faces of beggars who had been permanently disfigured through contract acid attacks. Amid the ‘broken girls’ who turned tricks on Phnom Penh’s crumbling boulevards and the street children who huffed glue from dirty plastic bags. When a bright young student I knew was killed over a romantic dispute, I tried to find a way to write about it for my newspaper. The twenty-two-year-old had been gunned down in front of a popular nightclub, surrounded by witnesses, but because the triggerman was the son of a powerful official no one was ever arrested. After struggling with several potential angles for a story, I finally had to accept the fact that in Cambodia, the student’s death was not newsworthy. He was just another casualty of what scholars have come to call the country’s ‘culture of impunity’.

I returned to Cambodia this spring to write about the Khmer Rouge tribunal. While the society’s dark undercurrents continued to haunt me, even after I left the country, the warmth and resilience of its people had an equally profound impact. Through improving coverage of the tribunal, I hoped to play a small role in the country’s recovery, to help Cambodians confront and exorcise the demons of their recent history.

After a three-year hiatus, I found the country greatly changed, at least superficially. Cambodia’s first suburban developments (cookie-cutter mansions with reflective glass and neocolonial flourishes) are under construction outside of Phnom Penh. Several skyscrapers, including a gleaming gold-coloured tower, are planned for the downtown area. Yet the country’s feeble infrastructure can’t accommodate this scale of development, and the huge strain of such vanity projects frequently plunges much of the city into blackouts.

As Cambodia’s growth accelerates, so too does the disparity between the tiny elite and the impoverished masses. Impunity is endemic. Weeks before July’s national elections, an opposition-aligned newspaper journalist and his adult son were shot to death in the middle of a busy Phnom Penh street. Witnesses said the gunmen, who rode on a motorbike, made no effort to conceal their identities and even circled back to make sure they had hit their target. It was a brazen act. Yet there are no suspects in custody and little hope among Phnom Penh’s beleaguered journalists that the killers will ever be punished.

Change is not on the horizon. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party won a landslide victory in the national elections, amid accusations of voter fraud and observer assessments that the polls ‘failed to meet international standards’. Most Cambodians have never experienced a truly democratic society and cannot imagine government institutions free of rampant corruption. Khmer Rouge survivors like Youk Chhang, who has devoted much of his life to cataloguing the regime’s crimes as head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, believe the tribunal can be a turning point for the entire country, setting a new precedent for the notoriously corrupt judiciary and ultimately creating a more accountable society.

‘I want justice for the future, not for us,’ says Chhang. In his Phnom Penh office, surrounded by boxes of books, newspapers and archived documents, he describes how the Khmer Rouge cut open his sister’s stomach after she was accused of eating stolen rice and, thus, trying to sabotage the revolution. The survivors ‘are too broken and divided,’ Chhang says, ‘no one can compensate what the victims lost. But we need to leave a legacy for the country’.

That can only be achieved if those in custody actually face trial. And given their frail health and the glacial pace of the law, many Cambodians worry the defendants may yet elude justice.

‘The court moves too slowly. It needs to move fast, before the defendants die,’ Chit Leang tells me, lowering his voice and glancing nervously toward his neighbour’s house. ‘There are no words to say how angry I am. I want to know why they killed their own people. I want answers.’ Chit wishes he could travel to see the court himself, but the daylong trip to Phnom Penh isn’t practical. He has a restaurant to run.

If he could go, I am not sure how worthwhile he would find the experience. Although a tribunal lacking outreach and education will be meaningless, sometimes I think that the process underway is too abstract, too disconnected from everyday life in today’s Cambodia. A sleek, new complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, populated by international lawyers and judges who seem plucked from their homelands – robes, wigs and all – and deposited on this strange judicial island, the tribunal could not be more foreign to people like Chit. It was not designed to be accessible, physically or conceptually, to average Cambodians.

And yet, they come.

From the tribunal’s dusty parking lot, I watch survivors arrive for the pre-trial hearing of Ieng Sary, whose Foreign Ministry underwent a series of radical purges during the Khmer Rouge period. Organized and transported by various NGOs, the old men and women stream out of their buses. Most are peasants, with rough hands and wide feet, and they’ve dressed as if they were going to the pagoda – probably the only opportunity for formal wear in their home villages. The men seem a little uncomfortable in their button-down shirts, slacks and flip-flops; women are wrapped in long traditional skirts paired with sparkly, handmade tops.

Once they pass through parking lot security, they shuffle along a covered walkway that leads to the central court building. To the left, across a small field and past the wall looped with razor wire, they can see the yellow villa where the five defendants are kept. The court itself is impressive, but sterile.

The survivors settle into their seats. They watch as a man enters the courtroom from a side door, bowed over a cane, his free hand gripping a security guard for support. Thick spectacles, a hairline receded to the back of his head, Ieng Sary is the very picture of infirmity. He stares straight ahead, expressionless.

The scene unfolds in what looks like a giant fishbowl. A long, curved glass panel separates actual courtroom actors – Sary, the lawyers and judges – from those observing the process. In the front rows of the audience section are court staff and students. With their stylish haircuts and smart professional attire, they remind me of the young men and women I often see after work at the new Lucky Seven fast food restaurant, members of the country’s burgeoning middle class sharing gossip and study tips over gelato.

Just a few rows behind them, the Khmer Rouge survivors seem to occupy a different space and time. Men and women with deeply grooved faces, their eyes betray an expression I have seen too often in Cambodia. It’s a look I saw in Chit Leang, a glassy and disconnected gaze so unsettling it makes me want to turn away.

When the court breaks for lunch, observers discuss their plans for the afternoon. Having found the morning’s proceedings hard to follow, many confess they won’t be returning for a similarly tedious afternoon session; I worry that their time at the court had little impact. Until an overheard exchange gives me hope.

‘Are you going to come back for the rest of Sary’s hearing?’ an aid worker asks one of the departing men.

He pauses to think. ‘I’ve seen his face,’ he answers triumphantly. ‘That’s enough.’

Click here to see more of Elena Lesley’s photographs of Cambodia’s pursuit of reconciliation.

This slideshow accompanies Elena Lesley’s dispatch from Anlong Veng, Cambodia. To read the caption of each photograph, drag your cursor down the top of the screen.