KHMER ROUGE TORTURER NOW A BORN AGAIN CHRISTIAN; AMAZING TESTIMONY OF KHMER ROUGE PRISON CHIEF KAING GUEK EAV

Phnom Penh, Cambodia - Once a devoted Khmer Rouge communist, the regime's former chief executioner traded leftist ideology for Jesus, and now, with his trial four days under way, presents himself as a pious, contrite, and cooperative old man.
"I would like to seek forgiveness from the victims," Kaing Guek Eav, alias "Duch," told judges Monday at the UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).
At the second day of his trial March 31, he said: "I would like to emphasize that I am responsible for the crimes committed at S-21 [prison], especially the torture and execution of the people there."
This is the penitent Christian that Cheam Socheong, the director of Phkoam High School where Duch (pronounced "Doik") taught math in the 1990s, remembers well. "Duch often talked of God and the good way," Mr. Cheam said in a recent interview at his school office in Cambodia's remote northwest. "He asked me why I didn't go to church. He tried to convert me."
First with communism, then Christianity, Duch has always embraced and espoused his beliefs with fervor, friends and family say.


The court's psychological exam noted "obsessive" traits in his personality, "both past and present," though it did not link that trait specifically with his faith.
The intensity that once turned Duch into a feared prison chief has now transformed him into an evangelical Christian eager to cooperate with the court and seek forgiveness. Of five former Khmer Rouge cadres now in detention at the ECCC, he is the sole detainee to have cooperated with the investigating judges.
Duch's embrace of Christianity makes him "less likely than other defendants to justify the regime's abuses as necessary but painful steps toward socialism," says Stanford University's John Ciorciari, a senior legal adviser to the nonprofit Documentation Center of Cambodia.

A devoted communist teacher
Duch joined the Khmer Rouge in 1964 while attending college. The next year, he began teaching math at Skuon High School in Kompong Cham province, about 50 miles north of Phnom Penh. There, he often carried around Mao's Little Red Book and, although he could afford a car, rode to work on a rickety bicycle. He also encouraged students to embrace a peasant life, recalls Kek Channary, a former student.
"Everyone knew he was a communist," she said recently by telephone from San Jose, Calif., where she lives with her husband and two sons.
That same year, Duch said goodbye to his family and friends and joined the underground ultra-Maoist movement. During the next decade, he oversaw several of the regime's security offices, most notably S-21 in Phnom Penh, now known as Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where it is estimated that more than 12,000 people confessed under torture to counterrevolutionary activity and were executed.

From communist to Christian
When the Vietnamese Army sacked Phnom Penh in 1979, Duch fled with the Khmer Rouge to Cambodia's western border. He remained a cadre until 1992, when he moved his wife and four children to the village of Phkoam in Banteay Meanchey Province and resumed teaching math. He used the alias "Hang Pin" to hide his identity.
Soon after Duch moved to Phkoam, his neighbor, Suon Sito, invited him to attend the local Christian church. Duch embraced the religion and cast aside his communist beliefs, Mr. Suon said in a recent interview.
Duch became vocal about his faith and began inviting others to attend services, says Suon, and eventually became a lay pastor.
Duch's eldest child, Ky Sievkim, said her father baptized her soon after his conversion. "Every night my father led me in prayer. Every Sunday he brought out the Bible and read it to the whole family," she said during a recent interview at her home in Battambang Province. As she spoke, she held in her lap her 1-year-old son Chhin Chonghour, whom Duch has never met.
Duch later started a house church near Svay Chek High School, where he taught from 1996 to 1997. During the work day, he proselytized. "He spoke of Jesus Christ and tried to convince other teachers to believe," said Hun Smien, the school's former director, in an interview at the now-abandoned schoolhouse where Duch lectured French — one of five languages he speaks.

Khmer Rouge identity revealed
In 1998, when local teachers recognized "Hang Pin" from a photo in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Duch urgently requested a transfer to Battambang province, where he became the education director of Samlot town, Mr. Hun says.
There, his evangelism continued. "He asked me to be a Christian," says Sok Lian, a local market vender in Samlot who briefly rented property from Duch. "He told me he wanted to start a church. But he was arrested before he could."
In 1999, a news article revealed Duch's identity and authorities soon detained him. The news stunned his former students and colleagues. "When I saw him on television, I said, 'Oh, Hang Pin is Duch!" recalls the former high school director, Hun.
"I was shocked," says Ms. Kek, Duch's student in the 1960s. Although she remembers Duch as kinder than the other teachers, she is appalled by his deeds. "You cannot erase his genocidal action," Kek says. "You cannot forgive him for that."
Family members see Duch differently, arguing that he is a changed man worthy of forgiveness. "I want to tell the court that my father is a good man, through Jesus," said Mrs. Ky. Duch's sister, Hang Kim Hong, who today lives in Duch's old home in Samlot, said that she prays for his release every day with her children.

Seeking forgiveness
Duch has said he will cooperate with the court during the next three to four months of trial proceedings and attempt to answer all questions asked by the judges.
Alex Hinton of Rutgers University's Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights says Duch's trial starts a long-overdue conversation between Khmer Rouge perpetrators and victims. It's also Duch's first chance to seek the forgiveness his new ideology commands.
"His admission is very much a Christian act," Mr. Hinton said during a break in Monday's proceedings. "The question now is whether he's trying to get his sentence down or is genuinely sorry and wants to confess his sins."

MEXICO'S ' DEATH CULT ' PROTESTS SHRINE DESTRUCTION

MEXICO CITY — About 200 worshippers marched Sunday to protest the government's destruction of "Death Saint" shrines, saying Mexico's fight against drug cartels has veered into religious persecution.
"We are believers, not criminals!" the protesters chanted as they marched from a gritty Mexico City neighborhood to the Metropolitan Cathedral downtown.
At shrines, chapels and small churches across the country, tens of thousands of people worship the Death Saint, which is often depicted as a robe-covered skeleton resembling the Grim Reaper.
It is popular with drug traffickers, and soldiers often find shrines to the saint during raids on cartel safe houses. But in crime-ridden neighborhoods, people of all walks of life believe the "Santa Muerte" protects against violent or untimely deaths. Devotees often use elements of Catholic rites, leaving offerings of candles or praying to the folk saint for protection.


Mexican law enforcement won't say it is targeting the "Santa Muerte." But last month, army troops accompanied workers who used back hoes to topple and crush more 30 shrines on a roadway in the city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas. Many were elaborate, one-story, marble-clad constructions with electric lighting and statues of the skeletal Death Saint.

The sect's archbishop, David Romo, denounced the destruction as religious persecution and demanded a meeting with President Felipe Calderon.
Protesters carried statues and pushed makeshift shrines to the saint. Some brought their children, and one marcher carried a white puppy.
"Sometimes people look down on us because we believe in her, but my faith is bigger than somebody looking down on me," said America Melendez, a 24-year-old street vendor marching with a red-robed statue of the saint.
Roberto Sanchez, a 28-year-old carpenter, said he became a believer after praying to the Death Saint for the recovery of a sick nephew. He carried a sign reading "I believe in you Santa Muerte and I am not a narco."
"If we are not doing anything to them, they shouldn't be doing this," he said of the shrines' destruction.

TEACHER'S UNION CALLS AN END FOR THE FAITH SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND; PRAY AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE...

Teachers' leaders will this week demand the phasing out of the nation's 7,000 state-funded faith schools.
As a first step, delegates at the National Union of Teachers' conference will seek a ban on opening any new faith schools – on the grounds that their admissions policies have created "segregated schooling" in many parts of the country.
The move would put the union on a collision course with the Government, which has openly sought sponsorship by religious groups for many of its flagship new academies. Several of the new academies to be opened this year have church backing.
It is also likely to provoke fierce debate within the union, as many of its members work in faith schools.
At present, there are about 7,000 faith schools in the country – 600 secondary and 6,400 primary. The vast majority are Christian: there are around 6,955 Church of England, Roman Catholic and Methodist schools. The rest consist of 36 Jewish schools, six Muslim, two Sikh and one Hindu, Greek Orthodox and Seventh-Day Adventist.
The motion, which is set to be debated at the union's annual conference in Cardiff on Saturday, states: "Religious groups, of whatever faith, should have no place in the control and management in the control and management of schools."
It declares that "all children should have the opportunity and the right to meet and work with children from a variety of backgrounds and faiths within their day-to-day education".
Supporters of the move argue that admitting pupils on religious grounds risks undermining the Government's calls to them to promote community cohesion, which has just become a legal obligation on all schools.
The union's leadership is prepared to back the motion's main aim – to declare a long-term commitment to creating a single community comprehensive system that covers all state secondary schools. However, it would rather place the emphasis on getting existing faith schools to change their admissions policies than campaign against all new proposals to establish religious schools. It will seek to persuade delegates to back a call for all schools to adopt "non-discriminatory admissions procedures".
Christine Blower, general secretary of the NUT, said: "Our preference would be that schools admissions rely on the proximity of the family to the school. The important thing for us is to ensure that all schools have to abide by the duty to promote social cohesion, rather than select on religious grounds."
The drive to create more faith schools gained impetus under Tony Blair's premiership, when he sought to persuade faith groups to become one of the key sponsors of academies.
Since then, Schools Secretary Ed Balls has insisted the Government does not have a policy in favour of creating more faith schools. However, department officials insist that ministers still value the work done by faith schools in the state education system.
Certain religious sectors agree that faith schools should do more to be more inclusive. In 2006, the Rt Rev Dr Kenneth Stevenson, the Bishop of Portsmouth and chair of the Church of England's Board of Education, wrote to then Education secretary, Alan Johnson: "I want to make a specific commitment that all new ... schools should have at least 25 per cent of places available to children with no requirement that they be of practising Christian families. The places would not be left empty if they were not filled by such children so this would technically not be a 'quota' but a 'proportion'."

Religion's role in a nation's education
There are about 6,400 primary and 600 secondary faith state schools in England
Of these, about 4,700 are Church of England, 2,100 Roman Catholic, and 150 Methodist, with 36 Jewish, six Muslim, two Sikh, one Greek Orthodox, one Hindu and one Seventh-Day Adventist
There are a further 140 Muslim schools in the UK which are not part of the state system
The only state faith schools which existed before the 1997 general election were Christian or Jewish
The state pays up to 90 per cent of the running costs
All faith schools have to teach the National Curriculum
For religious education, more than half only teach their own faith, while the remained teach a locally agreed religious syllabus
Admissions are determined by school governors, and schools can insist on proof of baptism and regular church attendance.
National Secular Society claims that 80 per cent of the population disapproves of faith schools