Victims of Duch: 'I could hear screams everywhere'

It was art that ultimately saved Vann Nath from the murderous clutches of the Khmer Rouge. By taking the job of painting portraits and sculpting busts of Pol Pot, he stopped the supremo's henchmen from taking his life.

Now the 63 year-old has the dubious honour of being one of the few living survivors of the notorious S-21 jail, presided over by the now-indicted Duch.

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"I allowed them to tie me like a pig," is how he remembers his 1977 arrest in his memoir, A Cambodian Prison Portrait. He was never to discover the grounds for his detention, which lasted for a year. "They would handcuff and blindfold the prisoners before they left the room. Sometimes, some of the prisoners came back with wounds or blood on their bodies, while others disappeared," Mr Nath wrote. "I could hear screams of pain from every corner of the prison. I felt a twinge of pain in my body at each scream."

His paintbrush spared him the torture his fellow prisoners were suffering but not the anguish of watching his cellmates die in front of his eyes. "If a prisoner died in the morning, they would not take him out until night," he said.

And it was the paintbrush to which he returned when he became a free man. Canvases capturing S-21's horrors now line the walls of the Cambodian Genocide Museum and, last month, a new exhibition opened in the capital, Phnom Penh, of 10 new Nath works, all painted this year.

At the launch of the show, he expressed scepticism about the UN tribunal's ability to give him justice: "I am totally without hope because it's almost 30 years now."

Yesterday's indictment may have come too late for many of Mr Nath's fellow inmates but now, perhaps, he can start to hope again.