Read The Master of Confessions Online
Authors: Thierry Cruvellier
The village woman who spoke next only added to the embarrassment of those in power: “This tribunal does not bring reconciliation. Justice does not exist. We have elections, but power and wealth remain in the hands of people in power. If you are not rich, you don't get justice. Those who committed crimes are in power. They don't admit to it. They keep the power.”
In court, Duch insists that ideology is important. And Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two and Duch's direct superior between 1977 and 1979, has said, “Ideology is truth. Truth comes from practicing ideology.” Of course, the political philosophy to which Nuon Chea was referring led to some of the twentieth century's worst totalitarian regimes, and many intellectuals who embraced it then now squirm when confronted with its history. The lawyers at Duch's trial appear curiously sensitive to this, as though fearful of somehow being undone by it. In response, they champion a doctrine of personal responsibility and maintain a scrupulousâand convenientâstance of political neutrality. Lawyers like to say that determining
why
a crime occurred is not within the purview of a criminal courtâyet it's the question on everyone's lips.
In the end, it's the Cambodian prosecutor who, at the start of Duch's trial, tries to answer the common-sense question posed by the peasants of Pailin.
For thirty years, 1.5 million victims of the Khmer Rouge have been demanding justice for their suffering. For thirty years, the survivors of Democratic Kampuchea have been waiting for accountability. For thirty years, a whole generation of Cambodians has been fighting to get answers about their families' fates. Today, at long last, this process begins and justice will be done. You are also called upon to determine why it happened, because history demands it. The purpose of courts such as this one must be to establish the truth, unflinchingly and without fear. The ultimate goal of the Khmer Rouge was the establishment of a “pure” Communist society unlike any seen before. Some then and perhaps still now argue that the Khmer Rouge came to power with the best of intentions and that something went terribly wrong. But that is simply not true. From the very beginning, the Khmer Rouge leadership was intent on ridding itself of its perceived enemies.
Long before the Khmer Rouge, some twenty years before Democratic Kampuchea came into existence, when Duch was still a schoolboy, the philosopher Raymond Aron wrote a scrupulous analysis warning of the chimera of good intentions. He wrote in
The Opium of Intellectuals
(1957):
The idolaters of history cause more and more intellectual and moral havoc, not because they are inspired by good or bad sentiments, but because they have wrong ideas. [ . . . ] The essence of a political regime is found not in the principles it proclaims, nor in the ideas it calls its own, but in the life that it gives its people.
In 2009, there are no anti-Communist activists using Duch's trial to substantiate their warnings of the dangers of Communism; this is a given. Rather, Duch's trial seems to interest mostly those old Marxists who have more or less kept the faith. They come primarily, it seems, to continue arguing among themselves. Revolution is a drug that lasts, with its promise of romance and excitement and its intellectual distance from the tedium of reform. Marxism is the opium of intellectuals, wrote Aron, just as Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses. It is Westerners who will write history in Phnom Penh, just as they did in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and just as they did at the temples at Angkor. Some of them see in Duch's trial a tacit retelling of their own broken dreams.
THE CAMBODIAN GOVERNMENT CLOSELY MONITORS
the tribunal. The state's three highest-ranking members are themselves former Khmer Rouge officials who fled the purges and escaped across the border to Vietnam in 1977. Other important ministers and many military officers are also former revolutionaries. Nothing illustrates the atmosphere of hushed tension and ambiguity hanging over the court better than the “Jarvis Affair” that breaks out in the middle of the trial.
Duch is in the dock talking about the policies of the Communist Party of Kampuchea when Helen Jarvis, who has been running the tribunal's Public Affairs section from the start, is named head of Victims' Support. Because Jarvis's longtime Communist affiliation is no secret, the announcement causes a bit of an outcry. But the tone becomes far more strident when a political manifesto surfaces, which was written as recently as 2006 and which Jarvis signed.
The text is titled “We Are Not Leaving the LPF!” The Leninist Party Faction (LPF) was a splinter group of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a now-defunct Australian far-left political party. The faction and the political alliance to which it belonged was a world of infighting, a place where purges and plots abounded, where people accused one another of treason and of plotting to secede, of vindictive and petty-minded fights between “comrades,” violations of Party discipline, collaboration with the enemy, and crushing insults. Its members still dreamed of being at the forefront of the Revolution and celebrated the one started under Hugo Chavez. The future of World Communism, they said, revolves around the Venezuela-Cuba axis. They respected “democratic centralism” and vilified the “international capitalist media.”
The manifesto's signatories were unhappy with the line held by the party leadership, because it failed to promote “the Leninist strategy of building a revolutionary party made up of Marxist cadresâthe key to advancing the socialist struggle.” They went on to say that “We too are Marxists and believe that âthe end justifies the means.'” They adopted an ambiguous position: “For the means to be justifiable, the ends must also be held to account,” but then state quite unambiguously: “In times of revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes become necessary and justified. Against the bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don't respect their laws and their fake moral principles [sic].”
The text, which Duch wouldn't have found objectionable in the 1970s, had been signed by the person that the tribunal put in charge of looking after the victims of the Khmer Rouge's revolution. As Aron wrote: “Communist faith justifies all means, Communist hope forbids acceptance of the fact that there are many roads toward the Kingdom of God, Communist charity does not even allow its enemies the right to die an honorable death.” He continues:
The sublime end excuses the revolting means. Profoundly moralistic in regard to the present, the revolutionary is cynical in action. He protests against police brutality, the inhuman rhythm of industrial production, the severity of bourgeois courts, the execution of prisoners whose guilt has not been proved beyond doubt [ . . . ] But as soon as he decides to give his allegiance to a party which is as implacably hostile as he is himself to the established disorder, we find him forgiving, in the name of the Revolution, everything he has hitherto relentlessly denounced. The revolutionary myth bridges the gap between moral intransigence and terrorism.
Some civil parties write of their distress at the Jarvis affair. The court's reaction is to ride out the storm. A UN spokesperson tells the media: “Every staff member has a right to personal political views.”
Helen Jarvis herself says little. She feels wounded by the victims' challenge. “I have spent ten years working to establish this tribunal,” she reminds her opponents. She has written a book about it.
In any event, the victims of Cambodia's Communist dictatorship never organized themselves into an advocacy group. They carry very little weight.
The storm passes. Ideas and ideology, we're told, aren't relevant. Jarvis keeps her job.
But unlike Jarvis, who can dodge the media, Duch cannot dodge Judge Lavergne's questions in the courtroom.
“Did you believe that the end mattered, not the means? Was that the way you saw it at the time?”
“Exactly,” replies the former Leninist.
O
NCE THE MIDDLE-RANKING OFFICIALS PRAK KHAN, SUOR THI, AND HIM HUY,
have given their testimony, it is the turn of the lower ranks.
One former guard wears rectangular glasses with a thin, dark frame. He parts his well-cut black hair low on one side, his hair so thick that the part is barely visible. It is so neatly trimmed that he looks like he's wearing a wig. He is fifty-one years old, with the demeanor of a well-behaved schoolboy. Thirty-five years earlier, he served as a guard and messenger at S-21, the bottom of the ladder. He sits straight and still in his seat, and positions his forearms confidently on the armrests. He looks like he's sitting in the electric chair. When he speaks, he purses his lips at the end of each sentence, which makes him look like a prude who's just heard a swear word. He ends each answer by clenching his jaw, swallowing, and lengthening his neck like a turtle.
The former guard's brother was arrested and killed at S-21, and the witness says he was terrified that he would be, too. He says he owes his life to Him Huy, the head guard. But he levels serious accusations against Duch. Before the trial, he told investigating judges that when a prisoner's answers weren't clear, Duch would say to them, “Are you going to talk?” then hit them a couple of times before adding, “You'll know soon enough.” The former guard swore it was true. He also said that Duch came to the prison almost daily.
But in court, he plays all this down, saying that he had been “a bit excessive” in his earlier testimony. He describes to the court the severe interrogation as he remembers it.
“When I came back from lunch, I saw Duch in a villa next to a wooden building. I saw that and it's the truth,” he says, before swallowing and extending his neck.
“Did you see Duch beat up the prisoner?”
“Duch used a rattan cane. He didn't beat him too much before I left.”
“You saw this with your own eyes?”
“I saw this with my own eyes because I was guarding the two-story building and that's the truth.”
“Did you see him torture other prisoners?”
“No.”
Wearing a pale lilac shirt, untucked, Duch is dressed like a member of today's Khmer ruling class. He says he feels sorry for the witness, whose testimony is generally accurateâexcept, of course, for the bit implicating Duch directly in the interrogations. “My crime was indoctrinating personnel. That was my crime against those who weren't arrested by the Angkar. The interrogators resorted to torture because they had to. I don't deny that. But the guards had to do their job, not conduct interrogations.”
Duch recognizes before the court that the witness, now a farmer, was a combatant who suffered greatly. He says he shares this man's suffering and offers him his condolences. He sits down and carefully puts into a plastic sleeve the documents he used during his statement. He looks at the former guard before he leaves the room. Duch slides the plastic sleeve into a big red binder.
Another rice farmer takes the stand. He's wearing the gray suit jacket in which a succession of witnesses has now appeared, each of them swimming in it. Whenever he doesn't understand a question, he grins. A French advisor to Prince Sihanouk wrote that the Khmer smile
[C]onceals brilliantly the true feelings of men. Throughout the Far East, the smile is the polite mask from behind which people watch one another, congratulate one another or fight one another. But in Cambodia, this mask is more often than not one of pleasant-enough and ambiguous indifference that people hold up between themselves and others. One should never mistake a smile for an invitation to start a conversation. On the contrary, a smile signals the worry and embarrassment provoked by an outsider. The smile, in Cambodia, indicates that one has neither the intention to answer indiscreet questions nor to ask them.
*
The farmer leans toward the microphone, his eyes twinkling. He has the easy good cheer of one so unaccustomed to the pomp and ostentation of the rich and powerful that they cannot intimidate him. He was fifteen years old when he was sent first to the S-24 reeducation camp, then to S-21, where he worked as a guard in Building B. He entertains the court with his naive, transparent answers and the smiles with which he punctuates them; a murmur of appreciation rises in the public gallery. The witness knows little and remembers even less. He neither saw nor met Duch, and he has forgotten what he told the investigating judges only last year. He is illiterateâor, at least, he was at the time of the crimesâyet the court asks him to confirm whether the prison rules and regulations were posted in each cell. He initially told investigators that he had witnessed numerous rapes. Now he says he saw none.
Duch explains that the witness was exactly the type of person he had sought to recruit: a young, uneducated, mentally and politically pliable member of the “base people.”
â
In court, the farmer comes across as a useless witness.
Criminal investigations work in mysterious ways: prestigious international courts do not keep count of the sensational statements made in confidence during the investigation and then publicly disavowed at trial. If, in the absence of documentary evidence, a court must issue a judgment based solely on testimony, then that judgment will often be little more than an act of faith. The more trials you follow, the more you disbelieve everyone: witnesses, the police, judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and victims.
The abundance of documentary evidence at Duch's trial makes it tempting to fall back on the principle set by the defendant himself: where there is no documentary evidence, there is reasonable doubt; and if there is doubt, you must not convict. The abundance of archival material takes pressure off of everyone's conscience: there's no need to believe in justice in order to form an opinion about it.
WHEN A CERTAIN LY HOR
takes the stand and claims to be a survivor of S-21, Duch immediately makes it clear that he doesn't believe him.