The Master of Confessions (11 page)

Once a Khmer Rouge soldier, Ly Hor tells the court how, after his arrest, he was transferred from S-21 to S-24 (which never happened); that the roof over his cell was of corrugated iron (which the one at S-21 wasn't); that he was taken out to wash every three days (even though it's common knowledge that the prisoners were hosed down in the cells); that he was served rice (even though no prisoner at S-21 was allowed it); and so on.

Duch smiles, leans forward over his desk, intrigued by the poor wretch testifying. The victim's lawyer, tricked by the local NGO he works for, endures the worst day of his short career. Judge Cartwright upbraids counsel for the civil parties for their lack of preparation, and laments the consequences for those put on the stand. Judge Lavergne is furious about the “utter vagueness” of the documents relating to someone called Hor, from a certain “Bureau 43-44,” which are supposed to prove that the witness was indeed a prisoner at S-21. The lawyer has no answers. Nor does the prosecutor.

But Duch does.

Off the top of his head, he remembers that in one of the case documents—“Document B-57, Appendix 003”—Bureau 44 appears to be that of the Army Division 703. As for Bureau 43, he adds, no documentation exists. He hazards a guess, but is careful to say that there's no proof. The court adjourns. After the break, the prosecutor returns with new documents, ones that Duch has never seen. He asks to see them. He flips through them, then embarks on a fascinating reconstruction of the possible path of one Ear Hor, the S-21 prisoner as whom Ly Hor has tried to pass himself off.

With his arm folded behind his hip, Duch looks almost professorial as he carries out a thorough analysis of the archives. He has already found in them the prisoner's date of execution. He cites the legal classifications by heart. He notes that three years separate the birth dates of Ly Hor and Ear Hor. And you only have to compare Ly Hor's document filing for civil action with Ear Hor's written confession, says Duch, for the fabrication to become blindingly obvious. “I can see that the handwriting is 50 percent different. Comrade Ear Hor and Mr. Ly Hor are therefore two different people. Finally, Ear Hor is dead and I will do nothing which may offend his soul.”

Duch the super cop, whose talents had long ago been singled out by his Khmer Rouge masters, has just given a brilliant performance at his own trial. The court has wasted the day on one witness's fabrications. With just a few words, Duch has generated a consensus and in the process done himself the favor of coming across as more respectful of the victims than those who speak on their behalf.

Duch has an excellent grasp of the documentation and can find his way through it with a mathematician's precision. Everyone is amazed when he cites without notes the classification reference for such and such a document, or the page to which he is referring. Duch compiles, compares, checks, and memorizes the relevant documents. It's true that, when working with the various lists from S-21 (some of which overlap), Duch reaches conclusions that any diligent and painstaking accountant could have reached. But it's at this point that Duch adds something that only he can bring: an intimate knowledge of the institution that generated all of this data.

Duch's trial is at this point the only one taking place at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Just four more Khmer Rouge leaders are scheduled to be tried after him. This means that many victims won't share in this rare moment of justice, for the simple, unbearable reason that their prison or their cooperative or their dyke or their canal wasn't one of the sites selected during the investigations. Courts such as the ECCC, that render symbolic justice, are faced with the bitter task of choosing which victims will have their day in court and which won't. For Ly Hor, the lure proved irresistible.

“When I heard about Duch's trial, I became determined to be part of it. I suffered so much under the Khmer Rouge,” he says.

Another alleged survivor of S-21 takes the stand. He is a handsome man with hair cut short, a round face, and laughing eyes. His eyebrows are slightly arched, and his lips are very pronounced and delicately outlined, not unlike those of the great Khmer king Jayavarman VII, whose face watches over his people from the four corners of the famous Bayon Temple. The man on the stand has a calm voice and keeps his eyes fixed dead ahead.

He remembers being sent to S-21 in 1976. He remembers being given a little fish in his food ration, being let out of the cell to wash, and being sent out to work in the vegetable garden. Again, you would think that anyone who knows how S-21 worked would have immediately unmasked this witness. But the prospect of parading before the court a survivor unknown to anyone for thirty years proves too great a temptation for the NGOs, and their discernment fails them.

DC-Cam, the Document Center of Cambodia, was founded in the mid-1990s by Yale University. Within a decade, it had built Phnom Penh's largest archive on the history of the Khmer Rouge. All of the S-21 archives are stored there, and when the tribunal was established in 2006, it proved an indispensable resource. But it was DC-Cam, perhaps swept up in the frenzy whirling around the tribunal, that “found” the daring substitute Ly Hor. Not to be outdone, the NGO Lawyers Without Borders produces its own improbable survivor.

Faced with such fecklessness, Duch hardly needs lawyers. His opponents turn out to be his best defense. Even worse, they embarrass some of the victims. Judge Cartwright is furious, her face locked in a scowl. Judge Lavergne looks at his fingers, then around the room, careful to avoid meeting the eyes of the reserve judge, though she's obviously as stunned as he is. The spectators who remain in the public gallery have—wisely—gotten unruly, and present a more genial scene than the one taking place in the courtroom: some villagers have noticed that they can see themselves in the background on the screens. They smile and chuckle and joke around. The air smells of Tiger Balm. There's a palpable buzz, for this is no ordinary session: it's a big day in court! Though there's little doubt that the poor fool on the stand suffered physically and psychologically at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, it wasn't at S-21, and no one bothers listening to him any longer. He may not have been locked up in Duch's prison, but he is nevertheless one of Cambodia's millions of victims. Sometimes, he tells the court, pus still oozes from his left ear.

Next, an ex–Khmer Rouge soldier limps into the courtroom. He comes across as a humble and gentle man, despite his eyes sunken into their sockets, his hollow cheeks, and his sharp, angular face. The soldier helped to clear Phnom Penh of its inhabitants in April 1975. The following year, he was arrested during one of the many purges in the Northern Zone. He was reinstated as a radio operator, then rearrested in 1978. He gives a flawless description of his detention at S-21. He wasn't photographed upon arrival, he says, but all his other details match. Unlike those of the fake survivors, his story contains no credibility gaps. That is, not until he describes being taken away to be executed. “It was probably the night of January 6, 1979,” he says, because he could hear gunfire. He was blindfolded and made to kneel beside a ditch. He told himself that his hour had come. Someone hit him in the ribs and he tumbled unconscious into the hole. Then, at around two in the morning, he came to. He didn't know where he was. He felt dizzy, but managed to free himself from the rope binding him. He could smell blood. He climbed out of the ditch. There were no guards in the vicinity. It was only later, he said, that he realized that the place was Choeung Ek.

He walked for an hour before lying down on a tree trunk. He was starving and tried to chew on a banana stem. He found his way to the river, where he put a trunk in the water, lay down on it, and pushed off the bank. He drifted downstream for two or three days before reaching the place known in Phnom Penh as the Japanese Bridge. Members of the army that had just driven out the Khmer Rouge found and rescued him. He remembers that there was still intense bombing going on. He was ill but safe.

The witness speaks in even tones for almost an hour without pause, barely moving, his eyes riveted to the floor. Thirty years after the fact, like some magician pulling a rabbit from his top hat, the human rights association ADHOC (along with Lawyers Without Borders, who represent the witness in court) has just presented to the world the only survivor of the killing fields of Choeung Ek, and the sole survivor whose violent interrogation Duch would have personally attended.

But there's a problem, and it lies in all the other statements the miracle witness made before Duch's trial: they differ substantially from what he tells the court. When he is confronted with this, the ex-soldier's memory suddenly fails him, even though he remembered the tiniest details when telling his tale to the court. A murmur rises in the gallery. The public, made up mostly of peasants, has a sharp ear for nonsense.

“This is utterly different from what you have previously told us,” snaps the presiding judge, determined to expose this miraculous survivor.

The witness, suddenly nervous, begins to blink rapidly. He confesses that he had visited S-21 in 2008, during a trip organized by ADHOC, with the purpose of looking for the “biographies” of his cousin and his cousin's wife. That's when he first learned about Choeung Ek—the place that he claims never to have revisited since he dodged death there all those years ago.

Now it is the judges who want to try a little police work. All the documentary evidence—the lists of those arrested and executed, the thousands of confessions, the photographs, the biographies—constitutes the vast terrain on which they play a kind of legal scavenger hunt. Bit by bit, each player has been drawn into Duch's well-oiled machine. He has shown them the way, has demonstrated to them the efficiency of his system. Everyone knows how to use it now; everyone knows how to cross-check facts. Digital technology makes it even easier, and the players find the game irresistible. Another false “survivor” is unmasked. Though she's loath to do it, his lawyer must beat a hasty retreat. She finds others to blame: “The human rights organizations collect the testimonies. The work is done by young, untrained investigators. They are amateurs using whatever means they have available.”

A
S SOON AS THE VIETNAMESE FORCES THAT TOPPLED POL POT DISCOVERED S
-21,
they made a propaganda film about it. Shot in early January 1979, the film shows the blackened and bloated corpse of one of the last victims of the regime's secret police—a Khmer Rouge soldier, according to Duch. The body is lying on an iron bed. Behind the bed is a small desk with a typewriter on it; then a shot of the courtyard, where crows are landing by a decomposing body. The army reporter's voice announces, “We found these children in an office.” Three children appear in the frame: one is wearing a white shirt and a cap, two are wearing the black uniform of the Khmer Rouge. One gives the camera a hard, challenging look. The camera zooms in for a close-up and you notice that “he” is wearing earrings. Another looks up toward the ceiling. The camera pans right and we see a half-naked baby lying on a mat. The commentator tells us that the children are “paralyzed with fear and hunger.”

Norng Champhal is the oldest of the children found at S-21. He was nine years old at the time. Seven months later, he testified to the people's court set up by Cambodia's new government in order to judge the crimes of the “Pol Pot–Ieng Sary Clique” and to assert its own legitimacy in the process. The forces that deposed Pol Pot's Communist regime were themselves Communist. The Soviet Union and China fought their proxy war in Vietnam and Cambodia, and things can get confusing when Communists put other Communists on trial. The Vietnamese-sponsored court denounced the Khmer Rouge regime as having been backed by “reactionary forces” in Beijing. Cambodia's Maoists were reviled as “counterrevolutionaries,” “imperialist lackeys,” even “fascists.”

Several witnesses called to testify before the court ended their depositions with a jarring cry of “Long live the revolutionary forces!” In a few short months, little Champhal had already had enough time to learn to use the term “Polpotists.” In his testimony at the time, he described in extraordinary detail what he saw and experienced at S-21: