The Master of Confessions (16 page)

“It all happened very quickly,” says the woman.

One year later, her husband was purged at S-21 and she was sent to S-24 for “reeducation.” After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, she returned to her village, where her mother told her that it was because of her, the revolutionary, that her father was dead. She fell to her knees before an aunt and begged her forgiveness, but the aunt refused to give it. So today she says that she must reject Duch's apology in order to prove that she isn't Khmer Rouge, that she is loyal to the nation, and that she was “betrayed by that group,” symbolized in her mind by Duch.

If we look beyond the anticipated punishment for the crimes committed at S-21, we see how they have torn apart Cambodian families; we see the terrible burden of family betrayals and insurmountable feelings of guilt.

Another woman takes the witness stand. She's wearing a burgundy-colored jacket over a white blouse and an elegant sarong typical of city folk. Her hair, touched lightly with gray, is cut short and neatly pushed back. A thin pair of spectacles rests on her nose. She is seventy years old, but looks younger. She pinches the hem of her blouse and nervously pulls it down. A victims' assistant puts a hand on her arm. Of the hundred or so students who passed the entrance exam for medical school in her generation, this witness was one of the few women. She immediately apologizes: “Sometimes I feel as if I am mentally unstable.”

She speaks quickly and forcefully. There are notes in front of her, but she doesn't use them. As soon as she starts talking, her story carries her away. She describes how the entire population of Phnom Penh was evacuated in the hours after the arrival of the Khmer Rouge. She remembers each moment. She can still mimic the way black-clad soldiers with megaphones in hand insinuated that all educated people were to be eliminated. “They said that they would keep only the base people.”

Her husband was deputy director of civil aviation at Phnom Penh airport. He was arrested. She was sent out to be “reeducated” by working on the dykes and dams. During the rainy season, her black-clad supervisor told her that if she passed this test, she would survive. If not, she would die. She closes her eyes to help jog her memory before diving back into the details of her tragic odyssey. Duch is sitting up straight, listening closely.

“I've lived in despair for so long that when death comes, I won't falter,” she says.

After the fall of the regime, she returned to Phnom Penh and found work at the hospital. One day, her boss summoned her and told her to visit the museum at S-21. She knew very well the Ponhea Yat High School, where the Khmer Rouge had set up its detention center. Friends of her parents used to live close by. She reached the prison and was met by one of the survivors, she says. It's at this point that, in court, the pitch of her voice rises and cracks. Her speech becomes a series of short, strident cries, and she addresses the court in that striking timbre that the Khmer language reserves for anger, grief, and incomprehension. At S-21, she was shown documents, including a photograph. It was the last one taken of her husband, Thich Hour Tuk, alias Tuk. The documents contained the date he was brought to S-21: February 2, 1976, and the date he was executed: May 25, 1976.

In the photograph, the prisoner's piercing gaze appears to defy the photographer. He wears a thin mustache and has a few hairs on his chin. He looks slightly cross-eyed. Tuk is pursing his full lips, which gives him a skeptical expression. His brother, a pilot, was also destroyed at S-21.

The widow lowers her voice to give the court an impression of a conversation she had with a cousin, and another she had with a niece. Sometimes she seems disorientated and confused, as though suffering from the mental malady she mentioned at the beginning of her deposition. Then she reminds herself that the regime accused her husband of a “great crime.” And then her angry voice returns and cracks through the courtroom like a whip and she asks the same question over and again: “Why? Why? Why?”

She says that men fall into one of two categories: those that resemble humans and have gentle hearts; and those that resemble humans and have animal hearts. An extremely devout woman, she prays for Duch's reincarnation and that “all of these beings cease to be cruel like Pol Pot's people.” Then that question again:
Why?

“Why should people who have done no wrong be locked up and mistreated? I don't understand.”

Her story returns ceaselessly to the inexplicable, a circle without end: they came for him, he disappeared, he's dead. It is enough to drive you mad.

“This is a good moment to take a break,” says the presiding judge.

IT TURNS OUT THAT
it was the witness's older sister who denounced her husband to the black-uniformed guards. She considered her older sister like a mother.

The judges have fallen quiet. Her lawyer has cast her adrift on the river of her memory, aboard her raft of grief. Her lawyer doesn't ask a single question; not one person in the courtroom interrupts her frenzied torrent of words, her heartbreak, her pain and madness, and that question—
Why?
—that keeps coming back again and again, the woman banging her head against it until it bleeds. “I was loyal to my country. I was loyal to my husband. Why have I been punished like this?”

P
OL POT, SAYS DUCH, WANTED TO BUILD A MONUMENT
on the Wat Phnom, the tiny hill in northern Phnom Penh where a temple stands. This first sign of a personality cult—so typical of totalitarian regimes—occurred at the end of 1977, and ran counter to the Khmer Rouge's obsession with secrecy. The regime needed painters and sculptors. Duch searched through his lists.

“Who in this cell knows how to paint?” shouted a teenage guard.

Bou Meng raised his hand. Moments later, he was in a room on the ground floor of the prison. Someone handed him a snapshot which, he saw, had been developed in China. The man in the picture was unknown to him; nevertheless, Bou Meng was to draw his portrait. It was Pol Pot, the Revolution's “Brother Number One.” Duch sat cross-legged behind Bou Meng while he painted. If he failed, said the prison director, he would be used for fertilizer.

“I didn't know if I was going to be used as fertilizer, or if I was supposed to produce some,” says Bou Meng. “It was a hard question to answer in those days.”

Duch gave him a sheet of paper on which to sketch. Satisfied with the result, the prison director asked Bou Meng what materials he needed to paint a large painting. He ordered his subordinates to fetch them.

Vann Nath had been lying in a cell in Building B for a month when he, too, was called by a guard. Vann Nath was the last in his row of prisoners bound in leg-irons, which meant the guards had to unfetter all the others first before reaching him. He needed help to stand; he was starving. He remembers thinking he was so hungry that he would have eaten human flesh. He was led out of the cell, barely able to walk. He wasn't blindfolded. He was terrified, convinced he was about to die. He entered a building to find four people waiting for him, including “Brother East”—Duch. He was asked to summarize his experience as a painter since 1965. Bou Meng was already there. Vann Nath was told that the Angkar needed portraits. He replied that he would do his best. He was given a photograph of Brother Number One. Vann Nath had never seen him before. His ears hurt. He stank of shit. He wanted to shave his mustache. He promised not to commit suicide. He felt on the verge of fainting: if he didn't paint well, he would die; if he did paint well, he would also die, just a little later. He was told he could rest for three days. “I realized it was a matter of life or death. My first painting was a failure. It was in black-and-white, which was a new technique for me. I asked for colors.”

A photo of Pol Pot appears on the courtroom screen and stays there longer than did the image of Bou Meng's wife. A murmur rises in the public gallery, followed by whispers.

At first, Vann Nath wasn't much good, but “Brother East” thought he could get something out of him. On February 16, 1978, Duch used his red pen to cross out Vann Nath's name from the list of people to eliminate. “Keep for use,” he wrote in the margin.

One day, Duch brought in another prisoner and told him to make a sculpture of the mysterious Pol Pot. But it turned out the prisoner didn't know how to sculpt; he was just trying his luck. He was never seen again. Another prisoner, a Vietnamese man, claimed that he could make paraffin-wax molds. When he failed at his attempt, Duch got angry and had one of his interrogators hit the prisoner. He was taken away and never seen again. Next, a Japanese prisoner tried to save himself by joining the artists' studio, but it was also in vain.

THE STUDIO WAS AT THE END
of Building E, the smallest, central prong of the former school's five buildings laid out like a trident. The entrance at one end of this modest house, which feels a little overwhelmed by the four large, three-story blocks surrounding it, was where Suor Thi met prisoners as they first arrived and took their photographs. The shutters on the windows at the other end of the building, where the studio was located, usually stayed shut. Vann Nath heard screams on an almost daily basis. He was shocked at first. But gradually, he grew accustomed to them.

Prison life improved substantially for the artists. Instead of miserable gruel, they ate rice, the same diet as the guards. “I even had noodle soup,” says Bou Meng. They slept unshackled in the generator room behind Building E with four other prisoners taken from the cells “for use” by the prison's administration or the regime. They could hear the trucks coming and going from the gate, but they couldn't see anything. The artists were locked in their studio. There was no guard in there with them, but the system was set up so that each prisoner knew as little as possible, and nothing filtered out.

Bou Meng requested three months to produce a three-by-five-meter portrait of Pol Pot. Duch ordered him to fix the leader's throat, telling the artist to get rid of a lump that looked like a tumor. When Bou Meng mentions this in court, Duch gives a slight smile. He also instructed Bou Meng to fix the lips. “I survived because I was able to paint a faithful portrait of Pol Pot.”

For Duch, who had taken his revolutionary name from a sculptor, the studio became a place of refuge. He visited almost every day. Each time he entered the room, the artists had to move to its far end and wait for his orders. Though he appreciated their work and often complimented it, the artists remained frightened of him. He never hid his displeasure when they fell behind schedule. Still, Vann Nath couldn't bring himself to believe that Duch was capable of putting people to death. “He was an intelligent, attentive man. He made you aware of his power. But he never did anything whatsoever to frighten us. He was respectful.”

DURING A TRIAL RECESS,
Duch holds a long conversation with his Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth, who, as is his habit, is resting on one of the chairs in the courtroom. Duch gives a short laugh, revealing his famously bad teeth. He lifts his head, and for a moment his bright, wide-eyed gaze freezes. Then, apparently in a talkative mood, he turns away to talk to his French defense team.

While Vann Nath testifies, Duch's expression is inscrutable, as though he has withdrawn into his shell. He still has some influence over his former subordinates, but he has no authority whatsoever over the painter. Vann Nath rubs his belly and kneads his handkerchief. With his jowls and heavy eyelids, he looks like a sad tortoise. Throughout 1978, the painter tried to produce his best work and to do what was asked of him, he says in his deep and slightly nasal voice. He had only one goal: “To survive.” One day toward noon, Vann Nath got the feeling that they were being watched, and had been for some time. He felt a surge of fear when Bou Meng was summoned. Bou Meng left the studio and didn't come back. Vann Nath says he naively thought that his fellow artist had been released and sent back to a co-op. But two weeks later, he heard someone call out and the sound of chains scraping along the ground. In the doorway stood Bou Meng in chains, his skin pale and his hair long. Brother East stood behind him. “He said, ‘
a
-Meng, what did you promise? Get on your knees and apologize to all of us.'”

With typical gallows humor, Duch asked whether Meng was still of any use or whether he should be turned into fertilizer.

Duch pays close attention to Vann Nath during his testimony. He listens carefully with his mouth slightly open, as though astonished by what he is hearing. There aren't many witnesses like Vann Nath: sober, firm, clear, and scrupulous, always taking pains to point out when he personally witnessed something and when he didn't. His testimony is both factual and charged with emotion. He exudes a natural dignity. For the past three decades, Vann Nath has devoted much of his time to advocating on behalf of S-21's fourteen thousand victims. He has acquired a unique stature in the country. Even when Duch disagrees with what Vann Nath remembers, he doesn't challenge the painter.