The Master of Confessions (18 page)

In any case, here's the joke as it was relayed to me: “Duch used to say that drinking water before eating was good for your health. I used to say the opposite: if you drink water, you won't eat much! So everyone takes care of his own business.”

One of the most pleasurable things about listening to stories of people from other parts of the world is when you no longer understand anything. During the first few months I spent covering the Rwandan genocide trials, a number of Rwandan witnesses used a proverb that clearly held some powerful meaning: “When a snake is wrapped around the calabash, you have to break the calabash.” I thoroughly enjoyed watching the judges' faces as they scratched their heads and tried to make sense of this ominous adage.

Kaing wins you over by lacing his wisdom with humor. For example, he tells a highbrow pun about Communism he and his friends used to make: in Khmer, the word
communism
sounds a little like
kum menuoh
;
menuoh
is the collective word for man or humanity and
kum
means resentment. Therefore Communism, they used to joke, means “resentment against man.”

From the start, Kaing disliked Communist ideology. Not everyone believed the Revolution would deliver what it promised, he says, which doesn't mean they were some sort of vile reactionaries. He had noticed how the Chinese were starving to death while more democratic governments provided life's necessities. He also found that the sciences were more advanced in liberal countries. He used to argue with his classmate Kaing Guek Eav. The students were split into two tendencies—communism and liberalism, “progressives” and “imperialists.” Kaing also recounts that some French teachers had no qualms preaching their politics.

Duch was neither talkative nor funny, says Kaing. He was a very serious boy. His classmates found him a bit effeminate, but no one teased him, because he was such a good student. “After 1979, I was told that he had been the director of S-21. I didn't believe it, because he had been so gentle. Then when I saw the documents, I believed it.”

The memory makes Kaing cry.

“It's the fault of the Democratic Kampuchea regime,” he says, regaining his composure. Kaing evaded the men in black by hiding his education while toiling in the co-ops. He still considers Duch a friend, though he makes sure to point out that he thinks Duch deserves to be tried. When Duch catches sight of his former classmate in the public gallery, he makes his way over to the thick, soundproof glass during the recess and waves at him. He smiles, clearly delighted to see his old friend.

“When Duch approached me, I saw the same man that I knew back then. He hasn't changed. It was the same face. What's changed is that he used to have quite a feminine character. Now he behaves more like a Frenchman. He's firm,” says Huot Chheang Kaing with a twinkle in his eye.

WHEN KAING GUEK EAV
was admitted to the prestigious Sisowath Lycée in Phnom Penh, he became aware of the gulf between the living conditions of rural Cambodians and those of wealthy city dwellers. In 1962, at the Pedagogical Institute, he met a professor who had been educated in France and who was already a secret member of the Communist Party, Son Sen. Henceforth, Duch addressed him as “master.” At the same time, a French professor of geography was teaching Duch a few Marxist principles. They resonated strongly with the young, idealistic student eager for social change. Through another teacher from the former colonial homeland, Duch discovered Stoicism, which teaches indifference toward anything that affects emotions.

According to the psychologist expert witnesses, “Duch acquired a sense of social devaluation very early. He tried to compensate for it with study and hard work; he adopted highly idealized male role models and endlessly sought their approval. Their recognition made him feel like he had his own identity, which he based on theirs.”

That same year, 1962, the Sisowath Lycée was gripped by an intense protest movement. Sihanouk's police reacted by brutally repressing it. Chhay Kim Huor, a teacher whom Duch admired, was among those arrested. Though Duch played no part in these events, they left him deeply shocked and fanned his revolutionary ardor. One of his teachers warned him that joining the Revolution was like being inside of a circle: once you're in, there's no way out. But by now his faith burned fervently, and he could not put off his decision to throw himself into the roiling waters of the Revolution much longer. He decided to join in 1964.

“A slave society becomes a feudal society, which becomes a capitalist society, which becomes a socialist society before finally becoming a communist society,” recalls Duch. “We started to appreciate this theory while studying elementary mathematics. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work; from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' I really liked that theory. I believed it. I wanted a society based on that slogan.” A society based on absolute abundance and an end to the problem of production. In essence, a utopia.

Duch completed his studies. In 1965, he became a math teacher in Skoun, less than a hundred kilometers north of Phnom Penh. He paid a visit to Sou Sath. He wanted her to join him in Skoun and teach there, too. But she didn't follow him. Judge Lavergne and Roux share a complicit smile but keep mum about what's behind it.

Duch gave up his math books and embraced Marxist and revolutionary literature. The first such book was an illustrated Chinese work with captioned photos. Then he bought
Everything Is Done for the Party
, the story of a Chinese mine worker who dedicated himself to the Revolution first in a weapons-repair factory, then in a bayonet factory, then in a heavy-weapons factory. The Chinese man was wounded in his eyes and hands and sent to the Soviet Union for treatment. When he came back, he was made professor of industrial drawing at the university. “I thought that if that was the way of the Revolution, I had to live up to it; I had to be capable of following it.”

He devoured Georges Politzer's
Elementary Principles of Philosophy
—“published by Éditions Sociales,” specifies Duch—as well as Mao Zedong's
On New Democracy
. He was completely fascinated by class warfare. “Every kind of thinking is stamped with the brand of a class,” he repeats to the court in French. Another idea has lingered in his memory: to truly love the people is to sacrifice oneself in order to bring about the total dictatorship of the proletariat. Duch found the alternatives lacking. For example, Jesus Christ taught that, should someone strike your right cheek, you should offer them your left. At the time, Duch found this to be at the very least inefficient, if not outright idiotic.

“I didn't know how you could serve the people with that theory,” he says soberly.

He read Gandhi. But Gandhi seemed impossible to follow, because he was half-human, half-divine, he says. Marx, Lenin, and Mao felt much more familiar to him. He was particularly seduced by the Chinese leader. He bought Mao's book of thoughts on conflict,
Four Essays on Philosophy
. He remembers several of the book's chapters, including
Where Do Correct Ideas Come From
, perfectly. “At the end of his book, Mao wrote, ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom and let a hundred schools of thought mutually complement one another.' I loved that sentence . . .”

Later, in 1976, Duch tried to study Stalin's book on Leninism, the famous book by which young Eastern Europeans who had fallen under the Soviet yoke were supposed to learn Russian. But Duch gave up on it. Maoism, he says, remained his major intellectual influence.

T
EACHER! HELLO, TEACHER! THAT'S MY TEACHER!”
The man calling out is a tall sixty-year-old who, when he arrived in the courtroom, greeted everybody with his hands pressed together and the broad, charming smile of someone who has spent his life working in the fields. Duch was his teacher between 1965 and 1968, and the man has clearly kept a happy memory of a down-to-earth, scrupulously fair, and kind teacher who gave free private lessons to poor students and who didn't preach politics in the classroom. The man remembers hearing Duch mention communism at the end of a class, but without pushing it on anyone. “He was a good model. The students liked him. We gladly attended his classes.”

Another student of Kaing Guek Eav, who became a secondary school principal before retiring, describes the same gentle and accessible teacher.

“The way he talked to us encouraged us to be good students and to help one another. We could consult with him at any time,” he says, punctuating each sentence with an odd, quick exhalation through his nose.

Kaing Guek Eav talked with his students about morality, about loving the poor, about acquiring knowledge in order to better serve the nation. He encouraged them to work hard, and led by example. One former student after another, both in the courtroom and among the public, painted the same picture of a simple, fair, accessible man who was strict but never cruel.

Even then, Duch was secretly supporting the Revolution by giving most of his salary to the movement. Of his monthly salary of seven thousand riels, he says, he kept only a thousand for himself. He gave nothing to his parents. Everything had to be sacrificed to the Revolution. He quietly ran a clandestine network whose members included a certain In Lorn, alias Nath, who, ten years later, would become the first director of S-21.

Duch may have decided to join the Revolution in 1964, but it wasn't until 1967 that he fully dedicated himself to it. At the beginning of that year, a peasant revolt erupted in Samlaut in the northwest of the country. The government put it down mercilessly. The far-right element then in power initiated a “hunt for Reds.” Midway through the year, Duch put himself through secret training, during which he met Vorn Vet, one of the top leaders of the Cambodian Communist movement. Vet would eventually become Duch's direct superior in the
maquis
, as well as Brother Number Five or Six of the Politburo, before he, too, met his end at S-21—at Duch's hands. Duch's other victims at S-21 included his former teachers Chhay Kim Huor and Ke Kim Huot, as well as Nath.

By the end of 1967, it was time for Duch to bid farewell to those close to him. He visited his family and told them, a few friends and the person in charge of the pagoda, that he was going into the
maquis
. He paid a final visit to Sou Sath and her husband. It was October 21, 1967, he tells the court.

Kaing Guek Eav went into the forest in the Cardamom Mountains, in southwest Cambodia. On November 25, 1967, he stood before Ke Pauk and took an oath of allegiance to the Revolution and the Party. Ke Pauk later oversaw the massive purges in the north of the country that kept the S-21 killing machine running at full steam.

“Did you accept that political violence was necessary when you joined the Communist Party of Kampuchea?” asks Judge Lavergne.

“No one told me at the time that political violence was the Party's daily bread. I only found out later, when I was forced to become the director of M-13.”

Forty years later, Duch rediscovers his fervor when he recalls taking that oath in the heart of the jungle. To demonstrate to the court the revolutionary salute, he stands sentry-straight, bends his elbow at a right angle and holds his implacably clenched fist level with his head. It is a gesture he faithfully performed daily for years and years, and it comes back to him with ease. His tightly clenched fist, his ramrod posture, and the way he holds his arm straight against the side of his body all bear witness to the burning conviction that consumed so much of his life. “Raising the fist like this signified that you mustn't betray the cause. I didn't betray it. I walked the straight line.”

Comrade Duch had barely started his revolutionary career when he suffered a serious setback. On January 5, 1968, twelve days before the Khmer Rouge started their armed struggle, Duch was arrested by the police force of the regime he hoped to overthrow. He was found guilty of breaching state security and of consorting with the enemy. The day of his hearing, he spoke without a lawyer. His trial lasted half a day. He was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. Duch did not appeal; being a revolutionary demands the utmost sacrifice and radicalism. Duch was locked up in the central prison, where he got to know a number of militant members of the clandestine movement. In May 1968, he was transferred to Prey Sar prison. Eight years later, Prey Sar, by then known as S-24, came under his authority.

Duch tells the court that the authorities at Prey Sar used to terrorize the inmates. Some prisoners were summarily executed, he says, though he didn't witness this directly. Some were tortured. Duch dryly reminds the court that prisoners were tortured under French rule, under Sihanouk's rule, and under Lon Nol's rule. “Therefore my experience was a combination of all these, even if I taught myself.”

Duch was insulted, but never tortured. Nonetheless, it was within the walls of Prey Sar that he came to believe that torture was “inevitable.” When a judge asks him whether such practices strike him as normal, acceptable, or outrageous, Duch stalls, unable to find an answer.

“As a revolutionary, I was prepared to submit to torture. I wasn't frightened. I knew what was to come. I joined the revolution to change society, to transform it, to oppose the government, and to end government-sponsored torture,” he says calmly.

There's a determined look in his eyes, though they've lost their usual strange gleam. Duch wants to convince the court that his spirit of sacrifice was undiminished. Then he tries to tackle the question: “If we had to judge it . . . we knew it was a crime . . . but how could we oppose it?”

The question is put to him again: “Were the torture and executions criminal acts, yes or no?”

“I was aware that they were crimes, and I knew that we had to fight for the Revolution. But I don't want to hide behind events. You are the judge of me.”