The Master of Confessions (19 page)

PREY SAR UNDER SIHANOUK
wasn't like Prey Sar under Pol Pot. For one, there was a doctor in residence. For another, the food was better. Reading was allowed. Duch says that he even continued studying Mao—clear evidence of how permissive Sihanouk's security service was. Family members were allowed to visit on Thursdays. Ultimately, you could get out alive.

On April 3, 1970, after two years and three months of incarceration, good fortune smiled on Duch. Two weeks previously, Lon Nol, Norodom Sihanouk's army chief of staff, staged a coup while the prince was abroad. One of Lon Nol's first actions was to announce the release of almost five hundred political prisoners. Duch had already been tried and sentenced, but a distant relative of his mother's had ties to Lon Nol. Duch was released.

The coup of March 18, 1970, determined Duch's fate and changed the course of Cambodian history. It amplified the terrifying bombing campaigns by the Americans. From 1969 to 1973, at least 540,000 tons of ordnance were dropped—blindly and from high altitude—on Cambodian territory. By contrast, a “mere” 160,000 tons of ordnance were dropped on Japan during World War II. The putsch gave the Khmer Rouge a huge, undreamed-of boost when Sihanouk backed the nascent guerrilla movement, essentially legitimizing it in the eyes of many Cambodians. It also tipped the country into an outright civil war in which around 600,000 people died between 1970 and 1975.

Duch explains with reasonable clarity:

Duch and his cellmates Mam Nai, Hor, and Pon regained their freedom. These men, who had devoted themselves to the education of others, and who, before they embraced Leninism, had been educated in the spirit of the Enlightenment, went on to become the operators of a merciless machine that ground other men into dust. Hor became the deputy director of S-21; Pon and Mam Nai, both teachers, became chief interrogators under the authority of Duch—also a teacher, and more talented than either of them. All followed orders handed down by their master, Son Sen—another teacher. No amount of education has ever inoculated a person from violent behavior, not even the most extreme variety.

After his release, Duch spent three weeks at home. Then he went to a monastery. Shortly after, he resumed his revolutionary activities. Four months later, in August of 1970, he obtained authorization to enter the “liberated zone,” the part of the country already controlled by the Khmer Rouge. Now Duch's revolutionary life began in earnest.

“HOW DOES A PERSON
become Duch?” asks the psychologist.

Duch told the psychologists about three events that particularly affected him; they took place during that crucial period before he went into the
maquis
, the period that shaped his thinking. The first is an utterly banal event of the kind found in any romance novel: a story of thwarted love. The second later triggers a flood of sarcasm among the trial's participants and observers: toward the end of 1965, someone stole Duch's bicycle, preventing him from getting to class at a time when teaching meant everything to him.

Each tiny event can seem meaningful when you're desperately seeking an explanation. But just as the road leading to mass murder is, in many ways, an indeterminable one of historical accident, becoming a mass murderer is often the uncertain and contingent fate of ordinary men. Those of us who have also suffered a romantic letdown or have had a bicycle stolen know that these are setbacks that can be overcome; they are without lasting damage. Yet Duch, for reasons of his own, remembers these events with sharp and painful clarity.

The third event is easier to link to his crime: Sihanouk's police arrested ten of his friends, including one he considered a brother, on suspicion of subversive activities.

According to Duch, these three events, whether directly or indirectly, helped drive him to Marxism.

T
HE DEFENSE FAILS TO SEE WHY THE PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE
insists on hearing from witnesses from M-13,” says François Roux, trying his luck.

It's true that the tribunal's mandate doesn't extend to events that took place before the Khmer Rouge took power on April 17, 1975, or after it fell on January 6, 1979. All international courts are thus constrained in space and time, their mandates limited only to certain crimes or certain groups of people. The court in Phnom Penh has nothing to say about the five years of war that preceded Pol Pot's victory; it refrains from passing judgment on that war's hundreds of thousands of bombs and hundreds of thousands of dead. Likewise, the ECCC must ignore the twenty years of war that followed the fall of the men in black, those two decades rife with hundreds of thousands of land mines and refugees; and the court must ignore the way the international community compromised itself when it continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's legitimate government for ten years after the party's downfall—this even
after
Pol Pot's crimes had come to light. Behind every international tribunal's limited mandate lies a cold political calculation, one that is often the consequence of the great powers taking steps to avoid any chance of incriminating themselves.

On the other hand, putting limits on an international tribunal is a sound precaution since, from the moment of their inception, such courts tend to become focused on their own survival and rarely restrict their own work. The men and women of the international judiciary are neither heroes nor saints. Whether serious and principled or vile and dishonest, they're never disinterested parties.

Yet, despite the limited mandate of the Phnom Penh tribunal, the answer to Roux's question is quite simple.

“There is continuity between M-13 and S-21,” says the prosecutor firmly.

When he first entered the
maquis
, Duch briefly found himself under the command of Chhay Kim Huor, the teacher who had initiated him into the Revolution. But as of May 1971, he came under the authority of Vorn Vet, one of the movement's principle architects.

Vorn Vet was then secretary in charge of what the Communist guerrillas called the “special zone.” M-13 was the police headquarters of that special zone. Vorn Vet asked Duch to run it. M-13 was where they developed those methods that, at S-21, were refined and practiced on a much greater scale.

The Khmer Rouge began its killings from the moment it took control of a tiny piece of territory. The most popular song in the
maquis
during those early days, says Duch, was called something like “The Cunning Infiltrator.” Finding and annihilating the enemy within was explicit Party policy from the very start. The atmosphere of paranoia and terror, though of lesser magnitude than it would be in the coming years, was there from the beginning. Prisoners were called “spies” and declared guilty a priori. They deserved to die. There was no end to the executions. If higher-level officers were arrested, their subordinates had to be, too. No quarter was given to the “enemy,” and that enemy didn't necessarily wear the uniform of the opposing army. The part of Duch's story that takes place during those years in the
maquis
is hard to swallow for those who maintain that the Revolution lost its way only after the Khmer Rouge's victory. How many revolutions are needed? How many victories?

It took comrades Duch and Pon no time to learn how to be torturers; they took to it with talent and dedication.

“I had no capacity for critical thinking at the time. The only thing that stayed stuck in my mind was the fear of being removed,” says Duch. It's not clear whether by “removed” he means losing his job or his life—the English interpreter gives nothing more than the word “removed.”

Duch asked no questions when he was given the job. “We intellectuals had to be strict. Yes, I authorized torture. And I went to the interrogations myself.”

At M-13, Duch first received “spies” sent from the zone controlled by Lon Nol's army. For the most part, they were poor people who hadn't had time to get away, he concedes. The great purges hadn't yet begun. Eliminating the camp's own personnel wasn't yet on the agenda. At this point in time, the Vietnamese were allied with the Khmer Rouge in the anti-imperialist struggle, and so weren't yet targets.

“The most shocking thing was the purge of the base,” Duch says, referring to the masses in whose name the teachers were leading the Revolution. “It hurts every time I think about it.”

Every fortnight, Duch went to a self-criticism meeting. Each person had to forsake his or her personal opinions and adopt the position held by the group. Individual consciousness was to be erased. Duch was no longer a citizen—he was the collective, he was the Party, he was the Revolution.

“In the psychology of extreme situations, the greatest danger occurs when an individual's affiliations are limited to one group,” says the psychologist. “To safeguard against sacrificing individuality and self-awareness, it is vital to belong to more than one membership group.”

JUST AS S-21 WAS COMPOSED
of S-21 and S-24, M-13 was divided into two camps. One of Duch's deputies ran the first, where prisoners were “reeducated” and eventually freed. Duch himself ran the other, where people were held, interrogated, and, in all probability, killed. Duch remembers the names of some prisoners he was unable to free because, he says, the military chief, Ta Mok, opposed it. He freed around a dozen people in all, and once again, he remembers most of their names. “It was a very small number compared to the number of those tortured and killed. So it wasn't an act of valor. I cannot congratulate myself for it, but it's the truth. It is just a drop of water in the ocean of crimes I committed.”

Nobody in that drop of water is more important to Duch than François Bizot.

Bizot was a twenty-five-year-old ethnologist when he arrived in Cambodia in 1966. He was conducting research at L'École Française d'Extrême-Orient, the French School of the Far East. For a century, this institution has been at the heart of the rediscovery and conservation of Angkor, the exceptional complex of temples in northern Cambodia. Bizot specializes in Khmer Buddhism. On October 10, 1971, while visiting a monastery, Bizot and his two Cambodian colleagues, Lay and Son, were ambushed by the Khmer Rouge. Bizot appeared before a summary people's court. He was accused of being a CIA agent and put through a mock execution. Then he was taken on a long march to a prison camp, where he was reunited with Lay and Son. According to Bizot, the officer who received him immediately showed himself to be “cynical and aggressive.” Bizot was shackled to a metal rod to which ten or fifteen other prisoners were already chained. He had been walking for two days and two nights without washing. He was covered in mud. The officer denied him permission to wash. Bizot begged; a younger man intervened and told him, “Go and wash.” It was Duch. Bizot had just arrived at M-13.

The camp was made up of three rudimentary, raised-floor shelters, one of which was reserved for sick prisoners. The captives had to urinate in a bamboo stick. To defecate, they had to go to a pit 1.5 meters wide, filled with excrement, a ditch which every prisoner “talked about with horror.” Food was distributed twice a day. It consisted of “succulent rice, milled that morning by two prisoners.” But there was nothing else with it. Malaria wreaked havoc.

“I was struck by Duch's poor health; like most of the prisoners he was unwell,” explains Bizot. There was no medicine. Many of the prisoners who weren't executed died from their illnesses.

American B-52s were dropping bombs, says Duch, so they dug three trenches and kept the prisoners in them. The only thing the Khmer Rouge protected its prisoners from was bombs, lest they deny the guards the choice of when to kill them. There were ditches where prisoners were held and others where they were killed by a single blow to the back of the neck, economically, without making a sound.

Duch saw the B-52s passing high overhead, but he never experienced a bombing raid himself. He was never a combat cadre; he was a commissioner in the political police.

There were still neither prisoner lists nor archives. It was wartime. When a person was executed, his documents were destroyed with him. Over time, the cadres' diet deteriorated. The prisoners' diet, meanwhile, became downright inadequate. By the end of 1974, they were getting nothing more than rice dust.

M-13 was relocated three times in four years. When the camp was near a muddy river, the prisoners could wash and relieve themselves daily. The women were allowed to bathe unencumbered; the men were tied to each other with hammock rope.

According to Duch, the Khmer Rouge was still sparing children at that time. But this is ambiguous, to say the least. He describes how he looked after three children who somehow ended up at the camp. All three died. “They were with their parents at night, with me during the day. My superiors questioned my attitude, and I couldn't argue with them. They believed the children would avenge their parents. The three children died of illness. We let them swell up until they died.”