The Master of Confessions (20 page)

M-13 was a prototype, one with notable shortcomings. For instance, one day in 1973, one of the prisoners managed to grab a guard's weapon. Mam Nai was wounded by another guard while chasing the fugitive. Like so much else, Mam Nai doesn't remember the incident. He says he was planting potatoes at the time. Some thirty prisoners escaped that day, leaving the camp practically empty. Duch was in the hot seat. “I told Vorn Vet to punish me. But he just sent me more people to destroy. It was probably my destiny to do that work.”

“Did you consider doing something else? Did you contemplate escaping?”

“I never imagined anything but obeying orders to survive. I knew that my job was inherently criminal, but I had to follow orders. If that was my destiny, the one I couldn't avoid, then I had to carry out the tasks assigned to me.”

Duch ordered executions. He remembers a few of his victims from those early days: a writer; one of Ta Mok's subordinates; cadres from Hanoi suspected of being Vietnamese spies. “My aim was to liberate my people, yet I did the opposite and became a part of the killing machine. M-13 wasn't only hard. It was cruel and odious. It was a place where we crushed humanity. It was beyond hard, beyond cruel.”

Once, during the rainy season, around September 1974, the M-13 prison camp became heavily flooded. By around eight that morning, the water had risen significantly in the space of one hour. The prisoners were trapped, chained in the trenches. Duch claims they didn't drown, that everyone was moved to higher ground, and that the prisoners only died later, from illness. He says this emphatically and turns toward the public gallery, as though he's looking for someone in particular. He freezes, his mouth slightly open. “We didn't eat that day. Everything was floating around us.”

His deputy Mam Nai remembers the flood. However, he cannot remember the fate of the prisoners. “I don't know if anyone died in the flood. I have no idea. Even pigs died,” he says.

It wasn't unusual for Khmer Rouge leaders to concern themselves with the fate of animals. When Brother Number Two surrendered at the end of 1998, he said: “We regret not only the people but also the animals that lost their lives to the war. We are very sorry.”

“I HATED POLICE WORK
and I hated the killings,” says Duch. “But they told me it was because of a lack of direction in the Party. At M-13, I came to hate shit, but I had to walk through it every day. I tried to solve things by my own means.”

Duch turned to an old trick common to some Communist regimes since Stalin: the confession. He admits that extracting these sometimes got physical, for instance the day he was interrogating a prisoner while fighting a fever; two guards armed with pistols started to beat the prisoner, who gave in and made his “confession.” Duch was infuriated not by the beating but by the fact that the prisoner failed to confess
before
it began. So, he says, he started hitting him himself, to punish him for not confessing until being beaten.

Duch says he used another prisoner, a poet, to test the techniques he had learned. The poet's interrogation lasted a month and Duch admits to beating him. Thus, Duch accounts for “at least two people” he admits to having beaten. “I don't remember the others now.”

“So there could have been more than two and you don't remember the others?” asks the prosecutor.

“Yes. That's correct.”

One witness says that he saw Duch whip a woman unconscious and laugh when she came to. But Duch vehemently denies this: “I interrogated that woman. I never beat a female prisoner. When a prisoner was beaten, no one helped me. The interrogations took place in the bush, away from everyone. I never let a prisoner see an interrogation. No one could see the interrogations.”

Vorn Vet recommended using plastic bags. Duch, ever practical, was disinclined to do so—it wasn't easy to find plastic bags back then. The prisoners were often left tied to posts. “That's how I remember it,” says Duch. The question arises of whether they were tied or suspended, as some witnesses have claimed. Duch gets to his feet and mimics the way a person was attached to a post. He uses the headphone wire of his simultaneous-interpreting device to show how the prisoners had their wrists and forearms tied. The prisoners sometimes stayed like that for four days. Someone asks if they were fed.

“I've forgotten.”

One prisoner was burned with a torch. At least one other was made to stand in the cold wind. Women suffered the same treatment. But the young torturer declared this method inefficient. Furthermore, it offended Duch's sense of morality.

Duch remembers this woman in startling detail. She doesn't exist in any archive, and the events he is remembering go back thirty-eight years, to August 1971, but his memory is sharp.

“Her background was prostitution. She had been sent to spy in the liberated zone. That was what she said in her confession,” he says, giving the impression of still believing it. “I asked her how old she was. She said twenty-eight years old. I told her to open her mouth so I could count her teeth. She didn't have thirty-two teeth. Anyone in their twenties has thirty-two teeth. So she was lying.”

NOBODY KNOWS HOW MANY DIED
at M-13. One former prisoner, who later became an auxiliary guard in the camp and who has since died, gave testimony to DC-Cam. The witness made a number of haphazard claims, including that thirty thousand people died at M-13, based on the following simple calculation: twenty executions a day over nearly four years add up to thirty thousand. The court has prudently decided not to use testimonies from such fickle sources as provided by NGOs.

According to Duch, between seventeen and twenty people worked at M-13, and there were never more than sixty prisoners there at any one time—both details match testimonies from others, including Bizot. The defendant claims that roughly two to three hundred people were executed at M-13 over those four years. Other experts, aware that the higher figure isn't credible but mindful of validating the executioner's own, succumb to a temptation commonly faced by those who tally the numbers in crimes against humanity: to split the difference and pick a number between the two extremes. People started saying that around three thousand victims died at M-13, but this is pure speculation. The reality, unpleasant as it may be, is that we have no idea. The remaining traces of the camp provide nothing on which to base any estimate; no document from M-13 survives; the Party had yet to develop its obsession with record-keeping, or the appetite for bureaucracy typical of totalitarian regimes. The Party was still at war and not yet in power. Duch says, “There were no orders to keep this sort of information. There was no reason to keep records about a person once he or she had been destroyed. The task had been accomplished. The mission was over.”

DUCH REMINDS THE COURT
that a twelve-year-old child is an adolescent. At twelve, a child can serve as a messenger. At sixteen, he can belong to a special execution unit.

The M-13 prison camp was shut down after the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975. We know that some prisoners were transferred to a new camp named, according to the same mathematical model, M-99. As for the personnel, a dozen or so interrogators, guards, and messengers quickly found new jobs at S-21.

After he arrived at M-13 in October 1971, ethnographer François Bizot was chained apart from the other prisoners, to one of the thin pillars holding up a bamboo awning. The day after his arrival, Duch began his interrogation. Bizot had to compose the first of a series of “declarations of innocence.” Duch wrote very late at night and very early in the morning. He was known as a tireless worker who said little and who took his responsibilities as camp commander very seriously. Unlike the other Khmer Rouge men, says Bizot, Duch responded whenever a prisoner greeted him.

For the prisoners, making confessions was an ordeal. But confessing was a way of life for everyone in the camp. The guards came together for self-criticism sessions. First, each person took turns lamenting his own revolutionary failures; then, he helped his neighbor recall the mistakes he had made but no longer remembered.

“Was this to encourage people to denounce one another?” asks Judge Lavergne.

Bizot neither saw nor heard any violent acts during his captivity. His two friends told him that prisoners were beaten in the ribs with canes, but no one could see the marks under their black button-up shirts. After many days spent watching the guards and listening to them speaking among themselves, Bizot knew that they were beating prisoners. One day, during his daily swim in the river, he slipped away to the other bank. There he discovered a cabin, where he found “a vertical bar of thick bamboo with rattan rings attached to it, which,” he realized, “were designed for tying wrists.” On another occasion, he came across a former prisoner who had hung around there and who was busy whittling a rattan cane. Bizot called out to him: “‘Hey, comrade! Who are you going to beat with that rattan cane?' The poor guy looked at me and said, ‘I'm not going to be
giving
the beating!'”

Duch toyed with his French prisoner at least twice. On the day he came to tell Bizot that he was going to be released, speaking French to him for the first time, Duch told his captive that he had been unmasked. Bizot fell to his knees, and then Duch said he was joking. On another occasion, aware of Bizot's friendship with Lay, Duch told him that he had to choose which of his Cambodian friends would go free and which would remain in captivity.

Yet despite this, once he was convinced of Bizot's innocence, Duch took a rare risk with his superiors. He went against the rule, and in front of the dreaded Ta Mok he asked for permission to release Bizot.

Bizot is the only person who can say, “Duch released me.” Consequently, Duch protects Bizot in the way of someone nurturing the hope of redemption. When a daughter was born to Duch a few years later, while he was running S-21, he gave her his grandmother's name—just as Bizot had done with his own daughter, Hélène. So, when Duch's “friend” Bizot steps onto the stand to testify, albeit indirectly, to the fact that the defendant personally inflicted violence on prisoners, Duch faces a real problem: how to protect both Bizot and himself. Someone asks him, “Who is telling the truth?” It's one of the rare instances during the trial when Duch does a miserable job of defending himself. He pretends to have never read Bizot's book,
The Gate
, only to quote from memory a passage “on page” a minute later.

THE ETHNOLOGIST LOOKS DOWN
when he talks and keeps his body very still; he weighs his words, thinks hard, and gives testimony as though from a meditative state. Every now and then, a memory will bring a bitter smile to his lips; then he lowers his head again as a severe expression of concentration and hidden torment returns to his face. When he describes those terrible chains, his weariness and inner rage are obvious.

Bizot was scheduled to be released on Christmas Day, 1971. Once removed from his irons, he arranged for his two companions to be unshackled as well, though this only lasted for a short time.