The Master of Confessions (23 page)

Thanatourism, or dark tourism, is already a mass phenomenon. It's also lucrative. In 2005, some Cambodians were shocked by two instances of it. First, a young man opened Café History opposite S-21, where waitstaff in black pajamas and red
krama
s around their necks (the uniform of the Khmer Rouge) offered tourists a set menu comprising a vile gray soup, an egg-based dessert, and tea. A Khmer Rouge lunch, in other words, all for just $6. The authorities were quick to shut down this genocide-tourism entrepreneur. Around the same time, Cambodians were finding out that the operating concession for Choeung Ek had been privatized and, moreover, granted to a mysterious foreign company called JC Royal, registered in Japan. But it turned out that the not-insubstantial revenue from Choeung Ek—$622,000 for the 2006–07 financial year—disappeared not into the hands of the mysterious Japanese outfit but into a supposedly not-for-profit fund with which several highly placed members of the government had very close ties.

Thirty years after 9,000 bodies were exhumed from Choeung Ek, the site serves virtually no educational function. Like at S-21, the explanatory panels put up at Choeung Ek in 1988 during the Vietnamese occupation remain in place today, and are read by the 200,000 tourists and some 20,000 Cambodians who visit the site annually. They inform us of “Pol Pot's gang of criminals” and those who “have the human form but whose hearts are demon's [sic] hearts, they have the Khmer face but their activities are purely reactionary.”

Choeung Ek not only stirs up financial appetites, but also bitter political quarrels. While former Khmer Rouges in power today view April 17 as a day of liberation, others from the main opposition party think it marks the beginning of the nation's tragedy, and gather at Choeung Ek on that date not to celebrate the liberation but to remember the oppression that followed. Around a month later, on May 20, members of the ruling party also congregate at Choeung Ek to lament the tragic setbacks faced by the revolution that many of them served, including the state's three highest representatives who, if they hadn't had the presence of mind to flee the purges in 1977, most likely would have ended their days in this very field, with a quick blow to the back of the neck. So, on May 20, they organize an official “day of hate.” A few actors dress up in the Khmer Rouge's black uniform and tie around their waists red-and-white
krama
s, the checkered cotton scarves so popular with Cambodian peasants, who use them as hats, bags, loincloths, and swaddling clothes. The actors enact torture scenes in which other actors kneel on the grass and, with terrified expressions, beg for mercy. Recently, after one such ceremony, the deputy governor of Phnom Penh said that its purpose was to “help us remember who saved us and who killed us.”

DUCH COMMITTED TWO FATAL ERRORS
when he left S-21: he failed to destroy the archives and he let a painter live. Not only did he leave thousands of pages that document his crime, he spared the artist who, with his brush, would prove the most devastating witness against Duch. The paintings Vann Nath made while imprisoned at S-21 have disappeared. But those he painted after the liberation have helped forge our image of the terror that reigned in that prison and the tortures inflicted there. No other testimony given over the past thirty years matches the power of the fourteen works by the artist-survivor. Visitors to the museum never fail to be struck by them.

But it is the photographs of the prisoners that anchor the experience of visiting S-21. Around two thousand portraits are exhibited in what were once classrooms, then prison cells, and now museum rooms. Their subjects look frightened, questioning, restless, quiet, defiant, smiling, tired, swollen, puffed up, gentle, jocular, determined, shocked, stiff, confident, obedient, despondent, resigned, evasive, astonished, sweet, sad, anxious, exhausted, proud. They are young, old, good-looking, ugly, baby-faced, thin, plump, blindfolded, and tied up. There is nothing more crushing than seeing these portraits hung tightly together, panel after panel, room after room. The intellectual power, emotional charge, documentary, and even artistic value of these snapshots of the thousands who died in the days or weeks after their photos were taken are what both define and anchor memory at S-21.

Yet almost everyone who visits S-21 walks past the photographs of its victims utterly unaware of the ambiguity inherent in many of them, including in the famous, harrowing image of a beautiful woman, understated and elegant, her hair slightly disheveled, her expression one of exhaustion, despair, and resignation, who is holding on her knees a sleeping infant in diapers, its eyes closed and hair slick with sweat. This woman, who was murdered in 1978 at S-21, was herself a revolutionary, the wife of the secretary of the southeast region, one of the regime's high officials who fell from grace and was eliminated, along with his family, by the regime he had served.

It is estimated that three-quarters of the victims at S-21 were themselves Khmer Rouge, of high and low rank, all of them destroyed by the regime.

“Every security-service post in the country, S-21 included, was tasked with imprisoning, interrogating, torturing, and, finally, smashing—that is to say, killing—people. But one principle unique to S-21 was that it was tasked with killing members of the Central Committee,” says Duch.

Throughout the world, S-21 has become the symbol of the Khmer holocaust, its most famous memorial, an emblem of the massacre for tourists to visit and, now, its judicial epitaph. Yet the bulk of its victims—an estimated 80 percent—were themselves members of the Khmer Rouge. No doubt there were those who were under its thumb, but many gave themselves wholeheartedly to the regime, and would be in the dock today had they not been annihilated by their own party.

The ledger of S-21 dead provides an X-ray image of the Khmer Rouge's internal purges. “In single-party regimes, purges are a normal phenomenon, not unlike political crises in France,” said Raymond Aron, with a mix of irony and seriousness. In mid-1977, Cambodia's central zone was purged. At the end of 1977 and beginning of 1978, it was the turn of the northern zone and then, in the second quarter of 1978, the eastern zone. More than a thousand Khmer Rouge cadres from the eastern and northern zones were sent to S-21.

Duch's trial is that of a Khmer Rouge cadre who killed primarily other Khmer Rouges. S-21 was the site of the regime's centralized purges rather than of mass murder on a national scale. For the millions of Cambodians who were annihilated by a Khmer Rouge regime they never served, there's a grim irony in this partial misunderstanding. S-21 was the most political of Democratic Kampuchea's two hundred documented security centers, and one could argue that the crimes committed there should be of lesser priority for the court, if you accept that many of the victims at S-21 had themselves been torturers or accomplices.

“Were any of them better than the others? Who
didn't
have blood on his hands?” says Duch about three victims of S-21 whose names regularly come up during the trial: a member of the Central Committee and the two teachers who introduced him to the Revolution.

Duch's trial has done justice to Vorn Vet, Duch's former boss at M-13 and a member of the standing committee, who was killed just before the Vietnamese arrived; Ban Sarin, one-time head of internal security in the northern zone, who was destroyed in January 1977 after having served the movement for fifteen years; Koy Thuon, former secretary of the northern zone, minister of commerce, who was promoted thanks to the purges of 1972 and who, according to Duch, had the authority to wipe out people before he was himself executed in April 1977; Ney Saran, alias “Ya,” who became secretary of the northeastern zone after serving as Son Sen's deputy, and who was killed in October 1976; Sy, who was first Ta Mok's deputy and then secretary of the western zone, executed in April 1978; Ros Nhim, secretary of the northwestern zone, purged the following month; Nath, the former director of S-21; Nun Huy, the former head of S-24; and so on.

It again befalls Duch to articulate a troublesome fact that many would rather forget. “The life of a Central Committee member equals the lives of thousands of ordinary people. What do you say to that?”

NOBODY DESERVED TO DIE
the kind of death meted out at S-21 and Choeung Ek. Though the two sites can bring out the worst kind of behavior in both visitors and carpetbaggers, S-21 and Choeung Ek remain memorials to the suffering inflicted by the Khmer Rouge and to the crimes they committed. This is not the case at Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge's final stronghold, where a more extreme version of dark tourism is taking shape.

F
OR A LONG TIME, THE ROAD TO ANLONG VENG
was sufficiently rough and corrugated by rain to dissuade most visitors, including most tourists, from venturing there. The sleepy, remote little town lies at the foot of the Dangrek Mountains on Cambodia's northern border. Its location appears to serve a dual purpose: on the one hand, it is protected from Thailand by the mountains, but on the other hand, it provides easy refuge.

Just before the bridge leading into town, a track veers off to the left. The track leads three hundred meters out onto a small peninsula covered in mango trees and jutting out into an area that is both land and water, known locally as “the lake.” The subtle, muted combination of water, wild grasses, and tall, bare trees soaring spear-like into the sky infuses the area with a meditative peace. If you stand on the peninsula and look out over this marsh, you can see the village of Anlong Veng without being seen from it. This promontory suits wise men, thinkers, and soldiers on watch, and it's here that Ta Mok, the most powerful and brutal of Khmer Rouge military commanders, lived.

Anlong Veng was the last bastion of the Big Brothers of the Revolution before they all died or surrendered. It's where Pol Pot and his most faithful associates lived out the last decade of the war, from 1988 until 1998. But Anlong Veng's true master was Ta Mok. Known within the Politburo first as Brother Number Five, then, with each successive purge or defection, as Brother Number Four, then Number Three, Ta Mok gained a reputation for being the most ruthless member of a cohort in which competition was fierce. It is said that a small house once stood on one of the strips of land jutting out into the middle of the lake, opposite Ta Mok's house. That is where Pol Pot is said to have stayed whenever he came down from the Dangrek Mountains to pay a visit to the region's strongman. All that remains of it now is the outhouse.

In 1997, Ta Mok had Pol Pot arrested, summarily judged, and placed under house arrest. Pol Pot had just ordered the deaths of Duch's old boss Son Sen, Son's formidable wife, and eleven members of his family. “Paranoia moves at a gallop; it never stops. Nothing appeases the paranoid man,” says the court psychologist.

For his own friends, Brother Number One was clearly becoming too dangerous. Only Ta Mok could take him down. Pol Pot died less than a year later, in April 1998. By the end of that year, Ta Mok was the only remaining Khmer Rouge leader not to have surrendered. He was eventually captured in early 1999. Ta Mok was the only Khmer Rouge leader—along with Duch, who was terrified of him—to be imprisoned. In July 2006, exactly ten days after the international tribunal with the jurisdiction to prosecute him was officially established, Ta Mok died, effectively thumbing his nose at humanity and its bourgeois system of justice one last time.

The first time I visited Anlong Veng, Nhem En was deputy district governor. Nhem En joined the victorious Khmer Rouge Army in 1975, at the age of sixteen. The conflict was still going on twenty years later, but by then Nhem En had realized that the army he'd joined, which was, once again, a guerrilla force, had crumbled. The Cold War was over. After ten years of occupation, the Vietnamese Army had gone home. In 1991, all of Cambodia's other political forces had agreed to a peace settlement; the following year, the UN's largest-ever peacekeeping operation was established in Cambodia. Elections were held in spite of the war. The Communists installed by the Vietnamese and loyal to Hun Sen now shared power with the royalists. Like many former Communists, they turned toward the most ferocious form of capitalism. Only the Khmer Rouge rejected both the peace process and the free-market economy, which in the eyes of many made them a tiresome and disconcerting anachronism. There was also, of course, the terrible burden of their blood-soaked past. Defections spiraled. It was time for the waning Revolution's cadres and soldiers to take advantage of the amnesty agreement signed by the king, and of the national reconciliation promised by Hun Sen. The Khmer Rouge was in its last throes, its old, paranoid heavyweights settling scores between themselves: Pol Pot murdered Son Sen, Ta Mok arrested Pol Pot, and so on. It was time to jump ship. Twenty years after embracing the Revolution, Nhem En bade it farewell.

While Duch slipped into another identity, Nhem En weaned himself of his revolutionary habits. But whereas Duch knew that his past at S-21 would prove fatal if discovered, Nhem En found that his past could bring him glory and, he hoped, income.

In the mid-1990s, S-21 was already famous throughout the world, not because of Duch but because of the photo portraits of its victims. Professionals studied and praised the particular artistic quality of those thousands of black-and-white images. It wasn't long before their creator was found: Nhem En, fresh from the jungle, was dubbed the “S-21 photographer.” Soon he was decorated by the American ambassador and invited to New York; media outlets competed for interviews. Nhem En believes he granted between one and two hundred, for which he charged as much as he could get away with.

In the three years following his return, while giving all those interviews, Nhem En also worked for the ministry of the interior on the demobilization and reintegration of his former brothers-in-arms. But in 1998, the war was finally over and Nhem En found himself out of work. He left for the rural seat of Anlong Veng, where he joined the royalist party and became its local representative. In 2005, though he became deputy governor, he realized that the real power was no longer in the royalist party's hands. What's more, three years previously, one of his sons had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison for murdering his wife. Nhem En told me that he needed between $10,000 and $15,000 to pay off the judge and get his son out. If he wanted to help his son, and if he wanted to help himself, then his interest indubitably lay in joining the real winners of both the war and the postwar period: the Cambodian People's Party, led by Hun Sen, which has been in power since 1979. So, in 2006, in a move typical of Cambodia's pragmatic, fickle politicians, Nhem En switched sides again. He had been a member first of the Khmer Rouge, then of the royalist party. Now he is a member of the party that defeated, subdued, or absorbed them both.