The Master of Confessions (24 page)

A deputy governor earns a salary of $35 a month, at least in theory, Nhem En tells me. He lives in a modest house across from a school built by Ta Mok. The walls of the entrance hall are papered with photographs, including one of the American ambassador awarding him a prize for his photography at S-21, and with Khmer Rouge propaganda posters, whose proletarian realism seems long out of date. Nhem En has accumulated around two thousand photos linked to the Khmer Rouge, which he keeps in albums at his home. Most of them weren't taken by him; he collected them from other sources. Though many are of a very average quality, they often have a documentary value. These aren't photos of S-21, obviously—those were left behind when the staff fled the prison. What Nhem En has is a mixed bag of images, some well-known, others less so. Many are of bodies: the murdered Son Sen and his wife covered in their own blood, Pol Pot and Ta Mok lying peacefully on their deathbeds. Nhem En took the photos of Ta Mok. It becomes clear to anyone looking at these pictures that it's highly unlikely that Nhem En was ever the chief photographer at S-21.

Nhem En has tried to sell his albums, but in vain. He needs money. He would like to make more profit from his past at S-21, his biggest asset for the past ten years. He became aware of the media's interest in genocide very early on. He tasted a few of the rewards. Now he would like to develop what he sees as Anlong Veng's tourism potential. After all, three of the most famous and most cruel leaders of Democratic Kampuchea are buried there: Pol Pot, Ta Mok, and Son Sen. It's the end of 2007, and Nhem En is planning to build a museum devoted to the Khmer Rouge.

It's hardly an outlandish idea. In December 2001, a government directive promised to “examine, restore, and preserve existing memorials, as well as investigate and study other remaining mass graves so that all such places may be transformed into memorials with fencing, trees, and information panels for both citizens and tourists.” Local authorities intended to create a “national region of historical tourism” in the mountains of Anlong Veng, which had been the setting for the “final stage of the political lives of the Khmer Rouge leaders and military organization.” Nhem En is only positioning himself in the new dark-tourism market, a market which, in Anlong Veng, is taking its most eccentric form: here, tourists are invited to make pilgrimages to the tombs and homes of Cambodia's mass murderers.

Nhem En thinks big. He calls for an investment of $2 million, including $300,000 for the museum. “It's a good project. It would be useful to generate money for my region,” he tells the press. “I think that international tourists will want to see the portraits of the Khmer Rouge leaders. We also need further advice: should the museum be devoted only to the Khmer Rouge leaders, or should it include other things, too?”

Nhem En thinks Anlong Veng could become as well-known as certain places in Germany or Vietnam, because “Ho Chi Minh, Hitler, and Stalin are all heroes of something, whether good or bad,” he says. He tells me that he's seeking both technical and spiritual support.

Above all, he's seeking money. He introduces me to his business partner, a wealthy jeweler from Siem Reap, gateway to the temples at Angkor and one of the country's most popular tourist destinations. Nhem En has convinced her to purchase a large parcel of land by the road leading into Anlong Veng. This is where he hopes to build his Khmer Rouge museum, using the hundreds of random photos in his possession as the basis of its collection.

The jeweler is a seductive, elegant, slightly eccentric divorcée. She built for her children an enormous house in the shape of a cart drawn by two bulls. There's a confident and intelligent gleam in her eyes, and she clearly manages her business with authority and success. In any case, you can't lose money on property in Cambodia, where one of the main causes of social and political violence is the frenzied, brutal land rush taking place. In Cambodia today, people are no longer killed or deported for their ideology. Instead, people are violently expelled from and killed for their land. Some Khmers Rouges have become today's “Khmers Rich,” their greed, racketeering, and corruption equal to the vices of the ruling class of the 1960s they so scorned.

Whatever becomes of the museum, it will only be a small part of the jeweler's portfolio; she says she wants to build it on only one hectare out of the parcel's fifty-five. She knows that the road between Siem Reap and Anlong Veng is to be rebuilt within two years, after which the journey linking the two will take only an hour and a half. The businesswoman believes that Anlong Veng could then be offered as an additional destination to the million tourists who visit Angkor each year.

“While visiting Angkor Wat, they could also learn what happened in Cambodia. I've discussed it with travel agents and they support us,” she told me.

If tourists visiting Phnom Penh have made S-21 and the killing fields at Choeung Ek obligatory stops on their itineraries, why wouldn't at least some of the crowds that flock to the splendors of Angkor every year consider visiting the graves of Cambodia's mass murderers? Neither to revere nor to revile, but simply to see?

Nhem En has been thinking about his museum since 2000. On the day I visited him in November 2007, he told me that he had just signed a contract with the governor; he believed he was getting closer to his goal. But the beautiful jeweler and the twisted photographer were always an unlikely team—a few months later, she pulled out of the project. Nhem En again came into the spotlight when he announced that he was selling all his treasures for half a million dollars, including a pair of sandals which, he claims, belonged to Pol Pot, as well as a piece of the former tyrant's toilet.

NHEM EN, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE,
does not speak the “whole truth and nothing but the truth.” During those years when he passed himself off as the head photographer of S-21, he didn't mention that there had, in fact, been six photographers working at the prison and that, at seventeen, he hadn't been their boss. The story he gave in his paid interviews suited him; but after a while, the well began to run dry, and his credibility with it. It's likely that it will suffer even more with the trial, since two other photographers are still alive, and one of them has already been interviewed by the investigating judges.

One day, I found myself in a car with Nhem En at the wheel. While negotiating the ruts and potholes, he admitted that someone else had been the chief photographer at S-21. Speaking of Duch, he told me that “those who commit such crimes always have a reason to conceal the truth and to lie.” There's no question he knows what he's talking about.

Each step of how S-21 operated is described during Duch's trial: how a person was arrested, registered, and locked up in a cell; how a person was interrogated and tortured until he confessed; how a person was taken to the killing fields. The only stage for which no former member of S-21 has been summoned is the one without which S-21 wouldn't be the world-famous museum it is today: the moment when the prisoner was photographed. Among the photographers who were interviewed during the trial's investigative phase, Nhem En was the only one whose deposition was read in court. He wasn't even called to testify. By now, few people still take him seriously.

T
A MOK'S ABODE IN ANLONG VENG IS ALREADY BEING COMMERCIALLY EXPLOITED.
Foreigners pay $2 a visit and 500 riels (about 12 cents) to use the toilets. According to the province's director of tourism, around a thousand Cambodians a month visited in 2007, along with fifty to a hundred Thais and twenty or so other foreigners, mostly Japanese. Out on the beautiful peninsula, in the garage where cars were once parked, two big cages resembling giant fish traps draw the interest of a group of Cambodian tourists. They are prisoner cages, someone explains a little too eagerly. Farther on, among the mango trees, lies the ruined chassis of a truck. With its hood propped open, it looks like some sort of a giant, yawning toad. It was once the mobile broadcasting truck used by the Khmer Rouge's television propaganda service.

The main house, though entirely emptied of its furnishings, has been pretty well-maintained. On the ground floor are murals painted in the early 1990s, illustrating the Khmer kingdom's former splendor—something that remains a source of pride for a patriotism with few sources from which to draw inspiration: there's the temple at Angkor Wat, of course, celebrated even by the Khmer Rouge, who, despite their determination to erase all traces of counterrevolutionary culture, placed an outline of the temple in the center of their flag; and there's the temple at Preah Vihear, a spectacular ruin perched atop a cliff in the Dangreks, which to this day continues to cost Cambodian and Thai soldiers their lives, ludicrously sacrificed on the altar of patriotic madness as both nations claim ownership of it. To sit on Preah Vihear's rocky outcrop as dawn's red glow turns to silver is to witness the majestic morning of the world as it was before man, and as it remains despite him.

On one of the walls of Ta Mok's house, next to some paintings of the famous temples, there's a large map of the kingdom. Nhem En produced it in 1993 on behalf of general command, which is where it remained until it was brought here. The room gives onto a large terrace with a magnificent view of the lake. Four Cambodians are talking quietly on the terrace. Ta Mok lived in paradise, they say, admiring the landscape. All four have come for a wedding. They're delighted to be able to combine the wedding with two lifelong dreams.

“I always wanted to see Angkor Wat and Anlong Veng. I'm so happy my dream has come true,” one of them tells me.

He says he'll pay a visit to Pol Pot's tomb after the wedding. Though disinclined to talk, the four tell me that they had all been about ten years old when the Khmer Rouge seized power, and that for the next five years they had belonged to mobile child units. One cautiously tells me that Ta Mok is now considered a criminal and Hun Sen a hero, but that in his opinion, there should be statues of all the leaders. His friends nod in agreement. All the leaders were fighters, they say.

SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE THE VERDICT,
I attended a Khmer Rouge victims' meeting in the south of the country, where I heard a number of odd suggestions about how best to commemorate Duch's crime. A young member of one of Cambodia's biggest human rights groups suggested that three statues of Duch should be raised at S-21: one of him seated in the horseshoe-shaped dock; one of him saying sorry; and the third of him being tortured. The well-intentioned young man went on to say that, on the day of the verdict, Duch should kneel before the ninety civil parties. Later, at the end of the trial, a Cambodian lawyer representing some of the victims also felt that a statue of Duch should be built at S-21, this time depicting him in his revolutionary uniform, that is to say, his criminal uniform, he wisely qualified.

Meanwhile in Anlong Veng, Nhem En also wants to build statues of Ta Mok, Pol Pot, and all the top Khmer Rouge leaders.

“We could inscribe them with ‘good leader' or ‘bad leader,'” he says.

“What would you write on Ta Mok's?” I ask. Nhem En and the four wedding guests laugh heartily.

“I can't give a definite answer,” says one of them. “Most people say he was bad, but I'm not convinced.”

“I would say ‘bad,' because he lost the war,” says Nhem En.

“And what about Pol Pot?”

One of the men tells me that he would put down “bad” for the same reason that Nhem En had given: Pol Pot lost the war. Then, as the conversation continues, everyone feels more comfortable and becomes more expansive.

“We should write ‘bad' because millions of people perished and the country was destroyed,” adds the same man.

Until this moment, he claimed not to know very much about the Khmer Rouge era; now, he gives a detailed list of the crimes committed under the regime. After this unexpected indictment, I again ask: “So, then, was Ta Mok good or bad?”

“I would say bad,” he answers.

ON THE STRAIGHT ROAD
leading from Anlong Veng to the Dangrek Mountains and the Thai border sits the Sra Chhouk pagoda and its impressive but unmarked mausoleum. It is the final resting place of Ta Mok. If the importance of former members of the Angkar can be measured by the size and upkeep of their tombs, then Ta Mok is hands-down the most powerful dead member of the Khmer Rouge, one of the few leaders not to have attended university. His grave stands as a sort of testament to his peasant superiority over the Revolution's professors.

Along one side of the property runs a long, incomplete wall made of concrete sections of equal size, each one with an inscription in Khmer. Each inscription, I'm told, indicates a donation. A pleasant, artificial pond ringed with eucalyptus demarcates the other side of the property. When I first visited in 2007, there was a platform of some six by ten meters rising about fifty centimeters off the ground, partly walled in by little columns made of faux mother-of-pearl and blanketed in flowers. A fine wooden roof covered this impeccably maintained kiosk. Rising from the middle of that square slab beneath it was a big, gray, rectangular cement tomb, about two meters across, with a slightly rounded top. No name or epitaph was engraved on it. The local authorities had permitted Ta Mok's house to be identified, but not his grave.

When I return three years later, the structure has been entirely redone. The simple wooden roof sheltering the tomb has been replaced with a real mausoleum of bricks and mortar. It looks a bit like an elephant, according to my motorcycle driver.

At a point where the path leading to the sepulcher intersects with another, one of Ta Mok's four daughters keeps a small shop. Inside, a handsome portrait of her father hangs on the wall.

“Whether he was a good man or a bad man, a father is a father,” she says calmly.