The Master of Confessions (26 page)

Duch says he can remember having gone to S-24 four times. The last time was in December 1978, a few weeks before he fled Phnom Penh. He had gone there to arrest his deputy, Nun Huy, the head of S-24 and one of S-21's three-man leadership team. Duch says he had many reasons for arresting Nun Huy, but has forgotten most of them. The main reason was that a radio operator had run away, he says. “I asked my superiors that he be arrested. Nuon Chea agreed to it.”

Nun Huy was planting potatoes when he saw Duch coming for him. His wife, Comrade Khoeun, the deputy head female interrogator at S-21, was arrested the next day and executed. Yet another “line” erased.

IN 1977, BOU THON'S HUSBAND,
a motorcycle chauffeur named Phuok Hon, was arrested and never seen again. Though he had been a low-ranking soldier in the Revolutionary Army, Phuok Hon had had the misfortune of having been introduced to the Revolution by a high-ranking Party cadre called Koy Thuon, who was both Cambodia's minister of commerce and responsible for its northern region. Koy Thuon fell from grace in 1976. By the beginning of 1977, he found himself in S-21. Phuok Hon fell in the wake of his mentor's fall, one more dot on Koy Thuon's line; one more domino in that bloody game of traitor networks that Duch was in charge of unearthing and eliminating. Three months after her husband's disappearance, black-clad guards came to tell Bou Thon that her husband had stolen some petrol; they told her she could go to him. Instead of being reunited with her husband, she was put in prison and beaten. Pol Pot's agents decreed that when a soldier was eliminated, his wife and children were, too. While Phuok Hon was sent to S-21, where his photo remains to this day, Bou Thon was sent to S-24.

Bou Thon and Phuok Hon had four children, all of whom died. In court, she tries to overcome her pain while villagers stream into the public gallery. There are some new faces on the bench reserved for civil parties: the parents of victims of S-21, who have come from abroad to give statements the following week. From their bench, Duch appears so remote that his head, visible over the top of the lectern, looks like a durian fruit sitting on a shelf. A security guard slaps a mosquito as Bou Thon begins describing everyday life for convicts during the Revolution. At first, her grim litany of Cambodia's collective enslavement wears me down and I find it hard to focus. The trial has been going on for four and a half months now. You get inured to it. Some mornings, you even feel oddly cheerful.

But Bou Thon speaks with great intensity, as though she's longing to speak. At sixty-four, with beautiful gray hair, she has grown out of any shyness. She wears a white blouse and a silk gray-green-and-gold scarf. Her sophisticated elegance makes it easy to forget that she's illiterate. She smiles. She, too, seems oddly cheerful.

In contrast, Duch's wrinkles and the bags under his eyes appear especially pronounced this morning; he looks tired after so many difficult days, like one of Marcel Marceau's sad mimes. But he doesn't hesitate to corroborate Bou Thon's identity, which he does in his most honeyed voice. He has no choice: her biography and photograph are in the prison's archives.

“My husband used to say that he didn't want to live under Pol Pot because there was never enough to eat,” she says.

Bou Thon was living in Phnom Penh in 1973. When Pol Pot's men seized power, she found she was the wrong type of person, a city-dweller. In court, Bou Thon talks and talks and talks. But instead of making me drowsy, her story grips my attention. She uses fragments of dialogue and description to recreate the banality of camp life, and to evoke how the twin obsessions of hunger and interrogation hung over everything. Her anecdotes are precise and detailed, and I sometimes wonder why her memory favors some stories over others. Why she remembers the banana story, however, is obvious.

One day, while working in the fields, Bou Thon saw a cluster of bananas. She said out loud that they would be good to include in the daily meal. That was enough for the guards to accuse her of being the enemy. Her face still bears traces of the beating they gave her.

Every day, the “elements” planted rice, carried water, checked the corn, and cultivated vegetables. Their work quota was strictly monitored. All production went to the mysterious, shadowy Angkar. “We weren't allowed to eat what we grew. And we didn't dare protest. They had complete control over me. We had to obey their orders. We weren't allowed to question them. They could've decided to kill me whenever they wanted to.”

No one spoke to anyone else. Everyone had watched someone get dragged away, never to be seen again. In this prison without walls, no one said a word.

Until the day Vietnamese troops invaded Phnom Penh.

“We ran for two days. I was loyal. I stayed with the group. I was stupid to follow the prisoners. I followed blindly. I don't know why. We reached the town of Amleang. We found shelter there for two nights. People said that was him, the prison director. Of course I knew him!” she shouts, sitting tall in her chair. “He was a small-framed man”—Duch smiles—“and I even knew his wife. She was tall and well-built.”

Shortly after her escape, Bou Thon found out that all her children were dead. She went back to her native village. Going home frightened her. Being alone frightened her.

“I suffered so much,” she says in a hushed voice. Her voice breaks beneath a tide of tears.

The court declares a recess. Bou Thon pours herself some water. Duch lingers behind his table, his mouth hanging slightly open, wearing that mask he puts on when he's troubled but doesn't want others to know it. He watches the people leaving the public gallery. Then he turns to his Cambodian lawyer and assistant, both of them relaxed and smiling, and he seems to immediately recover his work attitude, standing with his hands in his pockets.

Bou Thon was no Khmer Rouge cadre. Prey Sar is the forgotten place, the relegated place, the place from which, on July 23, 1977, 160 children were sent directly to Choeung Ek and executed because the Party feared that they would grow up and seek vengeance, and because they were too expensive to feed. Prey Sar hasn't been turned into a museum like S-21. Today, Prey Sar is still a prison, just like it was before Pol Pot, when Duch, Mam Nai, and Pon were incarcerated there. In court, Bou Thon's testimony focuses everyone's attention on Prey Sar, and for a day the prison is remembered. And then it is forgotten again, consigned to history's oblivion.

Duch starts to speak and Bou Thon begins to weep. Her sobbing triggers Duch, who starts crying, too, shedding long-repressed tears.

“The tears that fall from my eyes are the tears of innocents,” sobs the former director of S-21 and S-24.

Total silence fills the public gallery. A rustle, the sound of people brushing against one another and the sounds of joints cracking betray the first hesitant movements of people in the gallery. Duch had them rapt, stone-still, and now they're surprised and a little embarrassed for it. Duch salutes the court, then bows low to the public gallery. With her carefully groomed hair, elegant sarong, and dignified bearing, Bou Thon walks quietly from the room.

W
ITH THE VIETNAMESE APPROACHING,
people stampeded out of Phnom Penh. Duch didn't spare a thought to the fates of the dozen prisoners—the painters and sculptors, the electrician and mechanic and dentist—whose temporary usefulness to the Party had delayed their execution.

“Eventually, they, too, would've been smashed, correct?” asks a judge.

“That's correct, Your Honor.”

Duch left S-21 on foot, late on the morning of January 7, 1979, with Vietnamese tanks on his heels. Like Bou Thon, he walked for two days without food or water. The fates of the dozen prisoners who worked at S-21, or those of the “elements” at S-24, or of its staff, no longer concerned him. From now on, it was each man for himself. Duch fled northeast, toward Amleang. They say a murderer always returns to the scene of his crime. For a while, Duch took refuge on the former site of M-13, the place where his career in the revolutionary police had begun. The men who had then been under his command were now under that of Ta Mok or had scattered or been killed.

Duch ended up in Samlaut, in the northwest of the country, under the command of the military chief Sou Met with whom he had worked before, during the purges of 1977. There are nine damning letters in the S-21 archives, in which Duch sends the Khmer Rouge division commander information acquired from prisoners' confessions. Around three hundred of Sou Met's men were eliminated at S-21. Sou Met later achieved the rank of general in the national army. He is now retired peacefully in the quiet town of Battambang. The government opposes putting Sou Met on trial. No one involved with Duch's trial—not the prosecution, defense, civil parties, or judges—has seen fit to summon him. Justice, in this court as much as in any other, bends to political power.
^*

Duch describes how he became head of transport for the region, how he refused the offer to command a division, and how he became a sort of private tutor to Sou Met's children. It was at this point that his career as a torturer ended as suddenly as it had begun less than eight years earlier. Duch was still a member of the Khmer Rouge, but he no longer held any position of responsibility within its security apparatus. The man once described as one of the most powerful, enthusiastic, and well-connected officers of the Khmer Rouge, privy to the Politburo's most sensitive secrets, became a nobody. He sidelined himself. Once again it was the guerrillas and their war that mattered, not the police and their purges. Duch avoided taking on a military role. No one in the courtroom has properly explained why his political career ended so suddenly: neither the prosecutor, nor Duch himself.

“I LIKE TO HUNT BIRDS.”

In 1980 or 1981 (he's no longer sure), Duch was in his secluded house in Samlaut, cleaning the rifle he used for hunting, his new pastime. He assembled his weapon, put a bullet in the chamber, poured a little lubricant in the magazine, and pointed the barrel toward the sky. His wife, wondering how he could assemble a weapon in such manner, suddenly reached out and put her finger on the trigger. The gun fired and Duch's hand was partially torn off. His wife, a nurse, quickly wrapped it up in a bandage and took him to the nearest clinic. He had to have a finger amputated and, ever since, his mutilated left hand looks sort of like a flipper when he waves it about in that curt, martial way of his. Once, during the trial, a journalist friend whispered to me that she thought it looked like a bird's foot. Duch stopped hunting birds after the accident.

In the mid-1980s, Duch went back to teaching. He taught at a primary school in what was then still Khmer Rouge territory. His wife gave birth to two more sons, in addition to the two children born during Duch's years at S-21. Son Sen asked him to go to China and teach Khmer literature there. Kaing Guek Eav, a.k.a. Duch, asked to change his name again. He became Hang Pin. The name
Hang
is from his Chinese clan, and was the perfect introduction with which to go and teach in the land of his ancestors. For Duch,
pin
meant “lazy student,” the opposite of
duch
, “good student.” The Buddhist Institute Dictionary, on the other hand, defines
pin
as “summit” or “superiority.” Thus,
pin
connotes both the useless person Duch became and the superior one he always aspired to be.

He took off for Beijing in September 1986. When he returned two years later, he worked under the supervision of Son Sen's wife before taking charge of the economic affairs of the village of Phkoam. Peace talks were taking place at the time, and the UN was overseeing the establishment of multiparty elections in the country. Duch was there to prepare the campaign for the Khmer Rouge faction. In the end, the Khmer Rouge rejected the 1991 peace accord and resumed armed combat. But its fighters only lost ground and Phkoam fell under government control. Duch (going by Hang Pin) lost contact with Party headquarters. He no longer believed that the Party would win. Like many Khmer Rouge soldiers, Duch started thinking about ways to get out, though he was careful to maintain his relationships with his peers. The Revolution was dying. The Brothers were starting to claim that the Vietnamese had invented S-21. Son Sen's wife said the Swedish experts who examined the prison grounds established that the corpses found there belonged to people who had died after January 1979. This was one lie too many for Duch. In the universe of untruths he had inhabited for twenty-five years, he had reached his limit. Worse, he found himself being stripped of his biggest contribution to the Revolution. “I couldn't really accept it, because they were talking about history. I knew the real history. How could anyone say that S-21 was a Vietnamese invention?”