The Master of Confessions (32 page)

PARIS WAS STILL RECOVERING
from the student riots of 1968 when young Ouk Ket arrived on a scholarship to study engineering. He, too, was a member of Cambodia's privileged class; his family lived at the Royal Palace. After the 1970 coup, Ouk Ket answered Prince Sihanouk's rallying call and, quite naturally, joined the former sovereign's alliance, which included the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. That same year, he met a young Frenchwoman in Paris. They were married in October 1971, at the same time that, in a distant corner of the Cambodian forest, François Bizot was standing face-to-face with Duch.

A few months later, the young couple moved to Dakar, where Ouk Ket had been named third undersecretary at the embassy. Ouk Ket's wife gave birth to a son in 1973 and a daughter two years later. The young civil servant wasn't Khmer Rouge—his loyalty was to the king—but he appeared enthusiastic about the new regime he represented, whose dream of a better tomorrow he embraced.

Ouk Ket wrote this to his father-in-law in December 1975, delighted to be “returning to a country benefiting from all this prosperity.” In April 1977, a message from headquarters told him to return to Phnom Penh at last. The family spent three weeks in Paris. On June 7, still enthusiastic about the new regime, the diplomat flew via Beijing to the capital of Democratic Kampuchea.

“Ket was very happy to return to Cambodia to participate in national reconstruction,” his wife says from the stand.

Ouk Ket sent a postcard from Pakistan and another from China, from where he wrote that he would land in Phnom Penh on June 11. After that, there was no more news. His wife heard nothing for two years. In December 1979, she asked the Cambodian representative to the United Nations for news of her husband. He told her, “Don't put your life on hold for him.” Later, she learned about the existence of S-21, and that Ouk Ket's name was in the prison's archives. In 1991, in the middle of the peace negotiations then taking place under the aegis of the UN, she went to Cambodia for the first time, taking her two children with her. The family went to S-21 and to Choeung Ek. They searched the archives. On the forty-third line of a list of people executed on December 8, 1977, they read: “Ouk Ket, thirty-one years, Foreign Affairs, Third Undersecretary. Date of entry: June 15, 1977.” He had been in cell 23, room 2, Building C.

Ouk Ket's widow describes how she decided then and there that the crime would not go unpunished. Usually, it's the victors rather than the victims who decide such things. But now, at long last, she can stand before the court and ask for justice, though of course nothing will ever satisfy that need. Neither Ouk Ket's widow nor his daughter refers to Duch by name from the stand. They refer to him as “Case Number One,” which is what the tribunal designated his trial, its first case. Throughout their testimonies, the two women, in turn, use only this case number to refer to the man who reduced their husband and father to a number.

TIME RESOLVES NOTHING,
particularly for the parents who come to testify before the tribunal. In the wake of any mass crime, there is always a small number of victims for whom speaking and condemning the perpetrators are vital processes. The vast remainder, including Ouk Ket's eldest son, stay silent. No one witnesses their suffering; nobody can sooth their enduring pain. For some victims, expressing their anger is a step along the path to healing. Yet that anger can seem like a river overflowing its banks. The need to talk about their suffering is endless; the story of their loss cannot be recounted too many times. Sometimes, the more they tell it, the sicker they become.

One rainy October day, I went to a provincial forum organized by the tribunal's office for the civil parties in its second case, in which the regime's four highest-ranking, still-living leaders were to be tried. The regional governor was to open the forum. She had hardly begun her speech when she burst into tears. Her father, husband, and son had all disappeared in Khmer Rouge “cooperatives.” Her emotion was undiminished thirty years on. Then a Cambodian lawyer, only recently recruited to represent victims, declared that she, too, had been persecuted. She sobbed uncontrollably. Someone else admitted to having suffered psychological trouble and having had to consult specialists. An old Muslim man at the back of the hall got to his feet: “I am a victim of the Khmer Rouge. Is there a medicine to treat my mental problems?” Then, referring to the cases before the tribunal, he said: “We are dealing with only one germ. We all have all the other germs in our bodies.”

Time doesn't resolve anything for Ouk Ket's widow, either. “For the past thirty-two years, Ket's absence has been unbearable. I miss him always,” she says, looking up to try to stop her tears. “The pain hasn't faded; it has only gotten stronger. It's like an ocean in front of you. The result, for me, has been a complete breakdown.”

Ouk Ket's daughter is older today than her father was when he died. She says that the day she put her finger on the S-21 register, a drop of poison entered her. Shortly after, she abandoned her studies. Like Kerry Hamill's younger brother, she ended up haunted by wild and uncontrollable thoughts.

“It was necessary for me to imagine it. Unfortunately, I imagined the worst.”

When she found out that blood was taken from S-21 prisoners, she lost control. She sometimes feels as though she's the only survivor of all the children killed at S-21. Whenever she watches a ceiling fan spinning, she sees American bombers overhead, which, of course, she never actually saw. A deep sense of revulsion has taken root in her. When she describes it, her voice becomes cold, arrogant even, to help her hide her internal disintegration. She thought about suicide, about jumping from the window without knowing why. She reassures the court, says she's doing better. Yet a great sorrow hovers over Ouk Ket's daughter and wife. The older one gets, says the daughter, echoing her mother, the more the poison spreads. “The only way to return to my life is to testify.” 

U
NLIKE TIOULONG RAINGSY, LIM KIMARI, OU WINDY, AND OUK KET,
Chum Narith wasn't born into Phnom Penh's upper class. He came from a background similar to Duch's, with whom he became friends. Narith's parents, though poor, wanted to give their children a good education. One of his younger brothers won a scholarship to study in France from 1960 to 1968. Narith received a similar offer, but the youngest boy was already in Paris and the family couldn't afford to send both. So Narith, the responsible one, turned down the scholarship. He became a teacher in 1965, like Duch. Mam Nai was one of his colleagues. Then, in 1968, again like Duch, and like Mam Nai, and like professors Phung Ton and Chao Seng, Chum Narith was arrested on suspicion of having links with the Communist guerrillas.

Chum Narith's younger brother is among the witnesses to testify before the tribunal. Circumstances in Cambodia forced him to become a French citizen before returning to Cambodia in 1999. By the end of the 1960s, he says, Cambodian society was already split into “blue Khmers” and “red Khmers.” He draws a parallel between the situation in Cambodia and the uprisings then taking place in France. Cambodian intellectuals still had close ties with the former colonial power. They followed the events of 1968 closely and supported left-wing ideas. They opposed the social injustice that was widespread under the monarchy. Chum Narith's stint in prison only strengthened his political commitment and his opposition to the regime, just as their respective prison terms did for Duch, Pon, and Mam Nai.

From 1970 on, the civil war intensified and life became a lot harder. Refugees crowded into Phnom Penh, there were countless bombing raids, gas was scarce, and Cambodians went days on end without power. In 1973, there was an open revolt at the Pedagogical Institute. General Lon Nol's police believed Chum Narith was the ringleader and went to arrest him at his home, but he had already disappeared into the
maquis
, along with Mam Nai and several other teachers.

After the Khmer Rouge victory, Chum Narith joined its propaganda unit in Phnom Penh. On October 29, 1976, he was arrested, along with his younger brother, Sinareth, and Sinareth's wife, Dong Sovannary. It turned out that one of the teachers with whom he had gone into the
maquis
had later been arrested and sent to S-21. There, he was tortured by Pon—another former colleague from the national education system—before he denounced Chum Narith in his confession.

Chum Narith was accused of forming a group opposed to collectivization. At the trial, his younger brother asks the court how anyone can believe a confession obtained by torture. Yet despite this, he seems to
want
to believe that the charges against his older brother were true, as though Narith's admissible arrest by a regime founded on lies, fabrication, and slander could mitigate his powerlessness and rage.

Chum Narith was executed on January 1, 1977, after sixty-five days of prison and torture. His brother's voice swells until it fills the room: “I don't understand the point! If you want to kill, why not kill immediately?”

Chum Sinareth also died at S-21. The ignominious sign around his neck bore the number 59. His date of execution is unknown. His wife, wearing Khmer Rouge clothes and a Khmer Rouge haircut, was number 18. All that remains of her is a photo.

The youngest Chum brother happened to be in France in April 1975, and ever since he has been struggling with the sense of guilt so common among those who, by sheer luck or fortuitous circumstance, survived. He feels deep regret, he says, for not being intelligent enough, for not having the presence of mind, for misreading the situation, for failing to foresee the coming terror. But from Kigali to Phnom Penh, people never imagine the worst will actually happen, even when all the signs are there.

Where were his brothers executed and buried? The question still haunts him. It wasn't at Choeung Ek, which didn't exist yet when they were killed. He wrote to Duch, asking him, but Duch replied that he didn't know. The youngest brother doesn't believe that Duch had no choice but to follow orders. He thinks Duch enjoyed his work; he thinks Duch was a predator.

During the recess following Chum's deposition, Duch stands and smiles. Members of the victims' families have been testifying one after another, each account proving tenser and darker than the previous one. For the former executioner, there's no way out. The sense of discomfort and contrition he showed early in the proceedings seems to have disappeared, as it has been continuously rebuffed by the victims, who communicate their mutual support to each other through the glass wall. The fierce and eloquent testimony given by Narith and Sinareth's brother has galvanized them.

Duch's Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth, wanders among the rows of civil parties. He talks to Phung Ton's widow. The professor's daughter joins the conversation, which appears cordial. Kar Savuth is of the same generation as the professor, and belonged to the same Cambodian elite of the 1960s. Phung Ton had been his law professor. Lon Nol's former minister of culture, whom the Americans evacuated on April 12, 1975, is in the audience. His elegant wife, who has all the poise and grace of the old, cultivated elite, had once been a student of the wife of Son Sen, head of Pol Pot's security apparatus. Son Sen's wife had once been a decent but strict woman, her former pupil tells me. Then she became a hard-nosed revolutionary and ended up devoured by the revolution she served.

If it weren't for all the adversities and betrayals, you'd think you were at a family reunion. Cambodia's elite constituted a small world in which everyone knew everyone else and in which, before the Revolution, everyone's path crossed everyone else's. The story being written during the course of the trial is like an explosion in midair: how Cambodia's intellectuals clung to the privileges that had allowed them to flourish even as the wings fell off and they found themselves hurtling toward the ground; how they allowed the flames of change to flicker to life among them, never imagining the conflagration to follow.