The Master of Confessions (33 page)

“Many old friends were imprisoned at S-21,” says Duch.

A little earlier during the trial, Duch pointed out that no steps were taken to alleviate the mental suffering of prisoners at S-21. The prisoners, he said, were considered no more than animals, or even less. Had he distinguished between friends and strangers, he would have been accused of consorting with the enemy. This, he said, was the trap preventing him from showing even the slightest degree of empathy for the prisoners. Nor had he wanted to risk showing any emotion, he said.

Psychologists call this type of behavior “reaction formation.” Duch resorted to blind obedience, overzealousness, and total allegiance in an “over-adaptation to terror” in order to suppress his own fear and silence his own doubts.

“How would you characterize this attitude of avoidance?” is how one of the judges poses the question to Duch.

“I don't know. I shut my eyes and ears. I didn't want to see reality,” he says, his voice cracking slightly.

“Was it cowardice?”

“I think it was more than cowardice. I didn't go to see my friends at S-21 because I didn't know what to say to them. Certainly, I was a coward. But it goes further than that, because I betrayed my friends and teachers in order to survive. It was more than cowardice.”

D
UCH DOESN'T HAVE ANY PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS.
He isn't suffering from any neurosis, psychosis, or psychopathy. We cannot comfort ourselves by dismissing as deviants those men and women who perpetrated mass crimes in extreme political circumstances. Duch is neither mentally ill nor a monster, and that's the problem. He wasn't dangerous before 1970. And he most likely wasn't dangerous after 1979. The same applies to Him Huy, Suor Thi, and Prak Khan. Duch will be punished for the rest of his days, because somebody must be punished. But he could be rehabilitated: the twenty years between the day S-21 was shut down and the day of his arrest prove it. What's more, no one has questioned whether it's safe to let Mam Nai and other former members of the S-21 staff—or the tens of thousands of former Khmer Rouge cadres who, for the past fifteen to thirty years, have been living freely alongside those they persecuted—to continue doing so.

A year and a half before the start of the trial, the S-21 survivor Chum Mey told me that he could see no reason why Duch should be released. He wanted and demanded a severe sentence for his torturer. Yet he also seemed more worried about Duch's safety than his own: “We are safe now. I wouldn't be frightened if he were released. It's the tribunal that should be worried: what will it do if he's killed?”

The psychologists have less trouble addressing political crime. Their training precludes them from believing that anyone is born a monster or devil.

“Whether they sponsor it or carry it out themselves, people aren't born torturers. They turn into them,” says the court-appointed psychologist.

One night after the trial, I was eating dinner in a café with some acquaintances who were passing through Phnom Penh. One of them confidently declared: “Duch is a pervert.”

That seemed to settle it for him. He had found an
explanation
. The denial, the manipulation, the effort to control others, the desire to please, the striving to impress people for his own self-benefit: aren't all these constituent parts of perversity in its broadest sense? And aren't they all blatantly obvious in Duch? The answer to both questions, of course, is yes. But, alas, to say that this explains Duch's actions is to mistake
observation
for
explanation
.

“We could talk about the notion of perversity,” says the psychologist. “But then we'd simply have to work out where
that
comes from. Perversity doesn't exist in and of itself.”

The perversity explanation might provide some intellectual comfort, but it resolves nothing.

We all develop “life strategies” with which to negotiate our inner contradictions and overcome the obstacles of life. Duch developed strategies first to serve the Khmer Rouge, then to survive it; his strategies included zealotry and compartmentalization. Today, he has psychological mechanisms that allow him to exist, or survive, both with and despite his crimes.

In order to understand Duch's actions, say the psychologists, we must examine the extreme way in which his collective and personal stories overlap. Duch's psychology cannot be separated from the society around him, or from the collective history in which he has been swept up. Duch doesn't exist
ex nihilo
. Both he and Cambodia went through “successive and massive acculturation,” followed by a brutal and radical transformation into the New Man: that identity manufactured and demanded by the Khmer Rouge in which the individual exists only for the group, in an atmosphere of mistrust and generalized fear, and with all emotions and personal thought eradicated. Either you adapted or you died. In ethno-psychiatric terms, Communism constitutes a “deculturation.” It flourishes in the uprooting.

“The man who lives in a country under totalitarian rule has a different psychology than the man who lives in a democratic state,” says the expert.

Five months into the trial, the quality of the silence in the courtroom has changed. No longer is it that breathless and dumbstruck silence that knows it is watching history being written, nor is it the solemn quiet of a legal drama. The silence that fills the courtroom now is that of fatigue, of weariness, of exhaustion with both the trial and Duch's words. His performance has lost its shine. Now he sounds like he's rambling aimlessly. David Chandler, who has dedicated so many years to studying the tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea, and who has spent more time immersed deep in the S-21 archives than anyone else, has another way of measuring this decline: he believes the Khmer Rouge leadership's disconnect from reality, and the extent of the catastrophe that its reign brought about, points to its “profound stupidity.”

Duch reveals the limits of his own intelligence and cunning. On the stand for a final cross-examination concerning his personality, he maintains his story; other than a few minor details and dates, he no longer has anything important to say that he hasn't already said many times over. He talks in tedious, ineffectual circles. He has lost his mental agility. He is a shadow of the man who, five months previously, had the upper hand. He no longer cares, and he no longer holds our attention—his luster is tarnished. After forty minutes, he ends his own deposition and lets the presiding judge take over. The trial isn't over and yet it's already over. We face the remaining six days the way a boat enters port: motoring slowly, sails furled. The last six days have been set aside to hear defense witnesses. Duch's mother, who is on the list, won't testify. On the penultimate day of the trial, the defendant reiterates his apology:

Duch respects the two shrinks who examined him. Their work, he says, “is based on purely scientific, unbiased reasoning.” His lawyer François Roux also praises the experts' psychological report; at the start of the trial, Roux had framed the issue thus: “Have you ever known a child who dreams of growing up to be an executioner?” From the first day of the trial, Roux warned the victims that his client would be unable to answer all their questions, and that there was no simple, unambiguous, comforting answer to the single question haunting the survivors and the families of those who perished:
Why?
The lawyer tried to prevent the victims from harboring false hopes. Yet in so doing, he laid bare his own: “Will we be up to the task of not only giving back to the victims their humanity, but of readmitting to the human race someone who has abandoned it? That is the great challenge facing our court.”

At first, Duch keeps his lawyer's dream alive. He takes care to politely greet the judges, then the prosecution, then the civil parties. Walking past the long window separating the court from the gallery, he sees the survivors Chum Mey and Bou Meng, and salutes them. They smile and return his greeting. When the first lawyer representing the victims' families addresses him, Duch gives him his undivided attention. He strives to be cooperative, to give full and detailed answers. He is even more considerate with the next lawyer, who wants to know how Duch ranked different transgressions at S-21: “I will try to answer. If I don't, please ask me again.”

Roux is candid about his own utopian vision for the trial:

François Roux likes symbols. All his life, he has dreamed of a better world and has never stopped working toward it, whether this has meant standing alongside the peasants of Larzac fighting for their land in Southern France against the extension of a military zone; or conscientious objectors opposing the military draft; or Kanaks fighting for independence from France in New Caledonia; or just as well defending the rights of those accused of genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda or representing a member of al-Qaeda tried in the U.S. for his role in the September 11, 2001, attacks—in the name of opposing the death penalty. The philosophy of nonviolence made a deep impression on him, and he has always been staunchly on the side of those who rise up against injustice. Yet at the same time, he has always respected the state and its institutions. Roux, who is descended from Huguenots, regularly returns to his rural community, surrounded by high mountain pastures and flocks of sheep, for rejuvenation. He is also an avid traveler, an idealist keenly aware of the great power of doubt but who finds even greater fulfillment pursuing the bright promise of a better world.

The international justice system is filled with symbols to fire the imaginations of human-rights activists, and Roux has found in it the building blocks of the better world he dreams of, though he knows that most of the time, it will remain just that: a dream. The dream that he carefully and passionately constructed in Duch's case centers on what he considers the most important event of this particular legal undertaking: the reconstruction that took place at the scene of the crime, one year before the start of the trial proper, when Duch returned to S-21 some thirty years after having left it.

That day, Duch stood facing the prison's three still-living survivors—Bou Meng, Vann Nath, and Chum Mey—and read his declaration: