The Master of Confessions (37 page)

Kar Savuth shares with many of his Cambodian colleagues a tendency to exaggerate, and one very quickly develops the habit of only half-listening to their over-embellished arguments. Bellicose and grandiloquent one moment, courteous and back-pedaling the next, Kar Savuth can charge through the legal arena like a bull bled alive; he can switch from hostile to obsequious in the blink of an eye. We have all learned not to take his bombast too seriously.

Kar Savuth gave one of his spectacular, impassioned speeches at the start of the trial.

“Why are we prosecuting Khmer Rouge leaders?” he asked.

At that early stage of the trial, everyone found the old fox's lively, flamboyant posturing in court, as well as his sheer nerve, entertaining. Everyone assumed that he would bluster on until he ran out of steam, then return to his charming and courteous ways. But Kar Savuth didn't run out of steam. He claimed that there were fourteen top leaders in Pol Pot's regime. Duch wasn't among them.

“If those fourteen people aren't prosecuted, it's a breach of the law! This trial must be stopped immediately!” he thundered before an audience that was both amused and embarrassed.

This time, the lawyer had gone too far. The prosecutor warned him and asked that

The judges felt obliged to ask Kar Savuth to clarify his position. He immediately defused the bombshell with which he had just threatened the court.

“These arguments are just comments for the consideration of the chamber,” he said with a disarming grin. “I'm not questioning the chamber's authority. I am quite aware that I could have raised this during the initial hearing if I had wished to do so. They are just my own comments.”

Phew.

The defense floundered until François Roux returned to the helm and steered it toward the goal he had set for it a year and a half earlier. “There's no difference between international and national judges; there's no difference between international and national lawyers; and there's no difference between international and national prosecutors.” Roux would like to say that the fool's game that he and his Cambodian partner found themselves caught up in is one being played at every level in the tribunal. Everyone might be sitting next to his Judas. Anyone might find himself betrayed at any moment. And it's hard to resist twisting the knife in your neighbor's wounds while waiting to be stabbed in the back yourself. Roux battered his opponent's already bleeding injuries.

The same day, the head of the Cambodian government declared that no more than five suspects would appear before this tribunal. Yet four months previously, after a year and a half of political wrangling, contortions, and delicate negotiations, the international prosecutor had requested that six other former Khmer Rouge leaders face prosecution. But his Cambodian colleague, all too familiar with the powers that be, had opposed these new indictments. Everyone in this tightly controlled court is vulnerable to such discord. Political betrayal is an old habit here.

Kar Savuth brought up the question of discontinuing the trial two or three more times over its course. But it no longer meant anything: in legal terms, it was too late. Everyone hoped that his repeated insinuations that Duch shouldn't be judged in this court were nothing more than his own hang-ups, a lawyer's itch to play the gadfly, or simply the result of the Khmer tendency to think in circles.

THERE'S NOTHING STRAIGHTFORWARD ABOUT
defending Duch. Even those well-versed in defendants' rights, even those publicly committed to human rights, or who have made careers out of defending them, sometimes conflate the crime with the criminal and the criminal with the person defending him in court. Many human rights activists and lawyers have found such stigmatizations impossible to resist. And who hasn't wanted to write a letter to the editor such as this one, penned by a no-doubt well-educated reader of
Le Monde
, a highly respected French newspaper:

Behind this brave vigilante's words we can hear the lynch mob's call; we see its redemptive fist smash into Savuth's nose and Roux's temple, the throng frothing at the mouth; we hear the hollow sound of stones piling up on the bastard's corpse while nearby in a corner, the lawyer pisses vile blood onto his worthless robe.

We need only watch how men and women of all social classes react to the trials of torturers and executioners to gauge our collective lust for the gallows, for the firing squad lurking in a football stadium, or for watching women with the shaved heads in 1945 at the French Liberation. In every trial I've covered—whether in Africa, Europe, or Asia—I've felt the breath of that bloodlust, the hatred that exists even among the most well-educated, on the back of my neck. It is the same as the rush of air that preceded the blow of the pickax handle that was the last thing felt by the victims at Choeung Ek, on their knees at the edge of the pit.

Kar Savuth knows all of this. On the day he makes his closing statement, he begins by asking his countrymen for their understanding for the “vile job” lawyers are obliged to undertake when defending a man like Duch. With that caveat out of the way, he returns to his favorite theme: there were hundreds of prisons, some of them even more murderous than S-21, yet their former directors remain free, untroubled by the law. Why is Duch and Duch alone standing trial? Duch is just a scapegoat, claims the lawyer, and scapegoating isn't justice. Nine months after the trial began, Kar Savuth is sticking to his guns: this tribunal has the authority to judge the top leaders and main perpetrators responsible for the atrocities; Duch wasn't among those who decided whom to arrest and execute; therefore, he wasn't one of the fourteen people in charge of the Khmer Rouge. Of the individuals named by Kar Savuth, only three are still alive. All three between seventy-nine and eighty-five years old, they are scheduled to be tried after Duch. It's unfortunate, says Kar Savuth, but the court can't have it both ways: either charge all the former directors of all the other prisons in Democratic Kampuchea, or else free Duch.

Kar Savuth can show a good deal of finesse when it suits him. But today is one of those days that call for impassioned argument, which he gladly provides. The temperature rises, like a fevered trance taking hold of dancers swaying to primordial drumbeats in the sweltering night. Kar Savuth, intoxicated by his own words, grows heated and provocative; he finds it appropriate to invest Pol Pot's murder of Son Sen with some gravity; he deplores the Spartan conditions in which Brother Number One spent the last months of his life. Those crimes ought to have been punished, he says. The notion is so noxious that it is immediately dismissed by everyone present. But Kar Savuth has a knack for jumbling the coarsely preposterous with sensitive truths. Amid all his nonsense, he reminds us that high-ranking Khmer Rouge cadres are still serving in the army today, some of them as generals, and none of them are fearful of being arrested. So, really, why Duch and not them? The Cambodian lawyer has been preparing for his moment for a long time, and now, at last, he takes the final step: he declares that Duch is “not guilty” and that all charges against him should be dropped. Nobody finds this funny anymore. The atmosphere in the courtroom is electrified.

François Roux has been cut loose by the prosecutor, betrayed by his own cocounsel, and has helplessly watched his client withdraw into himself, all in a single twenty-four-hour period. The job to which he has devoted himself for the past two years now lies in ruins. Roux was Duch's best chance, yet Duch ditched him. He was the best ally the civil parties had, yet it's at his feet that they have laid all their anger and bitterness. He was the tribunal's best asset, since he promised it a dignified, unobstructed trial, yet he now stands humiliated before it. A good many people—even among those who consider Roux's a “vile job”—recognize that he has carried this trial, that he has stamped it with high standards, credibility, dignity, and competence. Yet two days before its end, he suddenly finds himself its biggest loser. He had wished for this trial to be transcendent; instead, he has fallen into the abyss. How can Roux fight the prosecutor when his own client and cocounsel behave as if they are on the prosecution's side?

Kar Savuth's
coup de théâtre
adds more drama to a trial that already has plenty; the latest one centers on a lawyer with a broken dream, who realizes that nobody else in the courtroom wants what he wants, a fact driven home during the trial's Shakespearean final act: a dagger in the back.

The victims' families, meanwhile, close ranks. For thirty years they've been trampled upon; now, finally, they have found strength in numbers, and they sit together in three long rows, persuaded that the drama unfolding before their eyes is proof of what they have long claimed: that Duch is a master manipulator, that his confessions are nothing more than a smokescreen, and that now, at last, the torturer is showing his true face. The Cambodian lawyer's outrage becomes their bitter triumph. It validates their desire to see Duch severely punished. How can they support François Roux when both his client and his cocounsel are fighting him?

I
'VE COME TO SEE
LE MAÎTRE,”
—THE MASTER—
a visiting American lawyer says, referring to Maître Roux, taking her seat in a packed courtroom the following morning. The man she has come to see enters the courtroom like a Roman warrior sacrificed to a
naumachia
.

François Roux might well say,
“Ave, populus, morituri te salutant”
(“Hail, people, those who are about to die salute you”). He is about to make the last closing argument of his prolific career. He finds himself in the most indefensible position imaginable, caught between surrender and humiliation, two sentiments he cannot stand. Yet even dethroned, even beaten and humiliated, “the master” still stands lustrous atop some invisible pedestal. Even in the hour of his defeat, he is still the one most admired by the public.

The master stands to speak, very slowly straightening his body. His hand reaches for the microphone as though in slow motion; he leans forward halfway at a right angle, as though his seat has remained stuck to him, and then stays in that position, his torso barely moving. His movements are so drawn out that once he completes them, you're not quite sure whether he's standing entirely straight or not. Then his confident and patient voice booms through the courtroom: “To stand up and speak in someone's defense, that is what makes our job noble. To stand beside the accused, beside the person here accused of one of the most serious crimes imaginable—a crime against humanity. Imagine that: a crime against humanity.”

Roux speaks in a natural tone that makes him seem close; his timbre is clear, his words carefully chosen. With just a few sentences, this intellectual tightrope walker succeeds in establishing a calm solemnity in the courtroom. Now he brushes aside yesterday's insult by turning it into a challenge for himself:

Once he has brushed his own team's betrayal under the carpet, he can continue to plead, despite everyone, on behalf of the Duch he has defended for the past two years, the one who repented, the one who broke down when confronted with the reconstruction of the crime at S-21 or at the mention of Phung Ton's name. “Who can dispute those moments that we have all lived through? Who is in a position to contest this? Didn't we all experience those same moments of utmost sincerity? Weren't we all utterly moved?”

The regime's leaders didn't need Duch to become paranoid, he says, quoting the much-respected historian David Chandler. “Yes, the paranoia began in the center of the Party, not at S-21. The paranoia began in the center and spread to the ranks. If the most dangerous enemy was the invisible one, then there could be no end to the terror, because the enemy could not be seen.”

Roux must also nullify the damning portrait of Duch painted by the prosecution, of a man who committed his crimes with particular enthusiasm. The master refers to Article 5 of the Party statutes, which each member had to scrupulously obey: