The Master of Confessions (40 page)

“Is it possible for a man to redeem himself? Do you believe that redemption is possible?”

In just a few words, Hessel has settled the quarrel about the poem and restored poetry to mankind. Duch has risen from his seat to salute a witness only twice: once for Phung Ton's widow and once for his pastor. When the presiding judge indicates that the old man's testimony is over, Duch rises for the third time and does the
sampeah
, pressing his hands together in front of his face, slightly higher than Christians do when praying. Hessel watches him through the satellite link. Quite naturally and without a moment's hesitation, he puts his own hands together in front of his face and reciprocates the defendant's gesture of respect. There is no one that he would not acknowledge.

On July 26, 2010, Duch was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He immediately appealed his sentence. On February 3, 2012, the chamber of appeals gave him a life sentence. Poetry, alas, enlightens only free men.

1953–1970: THE SIHANOUK ERA

On November 9, 1953, Cambodia gained its independence after ninety years of French colonial rule. In 1955, Norodom Sihanouk, crowned king of Cambodia in 1941 at age eighteen, abdicated the throne to his father in order to found his own political party. Prince Sihanouk won the elections and became prime minister. Five years later, he claimed the title “head of state.” In 1964, he coined the expression “Khmer Rouge” to designate Cambodia's Communists, whose party, created in 1960, operated underground. The Khmer Rouge undertook their first armed operation in January 1968.

1970–1975: LON NOL'S REGIME AND THE CIVIL WAR

On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was deposed by General Lon Nol, army chief of staff. Exiled to Beijing, Sihanouk put out a call for support, invited the Communists into his government-in-exile, and created the National United Front of Kampuchea. The National Front included the Khmer Rouge, whose guerrillas rapidly gained control on the ground. Lon Nol benefited from support of the United States, which in 1969 began massive secret air raids that increased in intensity until they were stopped in 1973.

1975–1979: THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. The Communist Party ruled over the new nation of Democratic Kampuchea, led by its secret prime minister, Pol Pot, and the country became isolated from the rest of the world. On December 31, 1977, after two years of increasingly rancorous border incidents, the Communist regimes in Cambodia and Vietnam broke off diplomatic relations with each other. Cambodia was supported by China, while Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union.

1979–1998: VIETNAMESE OCCUPATION AND THE ONGOING CIVIL WAR

On January 7, 1979, Vietnam launched a massive offensive and invaded Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge regime fell and its armed forces withdrew to the mountains in the northern and western parts of the country. Cambodia was now under Vietnamese occupation, and its leaders were mostly ex–Khmer Rouge cadres who had deserted the movement and escaped to Vietnam. They include Hun Sen, who became prime minister in 1985, at the age of thirty-four. At the same time, the world discovered the magnitude of the crimes committed under Pol Pot: about one-quarter of the Cambodian population of Democratic Kampuchea perished. Yet the context of the Cold War meant that the international community condemned Vietnam's intervention and, for another decade, the Khmer Rouge remained Cambodia's legitimate representative in the United Nations. On September 26, 1989, after ten years of occupation, the last remaining Vietnamese troops left Cambodia. On October 23, 1991, peace agreements were signed in Paris. Between March 1992 and November 1993, Cambodia was put under the temporary authority of the UN, which organized general elections. Sihanouk returned to his country as king of Cambodia again until he abdicated in favor of his son, Sihamoni, in 2004. A coalition government was established between Hun Sen and the head of the Royalist Party. The Khmer Rouge soon renounced the peace agreement and carried on as a guerrilla force, but continued to suffer more and more defections, including that of Brother Number Three, Ieng Sary, in 1996. In July 1997, Hun Sen ousted the Royalist prime minister in a coup. His Cambodian People's Party, which had been in power since 1979, reaffirmed its political dominance.

On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot died in Anlong Veng, the last bastion of the Khmer Rouge. Brother Number One had been pushed out of the movement's leadership less than a year earlier. In December 1998, Khieu Samphan, former president of Democratic Kampuchea, and Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two, joined Hun Sen's government, which welcomed them publicly in the name of national reconciliation. Three months later, Ta Mok, the last Khmer Rouge leader not to have surrendered, was arrested. The Cambodian conflict that started some thirty years earlier came to an end.

1999–2013: THE POSTWAR ERA

On June 6, 2003, after six years of tense negotiations, an agreement was signed between the Cambodian government and the United Nations to establish a tribunal charged with prosecuting the most senior Khmer Rouge leaders who were still alive. In July 2006, Cambodian and foreign judges chosen to sit on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia were sworn in in Phnom Penh. A few days later, Ta Mok, imprisoned since 1999, died at the age of eighty-one. On July 31, 2007, Duch was charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. Four other senior leaders—Nuon Chea; Khieu Samphan; Ieng Sary; and Ieng Sary's wife, Ieng Thirith, former minister of social affairs—were arrested and indicted at the end of 2007. Duch's trial began in early 2009. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the chamber of appeals in February 2012. The trial of the four other defendants started in November 2011. Ieng Thirith, eighty years old, was found unfit to stand trial and was released in September 2012. Her husband, Ieng Sary, died in March 2013, at the age of eighty-seven. A judgment of the two remaining accused, Nuon Chea, eighty-seven, and Khieu Samphan, eighty-two, is expected in early 2014.

The author has attended the entirety of the public trial, as well as pretrial hearings, between 2007 and 2010. All quotes or documents referred to in this book are from court proceedings, unless otherwise specified.

Three languages were used during the trial before the Extraordinary Chambers within the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC): Khmer, English, and French. When the speaker was speaking in Khmer, simultaneous interpretation was provided in English (by non-native English speakers), then into French (by native French speakers). Problems of interpretation and translation are common to all international tribunals. There is no reason to believe that, over months or years of proceedings, such problems affect significantly the understanding and the outcome of the case. However, being the product of live interpretation and subject to copy editing, official transcripts should be taken with caution.

In this book, all quotes from English speakers are original. Quotes from French speakers have been retranslated into English from the original French. (By nature, transcripts based on simultaneous interpretation are of limited accuracy.)

The main difficulty was to deal with quotes from Khmer-speaking individuals, including the accused. It was practically impossible to go back to the original speech and have it translated again, as was done from French to English. Yet there was often a need to edit and rewrite in proper English for the sake of clarity. The same was true for some documents from the case file. An example of how official transcripts can depart from what was actually said in court is the preamble of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia. The official English transcript does not follow the shortened version used in court by the French lawyer; instead, it reads like a mix of official translation and free interpretation. We did not rely on it, and stuck to a strict translation of what the French lawyer chose to read in court. Similarly, some English translations of Khmer Rouge–era documents by the court language services, such as extracts from the Party's newspaper or the Party's statutes, were rather poor, and have been edited accordingly for the sake of clarity, while retaining the somewhat awkward Maoist parlance.

To my friends Heather Ryan, constant companion during the trial, and Stéphanie Gée, unflagging source of support during the writing process.

To the friends, old and new, working at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, who went out of their way to help me.

To those who made my stay and my work in Cambodia so comfortable, Mrs. Kit Kim Huon, Khem Somalay, Lily Luu, David Harding.

To Phann Ana.

To Lin Zi.

Thank you to Antoine Audouard for following my work with patience and wit, to Susanna Lea for having carried out the final stages so impeccably, and to Yvon Girard for his enthusiasm and confidence.

At Ecco, my most sincere thanks to Dan Halpern, Hilary Redmon, and Emma Janaskie, for their great support and work.

In memory of Mike Fowler.

THIERRY CRUVELLIER
is the only journalist to have attended trials brought before all contemporary international tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since 2003, he has been a consultant with the International Center for Transitional Justice. Cruvellier was also a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and holds a master's in journalism from Sorbonne University in Paris. He is the author of
Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

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Court of Remorse:

Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover photographs: © DCCAM/epa/Corbis (Kaing Guek Eav “Duch” in 1977); © Michael Freeman/Corbis (prisoners of the Pol Pot regime, at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum)

LE MAÎTRE DES AVEUX
© 2011 by Thierry Cruvellier. Originally published in France by Editions Gallimard/Versilio.

THE MASTER OF CONFESSIONS
. Copyright © 2014 by Thierry Cruvellier. Translation copyright © 2014 by Susanna Lea Associates. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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^*
“To smash” was the official English translation used in court for executing or killing people. For the sake of accuracy, I have kept it throughout, whenever it is used in a quote.

^*
Charles Meyer,
Derrière le sourire khmer
(Paris: Plon, 1971).

^†
“Base people” is the original revolutionary term used by the Khmer Rouges to refer to the rank-and-file, or common people.

^*
“Testimony of Surviving Prisoners, Investigation Report, People's Revolutionary Tribunal Held in Phnom Penh of the Trial of the Genocide Crime of the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary Clique,” documents collected by “a group of Cambodian jurists” (August 1979), pp. 134–35.

^*
Vann Nath died on September 5, 2011.

^*
Kampuchea Krom (literally, “Cambodia from below”), encompassing the Mekong Delta (formerly Cochinchina), was part of the Kingdom of Cambodia before the Vietnamese annexed it during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was granted to Vietnam under French colonization. The Khmer Rouge suspected the Khmer Krom of spying for the Vietnamese.

^*
Sou Met's death was announced on June 26, 2013, twelve days after he had passed away, at the age of seventy-six. He had been under confidential investigation since late 2009, and was never charged.