The Master of Confessions (6 page)

Duch counters with another set of minutes, written five days earlier and in which this damning statement doesn't appear. Even with supporting documents, the torturers' truth is slippery to the point of being exasperating. When the court asks Suor Thi to explain a document in the archives for which he was responsible, he says that the page isn't formatted the way it was back then, or the number of columns is wrong, or it was written on a different typewriter, or the annotations aren't correct.

HIM HUY, A STILL-SPRIGHTLY OLD MAN
with laughing eyes and thick black hair, appears in court wearing an apple-green shirt over a yellow T-shirt, his spectacles tucked into his breast pocket. The former guard has a face shaped like a mango and long, beautiful, pointed lips. He suffers from a nervous tic that makes him sniff and blink continually. Him Huy is typical of the indoctrinated youth who worked at S-21—the young peasants recruited as henchmen by the teachers who ran the complex. He was an illiterate seventeen-year-old when the Party enlisted him. He soon found himself under the command of one of Duch's two deputies, the number three of this little archipelago of death, who ran the “reeducation” center S-24.

Conscripting children into war or revolution is nothing new. Duch recruited teenagers because they were

When Him Huy relates how his fellow officers were arrested, Duch smiles, puckers his lips, and raises an eyebrow, as if to say that the story strikes him as not quite true. Duch is so relaxed he comes across as almost arrogant. He exudes a quiet pressure in the courtroom, and makes his presence felt. Him Huy sniffs. He describes how the purges at S-21 threatened the most senior officers, including Duch's two deputies. He explains that, from 1976 on, he was promoted after each purge until eventually he was a head guard. When Nath, Duch's predecessor as the head of S-21, was crushed by his own machine toward the end of 1978, followed shortly thereafter by one of Duch's deputies, Him Huy worried that he would be next, that he was about to be swept away along with the rest of one of those “lines” that the Angkar traced between people before wiping them out. He sniffs again: “Honestly, when I see him now, it reminds me of when I worked for him and was frightened of him. He still frightens me. If we hadn't been liberated on January 7, 1979, I don't think I would be around today.”

Him Huy slumps into his seat and pulls out a big yellow handkerchief. “I would've been killed because Duch said so. He said everyone would be killed in the end.”

Suor Thi describes his terror at the end of 1978, when the leaders started wiping one another out. All his hard work had amounted to nothing, he tells the court. “All I got in return was fear.”

“Did you like your work?”

“Not for a second. I hated it, but I had to do it.”

“Why didn't you leave?”

“Where could I have gone, under the regime? If I was five minutes late, someone noticed. I had no choice but to force myself to do my job. There was nowhere to escape to. The personnel at S-21 didn't like the regime, and that's the truth.”

Before stepping down from the stand, the S-21 survivor Chum Mey has some questions he wants to ask Duch. When he was accused of being in the CIA, were all the agency's agents eliminated or did a few remain? What exactly was the Angkar? And was Pol Pot the same thing as the Khmer Rouge? All these questions are still on his mind, he says. He would like to have clear answers for the schoolchildren to whom he speaks from time to time.

Head Judge Nil Nonn looks amused by the old survivor's naive questions. Duch smiles. There's nothing he likes more than wearing his teacher's hat.

“I want to make it clear that the term ‘CIA' referred to those people who opposed the Communist Party of Kampuchea,” says Duch. “The real CIA and the Party's CIA were two different things.”

As for the Angkar, he says, it was basically the Party's permanent committee. But the concept, by its very essence, had to remain mysterious.

For Chum Mey, the memory of all those he denounced in his confession is a painful one. He loses his temper. Again and again, he goes over the accusation of treason that had been leveled against him, an accusation he had never understood, that had never made any sense to him and yet had cost him so much. Behind all of his questions to the executioner lies the enormous, unyielding stupefaction of a sane man vainly seeking to understand the inexplicable.

D
UCH STANDS AND GREETS THE COURT.
He begins by saying that his people's suffering started with Prince Sihanouk's repressive government in the mid-1960s and continued after the far right–wing coup of March 18, 1970, when “all the parties competed to kill Cambodians until April 1975.” He holds a sheet of paper in one hand and leans on the edge of the table with the other. It takes just seconds for the room to fall silent. Though the trial started the previous day, not until now has it been imbued with that solemn atmosphere so specific to important moments in courtrooms. Duch is asking for forgiveness:

Bou Meng nods approvingly. Duch looks like he's trembling. The judges barely look in his direction. He removes his spectacles and leans on the desk with both arms. He looks at each person in turn, first left, then right, giving most of his attention to the prosecutor's bench.

“I never liked my job,” he says.

When he describes his arrest in May 1999, Duch's breathing grows heavy and he sounds ill. He finally mentions the sheet of paper he's been clasping since the start of his address to the court. It's a drawing that he has made, he says. He would like to show it to the judges. He sits back down while waiting for their permission. People have been waiting thirty years to hear Duch speak out in his own defense. The public gallery is abuzz. Yet the moment is utterly devoid of emotion.

Duch tries to explain his peculiar drawing. He points to three chairs on the sheet of paper, which he says are occupied by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, and Ta Mok—Brothers Number One, Two, and Four of the Khmer Rouge leadership. Along with Brother Three, Ieng Sary, this was the structure of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, explains Duch. The presiding judge keeps his eyes glued to the defendant. The other judges look away. Duch's first address to the court is a resounding flop.

AFTER ARRIVING IN PHNOM PENH
on June 21, 1975, Duch, like everybody else, went through a few days of political training. He was taught “the revolutionary conception of the world,” he says in French. Each person was made to write down his “biography” and ideology. Celebrating the “great victory of April 17,” the date the Communist insurrection took Phnom Penh, was mandatory. So was committing oneself in writing to the good of the collective, to the teachings of socialism, and to the continuation of the Revolution. Once a person had written down his biography and commitments, he read them out to his comrades, who were then encouraged to ask questions. He also had to reveal his family background, which was far more perilous than it sounds: having the wrong family tree could get you killed. Duch made sure not to mention that he was related to the niece of Lon Nol, the recently deposed field marshal with a price on his head. Duch says that it was at this time that he tried to quit the Party's security services after having worked for them for four years. He asked a high-placed contact for a transfer to the Ministry of Industry, he says. When the court asks him to elaborate, Duch answers with a proverb that the judges, particularly the foreign ones, are free to interpret however they choose: “Is it necessary to crack open a crab to see its shit?”

When asked whether he hadn't developed a taste for police work, if he hadn't found fascinating the secret and all-powerful world of the Party security apparatus, Duch has no good answer. Pressed, he dodges the question. Pressed further, he rehashes the explanations that his conscience has already endorsed: that his work was evil by its nature, or that the confessions were half-false. But the difficult question of whether he enjoyed committing the crimes won't go away, and eventually Duch makes an effort to answer it.

His effort fails.

“I was just an instrument of the Party,” he says, defeated, “an absolute, authoritarian instrument.”

THE
S
IN S-21
stands for
Santebal
.

In the Buddhist lexicon, the Santebal are those who keep the peace and maintain order, like the police. Under Pol Pot, Santebal was the name given to the internal security service, more commonly known in Communist regimes as the secret police. At the end of June 1975, Son Sen, the head of state security and minister of defense, informed Duch that a detention and intelligence center was being created in Phnom Penh. He told Duch that they were to follow the French “counterespionage” model.

The
21
in S-21 was, according to Duch, the radio code that belonged to the center's first director, Nath.

Duch was sent to search government buildings and the homes of former government employees. He gathered reports and archives from the fallen regime. From the judicial police headquarters, he took documents on torture. S-21 was created on August 15, 1975, with Nath as its director and Duch as his deputy.

It was set up first and foremost to eliminate the
ancien régime
. This included army officers, civil servants, aristocrats, and “new people”—those who stuck with the old regime right to the end and those who lived in the cities. The revolution soon found that it had no use for the mentally impaired, either: in its earliest days, S-21 served as a psychiatric hospital as well. What became of its patients?

“Based on my own analysis, more than 50 percent of patients were smashed,
^*
though I'm not entirely sure,” says Duch.

He has a better recollection of what he was ordered to do with lepers: destroy them all. Communism must liberate man. Communism abhors the handicapped, the sick, the mentally ill, the religious, homosexuals, and intellectuals.

On March 30, 1976, Party leaders signed a secret order authorizing purges within the Party itself. It would prove a watershed moment. That decree is the most tangible proof we have of the policy of extermination implemented by the secretive Angkar. The order formalized as policy the already existing practice of summary execution by giving the zone committee, the central committee, the standing committee, and the military staff the authority to kill. Thus began the great purges, ministry by ministry, division by division, region by region. Nath lost his job, Duch was promoted, and S-21 had a new mission. Its focus was now on the internal purges, as per the decree of March 30. Yet Duch was unaware that this decree even existed. He would only learn of the Angkar's decision some thirty years later, while in prison.

“Why were you chosen to run S-21?” asks Judge Lavergne.

Duch claims to have been terrified when he took over. He says he even suggested that someone else take the position instead. But Son Sen threatened him, he says. When he tries to reenact their conversation in court, the pitch of his voice climbs until his Khmer sounds metallic, jarring.

“I was their sheepdog,” he says.

But for the prosecutor, he was clearly the perfect fit for the job.

THE HISTORIAN DAVID CHANDLER
likes to say that S-21 was probably the most efficient institution in all of Cambodia during the Khmer Maoists' tragic and grotesque reign. Its own impeccable archives showed that S-21 was efficient, modern, and professional. The archives, down to the smallest detail, convinced the Party leadership that its suspicions were well-founded. They satisfied the Party's need to prove that it had eliminated all its enemies and that it had emerged victorious, even if newly conjured enemies constantly surfaced.

Chandler doesn't think the Khmer Rouge followed any particular Communist model. Similar security centers existed in China and the USSR, where the security apparatuses extorted the most dubious confessions and “reeducated” reactionary minds with the same unabated enthusiasm as the Khmer Rouge did at S-21. From Lenin onward, the Russian Revolution was blighted by purges. What Chandler does believe is unique to S-21, however, is its completely secret nature. And he calls the practice of “reeducating” prisoners only to then kill them unprecedented. The systematic killing that took place at S-21 made it a unique combination of a secret police prison and death camp.

A network of prisons and interrogation centers in which black-clad agents carried out violent abuse abounded across the Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea. But each little island in this police archipelago was isolated from the others. S-21 had no authority over any other prison, nor any autonomous or direct contact with them. Everything had to go through the “center.” S-21 was unusual because it did have a sort of national jurisdiction in that it could receive prisoners from anywhere in the country, and because it was directly linked to what everyone called the “upper echelon.” S-21 was an arm of Santebal directly linked to the center of power: the standing committee, the true Angkar, which comprised between five and seven members. This prison was its exclusive tool. The most important arrestees were sent here and nowhere else, including those made within the Central Committee or the Politburo.