The Master of Confessions (7 page)

But S-21 is also unique in that we have its archives. It is often emphasized that no other prison in Democratic Kampuchea was run as efficiently or with such sophistication. Perhaps. But no other prison in Cambodia remains with its archives intact. We know little about the two hundred other centers of the secret police that have been identified, just as we would know nothing about S-21 had Duch been ordered or had the presence of mind to destroy its records.

Duch's confession makes him unusual among the members of the Khmer Rouge's inner circle. But would he have confessed had he not left so much evidence behind? Duch is a mathematician; his arguments adhere to logic. He has admitted nothing that can't be found in the archives.

“If documents exist then I can't deny it,” he says simply. “I recognize everything that comes from S-21. I accept no other evidence.”

His first great error was not anticipating the rapid Vietnamese invasion in early 1979, and his second was not destroying his archives before fleeing. His superiors made the mistake of not ordering him to do so. Didn't they know about their warden's meticulous record-keeping? Did Duch leave the fruits of his endeavors intact out of haste or simply out of lack of foresight? Or was it because he had been too proud to destroy the exemplary work he had accomplished for the Party and for the Revolution, the testament to his talent and proof of his ability to establish a successful and efficient institution?

Had Duch destroyed his archives, we never would have known much about the prison nor the magnitude of the crimes committed there. We might never have known the true identity of its director, “Brother East.” It's true that a handful of survivors might have told us about a terrible place that had once existed in Pol Pot's Cambodia. But with no written records, how many other terrible prisons have been erased from the pages of history? Without the written confessions, photographs, and “biographies,” there is no S-21. In short, S-21 exists today because hubris or professional oversight prevented its director from destroying his work.

The archives are of exceptional quality and incredibly thorough. Without them, the history of Democratic Kampuchea would be much murkier and less detailed. And if we had all the regime's documents, says Chandler, “We would have a completely new history of Democratic Kampuchea.” Ever the iconoclast, Chandler tells the court:

D
UCH WAS NOT A MEMBER OF THE PARTY'S CENTRAL COMMITTEE
, which means he was among the middle rungs of its hierarchy. He was, however, high up in the secret police—a commissar, he says, returning to orthodox Party jargon, at the head of its most strategic and sensitive department. With feigned modesty, he describes his position thus: “I had three important jobs: to teach and train; to send confessions to my superiors; and to deal with any questions having to do with S-21. My duties were more political than technical.”

According to Chandler, Duch was an outstanding administrator who expertly accomplished the work asked of him. Little of the prison's operation escaped his attention. Yet even so, says the historian, not even he could instigate and manage everything that happened there.

Duch maintains that he went infrequently to the prison, and never into the cells. He left the menial tasks to his subordinates, he says, taking care to cultivate the mysterious and menacing persona of the inaccessible boss who appears rarely and then only by surprise. He devoted himself entirely to his strategic role: reading and annotating confessions, sending them back to the interrogators with comments, then reporting on them to his superiors so that they would “understand them more easily.” He did not wish to see the conditions in which the prisoners were kept, and in any case he paid them no attention whatsoever. This is what psychologists call “avoidance.”

“S-21 was only for people who were going to be executed. There was no protection of their rights. We fed them like animals and treated them as such. We were only waiting for the moment when they would be smashed. No one cared about their well-being. That's it.”

“You admit that you didn't consider them human?” asks a lawyer for the victims' families.

“We didn't think about it in such complex terms. We distinguished between friends and enemies. Now, looking back through the prism of human rights, it was absolutely wrong and constituted a criminal act. But at the time, we thought about it differently. We told ourselves only that the police work had to be done,” says Duch.

Duch oversaw the logistics of death, but from a distance. He left the daily management to his deputy, Hor, who had an office inside the prison, where the clerk Suor Thi worked.

Apart from closely monitoring the confessions, Duch's other tasks were to train his staff in interrogation techniques and to ensure their political education. The crimes perpetrated at S-21 were the work of many, and though Duch certainly got his hands dirty, his real aspiration was to become a bureaucrat. To a certain degree, he succeeded.

OF COURSE, HE KNEW EXACTLY
what was going on. He is an expert on torture. The method of covering someone's head with a plastic bag is “very dangerous,” he asserts. Throwing water over it makes it even more sophisticated. The prison's first director, Nath, had a predilection for electrocution and whipping. Duch says he himself authorized four types of abuse: forcing water up people's noses, beating people up, whipping, and electric shocks. He doesn't believe that prisoners had their breasts burned, or that his interrogators used venomous insects such as centipedes to extract confessions. Above all, he tries to convince the court that he did not pay close attention to the technical aspects of what went on at S-21; he left that to his underlings: “I didn't know what they were doing and they didn't know what I was doing.”

It's a stance that makes it easy to avoid remembering too much. In reality, all kinds of tortures were practiced at S-21. Chum Mey describes having his nails pulled out, though Duch claims he put an end to that method. One written order directs an interrogator to force one of Duch's former teachers to eat spoonfuls of excrement. Brother Number Five, Duch's former boss, was forced to take a cold shower and then sit in front of a fan—“to induce fever,” says Duch. Some were made to drink urine. Others were forced to pay homage to an image of a dog with the enemy's face superimposed over it, or made to kneel in front of a chair, or a table, or any other object that only a contemptible person would honor. How should such methods be labeled? Are they cold, lukewarm, or hot?

Duch vows that he never tortured anyone himself. He admits slapping a prisoner around once when Nath was still director of S-21, but he only acknowledges that because he has to—it is documented in the archives. His clumsy explanations are difficult to believe. Even the way he phrases his answers suggests that he knows more than his conscience will admit:

“What characterizes torture for you?” asks Judge Lavergne.

“That's a difficult question. Could you phrase it in a different way?”

“Can you imagine how the prisoners felt? The water technique, for example. How do you think that feels?”

“Once the stomach is filled with water, the prisoner is shaken until he vomits and sometimes loses consciousness. When he comes to, we carry on with the interrogation.”

He remembers one victim in particular, to the point that he even remembers his name, as well as many details of his interrogation:

“Can you imagine what it feels like to have a plastic bag over your head?”

“It feels like you're dying.”

The only rule to the torture—though at times broken—was that the subject had to be kept alive until he or she had made a complete confession.

“Is it easy to know when to stop?”

NEVERTHELESS, DUCH HAS NO TROUBLE
admitting that he ordered torture. The more specific the documents are, the less he equivocates. When Brother Number Ten wrote in his confession that he had been severely tortured by Duch's men, Duch crossed out the passage in question and wrote to the prisoner: “You have no right to report this problem to Angkar. I am the only one who decides.” In another report, an interrogator named Pon made a note of the number of lashes a prisoner had received; Duch wrote instructions to give him more. Elsewhere, he wrote to Pon to torture a prisoner by the hot method, “even if it leads to death.” When asked in court what he has to say about this particular note, Duch claims that it was a bluff to frighten the prisoner into confessing; it wasn't for real.

Duch wrote his annotations in a clear, neat hand. They are as elegantly written as they are ruthless.

“I'm very jealous of the neatness of his calligraphy,” David Chandler, who has analyzed a thousand confessions extorted at S-21, comments with sarcasm.

Duch wrote instructions to his torturers in a red pen:

The radical, uncompromising revolutionary never wavered from inflicting suffering, from destroying men. The young, thirty-three-year-old Duch who reigned over his secret prison and who made these annotations in red ink some thirty years ago, seems to have little in common with the elderly Kaing Guek Eav who appears in court today. He may be a manipulative old man, and he's certainly hiding things, but he's not a threat.

Duch wants to convince the court that, under his authority, torture was at least practiced with a certain amount of objectivity: “I wouldn't say that torture was common. It was carried out only when necessary.”

It's true that one of the principal interrogators that worked for Duch, Mam Nai, wrote in his copious notes that putting greater emphasis on torture than on politics and propaganda was an “erroneous position.” Mam Nai, a former teacher and a resolute and conscientious subordinate, took notes during the training sessions organized by Duch. To carry out a good interrogation, he wrote, the first step is political pressure, whereas “torture is a complementary measure.”

The fact remains that we don't know how systematic the torture was. All we know for sure is that it happened abundantly.

“It's impossible to know how much torture was used and it's quite possible that some confessions reached a conclusion deemed satisfactory with minimal or almost no torture,” concludes Chandler.

In 1976, S-21 was moved to the Ponhea Yat High School and Tuol Sleng School, says Chandler, to conceal its existence from the many Chinese advisors then in Phnom Penh. (It is now the site of the Genocide Museum.)

Secrecy: nothing was better maintained than secrecy. So precious was secrecy to the Khmer Rouge leadership that for a long time the Party's very existence was kept hidden, and the name of Brother Number One, Pol Pot, wasn't divulged until more than a year after the 1975 victory, and then only discreetly.

“I was instructed to share nothing with my colleagues,” remembers Prak Khan. “I was told to keep everything secret. Each of us had to keep things secret. We were supposed to look after only those things that concerned us, or else we would be reported.”

Duch taught his staff that secrecy was the very soul of their mission and that, without it, their work made no sense. Guards and interrogators were not authorized to communicate with other units. Merely having contact with the outside world was deemed suspicious. Secrecy was an obsession, the Party's alpha and omega. It was also a formidable instrument of control that, like everything else in Democratic Kampuchea, eventually imposed its own insane logic over all other lines of reasoning. The systematic execution of prisoners at S-21 was in large part due to the absolute imperative of keeping the prison secret. Due to secrecy becoming of utmost importance, it was decided that nobody could get out alive. And if someone were arrested by mistake, then the secrecy of the institution took precedence over that man's life.

Then there was the fear. Nothing was more widespread than fear. In court, the prosecutor doesn't like it when the defense team emphasizes the atmosphere of terror that reigned over the country at the time. He worries that it's too easy an excuse for the defendant, who, he says, freely chose the path that led to his crimes and who enthusiastically organized the execution of his people.

Nevertheless, under the regime, the threat of annihilation hovered over everyone, as those who worked at S-21 knew better than anyone. Most of the staff working at the prison complex was recruited from a single division of the Army of Democratic Kampuchea, the 703. Both of Duch's deputies, Hor and Nun Huy, were from Division 703, as was his predecessor, Nath. The day the division—like so many others before it—fell from grace, Duch did some housecleaning. Nath's life ended in the prison he used to run. His wife followed him in death. Nun Huy, the third-in-command at the prison after Duch and Hor, was wiped out in December 1978, along with his wife and children, a month before the Vietnamese troops entered the city. Hor, Duch's number two, was also on the hot seat, guilty of having compromised the interrogation of a high-ranking Party official: “The secretary of Division 703 was eliminated first. Then his subordinates were placed under the upper echelon's supervision. They couldn't avoid being purged. It was only a matter of time. That was the process.”