The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Denouncing accomplices was crucial; Chandler reminds us that “you can’t conspire by yourself.” A conspiracy needs coconspirators. Every secret police in every Communist dictatorship—and in non-Communist ones, too—has compelled people to denounce others; everyone drew up imaginary lists. In this regard, S-21 broke no new ground.

  The court openly hates the very idea of denunciation. Given that at S-21 thousands were tortured and mercilessly killed, the court vehemently rejects the validity of the denunciations obtained there. But in other circumstances, the international legal establishment can be more accommodating. Mandatory denunciation (though obtained without torture) is a crucial element in many confessions made before international tribunals and, in these circumstances, lawyers find that their consciences remain quite untroubled by it. On the contrary, they actively encourage it. A defendant who pleads guilty to a UN tribunal is told to denounce his accomplices if he wants to win over the prosecutor and earn the judges’ leniency. He isn’t forced to name names under torture, of course, but if he wants to make the most of his guilty plea and obtain a lighter sentence, then he has no real choice but to comply. Rwanda’s community courts, known as Gacaca courts, which have been so misguidedly praised over the past ten years, feed off of mass denunciations. Though they don’t torture people, snitching is inextricably linked to confessions in Gacaca courts. The result is an all-consuming, rampant, and poisonous judicial operation that has produced more than a million suspects. Throughout Rwanda, the pressure to name one’s accomplices has given rise to slander so great it would not be out of place in the archives of S-21. “Denunciation is another form of lying,” François Bizot, a survivor of imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge, says in court. International justice, it seems, only hates lying in certain circumstances.

  EXTERMINATION CAMPAIGNS ALL HAVE one absurdly equitable moment: they always end up devouring their own members. The concentric circles of those condemned to die contract with each round of killing, and new, increasingly restrictive criteria are established until the killing machine holds in its sights its own most fearful servants and greatest champions. At S-21, some prisoners denounced Son Sen—Duch’s “master,” the founder of S-21 and head of the Khmer Rouge security apparatus—saying he was working for the Vietnamese. Some even named the powerful and much-feared leader Ta Mok as one of those cancerous enemies to be excised. One prisoner said a woman called Khieu Ponnary was a CIA agent. In the margin, Duch wrote, “Whose wife is she?”

  Khieu Ponnary was Pol Pot’s wife.

  Duch himself was implicated in the confessions of at least two prisoners: that of his former teacher who had introduced him to the Revolution, and that of his former boss, Brother Number Five, Vorn Vet. A lawyer for the civil parties asks Duch why he suffered no consequences. Duch listens to the question, leaning back slightly in his chair. The teacher’s accusations were weak, he says, because they were counterrevolutionary allegations dating from before the maquis. In other words, they were no longer relevant. “As for Vorn Vet, everyone knew that I had been in his debt. He wrote down my name. I changed nothing because people would’ve said that I opposed it. If I was to die, then so be it. I survived because I remained loyal. I survived because I was honest with them.”

  By the end of 1978, people increasingly close to Duch were being killed. Duch says that he felt “hopeless” and that he simply awaited his turn. He emptied his prison of its last inmates on January 3, 1979. After that, he says, he felt like he “was waiting to die.”

  “If Vietnam hadn’t invaded Cambodia, Son Sen would probably have fallen,” says David Chandler.

  Had the Angkar eliminated Son Sen, Duch would have been next, along with his wife and children. His loyal deputies, Mam Nai and Pon, would have followed soon after, all of them dots on the same “line” of traitors, and instead of being on the docket today, Duch’s name would be just another on the unfathomably long list of victims.

  CHAPTER 9

  EUPHEMISM IS THE VERNACULAR OF MASS MURDER. Under Pol Pot, the regime didn’t kill people, it “resolved” them, or else it “withdrew” them from their work or combat units. The regime “destroyed” or “smashed” people, depending on how you translate the Khmer farming term komtech: to reduce to a thousand pieces or, according to the translation adopted by the court, to smash.

  “Resolve, smash, execute—they all mean the same thing. A person was executed and buried,” says Duch.

  Revolutions are plagued by such lies, duplicities, and dissimulations. The preamble to the Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea, for example, makes the following lofty, Promethean statement of purpose:

  Whereas the entire Kampuchean people and the entire Kampuchean Revolutionary Army desire an independent, unified, peaceful, neutral, non-aligned, sovereign Kampuchea, enjoying territorial integrity, a national society informed by genuine happiness, equality, justice, and democracy without rich or poor and without exploiters or exploited; a society in which all live harmoniously in great national solidarity and join forces to do manual labor together and increase production for the construction and defense of the country.

  All this was just “une façade,” says Duch in French, intended to “disguise the dictatorship.”

  Anyone who wanted to be a Party member was required to adhere to ten conditions. These, too, were a sham, according to Duch, designed to keep people out. You had to have:

  A solid revolutionary position within the Party line

  A solid revolutionary position within the Party’s proletarian ideology

  A solid revolutionary position on internal Party solidarity and unity

  A solid revolutionary position within the decisions, leadership, and work of the Party

  A solid revolutionary position in maintaining the vigilance and secrecy of the Party and defending revolutionary forces

  A solid revolutionary position in maintaining the independence, autonomy, self-reliance, and internal control of the Party

  A solid revolutionary position in making and controlling revolutionary biographies and revolutionary self-criticism

  A solid revolutionary position on class

  A solid revolutionary position on clean life morals and on politics

  The potential to self-edify and to be receptive to future leadership

  In Duch’s eyes, however, the regime’s fundamental document remains the statutes of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

  It was a document I feared so much that I had to constantly reread it. We had to measure our own philosophy against the statutes. I may not have followed Revolutionary Flag [the Party magazine] perfectly, but I adhered to its statutes to the letter. I worked very hard to uphold them, because they were the measure the regime used to decide whether you lived or died.

  The Party considers Marxism-Leninism to be the foundation of its vision and the guide for all of its actions.

  Based on this principle, the Communist Party of Kampuchea absolutely resists and fights idealism, empiricism, bookish science, and reformism.

  The Party fights in absolute terms the diseases of isolationism, authoritarianism, militarism, mandarinism, and bureaucratism. At the same time the Party is also opposed to lagging behind the masses.

  When I discussed the trial with young people born after S-21 was shut down, I found it telling and ironic to see the bewildered expression that this Marxist gibberish brought to their faces. Even the Cambodian court interpreters regularly had trouble understanding what was being said. The language of Marxism seems completely foreign to them now, jargon from another age. Words once familiar to everyone have become unfamiliar and hazy today.

  Though Judge Lavergne experienced the Cold War, he was only nineteen when the Khmer Rouge fell from power, and he is wary of the regime’s more baffling statements.

  “What does the struggle against ‘bookish science’ mean?” he asks.

  Duch tries to clarify as best he can. “The word ‘dogmatism’ might be more accurate,” he says.

  We also used t
he term “dogmatism.” It is based on the whole of Leninist theory. The former Soviet Union had a working class, but that wasn’t the case in Cambodia. We had no industrial working class. So we had to control the peasant class, because if we had waited for a working class to emerge, then it would’ve meant that we were being dogmatic. Therefore, we did not exactly follow Marxism-Leninism.

  Cambodia’s Communists intended to go faster and do things better than their Bolshevik and Maoist predecessors. They saw no need to wait for Cambodian capitalism to develop, nor even for a proletariat to form. They abolished money. They imposed radical agrarian reforms on the country. They decreed wildly excessive rice production quotas. Business was conducted by the whip and bayonet. And through it all, the Khmer Rouge leadership concerned itself more with eliminating those who stood in its way—or were simply born to the wrong parents in the wrong place—than with managing production. After all, the regime needed to find someone to blame for the catastrophic failure of its economic policies, and for the famine that ensued.

  Expert witness Craig Etcheson points out that Khmer Rouge district leaders, in the reports they telegrammed to the Central Committee, devoted on average half a page to economic development, another half to production figures, and five pages to the hunt for the enemy within. This obsession with the enemy spread throughout the country and infected every level of authority. The exhausting and endless hunt for traitors sucked dry all of Cambodia’s energy and talent—and S-21 was at its very heart.

  The Party must protect the revolution as much as possible from any action or trick conducted by an enemy in any direct, indirect, open, or secret way whose aim is to destroy the Party by all possible means. All Angkar Party organizations and every Party member must always be good, clean, and pure, in politics, mentality, and command, permanently, through a clean and pure biography, consecutively and constantly.

  We had to be eternally vigilant in order to distinguish our friends from our enemies. We tried to prevent our superiors from being labeled left- or right-wing. Otherwise, it could’ve led to trouble for us. That was the core principle, and one of the conditions you had to meet before being admitted to the Party. We fought hard, but our enemies were legion. I didn’t know that the Party’s intention was to abolish civilization and humanity.

  “Did the party purge people who became or proved to be too extreme? Or was a good leader somebody, first and foremost, who could be controlled; that is, someone who could be counted on to do what he was asked as much as possible?” Judge Lavergne asked.

  “The good leaders were those who did not act excessively, but did not make mistakes, and completed what had been assigned. So that was the main purpose: we had to make sure to follow the instructions for each assignment we received.”

  When a person was arrested, he or she necessarily became the enemy, and the enemy had to be systematically eliminated. By this brutal but effective logic of simply presuming suspects to be guilty, the Khmer Rouge ensured that its henchmen didn’t flinch when extorting confessions from prisoners. To this day, Duch cannot give a straight answer to the question: Was it official policy of the Communist Party to kill and crush its people?

  “Our aim was to be absolute and to defeat the enemy bit by bit. The language was slightly different, which may have led to some misunderstandings. Nowadays, lawyers call it extrajudicial killing, but at the time we called it class struggle.”

  Unlike the Party’s official documents, its propaganda demonstrates a much clearer and more direct tone. The Party magazine Revolutionary Flag demanded “absolute measures,” “zero tolerance,” and “no hesitation”:

  We have managed to wipe out 99 percent of our loathsome enemies hidden within. Now we must do the same thing throughout the entire country. Every sector must be investigated in this way. Every district must be investigated in this way. Every cooperative must be investigated in this way. The military, party officials, and the government must be examined in this way.

  Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, again and again, ceaselessly, so that our Party forces are pure, so that our governing forces at every level and in every sphere are clean at all times.

  CHAPTER 10

  DUCH’S IS THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL TRIAL CONCERNED WITH crimes committed in the name of Communism. International lawyers and human rights activists are scathing about so-called nationalist revolutions—those that openly pursue racist or xenophobic aims. No one has any trouble rejecting the movement for a Greater Serbia or denouncing Hutu Power. Yet many balk at the notion that, in a trial of the Khmer Rouge, Communism itself takes the stand as well.

  When right-wing revolutions conflate purity with race, the violent resulting ideology is cause for alarm; yet when a left-wing revolution conflates notions of purity with class, it is somehow deemed appealing. Desiring a single race of men is a hateful project; desiring a single class of men (or two, or four), a good intent.

  Before the trial started, I attended a public forum in Pailin, a Khmer Rouge stronghold during the twenty years of war that followed the overthrow of Pol Pot. The forum was set up to explain the tribunal’s purpose and how it would operate. The international prosecutor said to the crowd:

  Here we believe that they wanted to take power to change their country, to make things better. But if you commit crimes, regardless of your belief, you should be prosecuted. The reasons are only relevant for the punishment. It’s not an ideology that is on trial but people who committed crimes in the name of an ideology.

  In other words, Pol Pot was evil, not Communism. The ideal is redeemed by good moral intent. From Stalin to Mao and from Kim Il-sung to Mengistu, Hoxha, and so many others, mass murder was committed with the same moral intent. And it would seem that, for some, good intentions are a mitigating factor.

  It is in this vein that Nate Thayer, the famous journalist who obtained an exclusive interview with Pol Pot shortly before his death, gave his analysis on the Cambodian tragedy: “The Khmer Rouge wanted to modernize the country. Whatever their faults, the fact is that they weren’t motivated by selfish reasons. Pol Pot wasn’t corrupt. They were trying to lift Cambodia out of the feudalism and corruption that had brought the country to its knees.”

  Cambodia experts who would later work for the tribunal subscribed to the same idea. “Pol Pot may have had noble goals, but his methods were catastrophic,” said Craig Etcheson, who later joined the prosecutor’s office. “He accomplished the opposite of what he set out to do,” claimed Stephen Heder, a key member first of the prosecutor’s office and then that of the investigating judges.

  “We loved the people and the nation, but practical mistakes were made,” Pol Pot told Nate Thayer. “I must tell you: I did not join the struggle to murder my people,” he said. At this point, he was a weakened man, cast out of any leadership role. A silence ensued. His eyes fluttered. He stared at the camera, a faint smile on his face. “Look at me: do I look evil? Not at all,” he said, closing his eyes and waving his hand dismissively. “My conscience is clear.”

  In Pailin, the prosecutor, protected by two bodyguards, addressed the crowd. When he was finished, there stood in the middle of the meeting room a peasant, one of those humble people in whose name intellectuals directed the Revolution, and on whose behalf the tribunal says it is acting today. “You’re convicting the smoke but you must see the source of the fire. I want to know why so many people were killed.”

  The village woman who spoke next only added to the embarrassment of those in power: “This tribunal does not bring reconciliation. Justice does not exist. We have elections, but power and wealth remain in the hands of people in power. If you are not rich, you don’t get justice. Those who committed crimes are in power. They don’t admit to it. They keep the power.”

  In court, Duch insists that ideology is important. And Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two and Duch’s direct superior between 1977 and 1979, has said, “Ideology is truth. Truth comes from practicing ideology.” Of course, the political philosophy to which Nuon Chea was
referring led to some of the twentieth century’s worst totalitarian regimes, and many intellectuals who embraced it then now squirm when confronted with its history. The lawyers at Duch’s trial appear curiously sensitive to this, as though fearful of somehow being undone by it. In response, they champion a doctrine of personal responsibility and maintain a scrupulous—and convenient—stance of political neutrality. Lawyers like to say that determining why a crime occurred is not within the purview of a criminal court—yet it’s the question on everyone’s lips.

  In the end, it’s the Cambodian prosecutor who, at the start of Duch’s trial, tries to answer the common-sense question posed by the peasants of Pailin.

  For thirty years, 1.5 million victims of the Khmer Rouge have been demanding justice for their suffering. For thirty years, the survivors of Democratic Kampuchea have been waiting for accountability. For thirty years, a whole generation of Cambodians has been fighting to get answers about their families’ fates. Today, at long last, this process begins and justice will be done. You are also called upon to determine why it happened, because history demands it. The purpose of courts such as this one must be to establish the truth, unflinchingly and without fear. The ultimate goal of the Khmer Rouge was the establishment of a “pure” Communist society unlike any seen before. Some then and perhaps still now argue that the Khmer Rouge came to power with the best of intentions and that something went terribly wrong. But that is simply not true. From the very beginning, the Khmer Rouge leadership was intent on ridding itself of its perceived enemies.