The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Long before the Khmer Rouge, some twenty years before Democratic Kampuchea came into existence, when Duch was still a schoolboy, the philosopher Raymond Aron wrote a scrupulous analysis warning of the chimera of good intentions. He wrote in The Opium of Intellectuals (1957):

  The idolaters of history cause more and more intellectual and moral havoc, not because they are inspired by good or bad sentiments, but because they have wrong ideas. [ . . . ] The essence of a political regime is found not in the principles it proclaims, nor in the ideas it calls its own, but in the life that it gives its people.

  In 2009, there are no anti-Communist activists using Duch’s trial to substantiate their warnings of the dangers of Communism; this is a given. Rather, Duch’s trial seems to interest mostly those old Marxists who have more or less kept the faith. They come primarily, it seems, to continue arguing among themselves. Revolution is a drug that lasts, with its promise of romance and excitement and its intellectual distance from the tedium of reform. Marxism is the opium of intellectuals, wrote Aron, just as Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses. It is Westerners who will write history in Phnom Penh, just as they did in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and just as they did at the temples at Angkor. Some of them see in Duch’s trial a tacit retelling of their own broken dreams.

  THE CAMBODIAN GOVERNMENT CLOSELY MONITORS the tribunal. The state’s three highest-ranking members are themselves former Khmer Rouge officials who fled the purges and escaped across the border to Vietnam in 1977. Other important ministers and many military officers are also former revolutionaries. Nothing illustrates the atmosphere of hushed tension and ambiguity hanging over the court better than the “Jarvis Affair” that breaks out in the middle of the trial.

  Duch is in the dock talking about the policies of the Communist Party of Kampuchea when Helen Jarvis, who has been running the tribunal’s Public Affairs section from the start, is named head of Victims’ Support. Because Jarvis’s longtime Communist affiliation is no secret, the announcement causes a bit of an outcry. But the tone becomes far more strident when a political manifesto surfaces, which was written as recently as 2006 and which Jarvis signed.

  The text is titled “We Are Not Leaving the LPF!” The Leninist Party Faction (LPF) was a splinter group of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a now-defunct Australian far-left political party. The faction and the political alliance to which it belonged was a world of infighting, a place where purges and plots abounded, where people accused one another of treason and of plotting to secede, of vindictive and petty-minded fights between “comrades,” violations of Party discipline, collaboration with the enemy, and crushing insults. Its members still dreamed of being at the forefront of the Revolution and celebrated the one started under Hugo Chavez. The future of World Communism, they said, revolves around the Venezuela-Cuba axis. They respected “democratic centralism” and vilified the “international capitalist media.”

  The manifesto’s signatories were unhappy with the line held by the party leadership, because it failed to promote “the Leninist strategy of building a revolutionary party made up of Marxist cadres—the key to advancing the socialist struggle.” They went on to say that “We too are Marxists and believe that ‘the end justifies the means.’” They adopted an ambiguous position: “For the means to be justifiable, the ends must also be held to account,” but then state quite unambiguously: “In times of revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes become necessary and justified. Against the bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don’t respect their laws and their fake moral principles [sic].”

  The text, which Duch wouldn’t have found objectionable in the 1970s, had been signed by the person that the tribunal put in charge of looking after the victims of the Khmer Rouge’s revolution. As Aron wrote: “Communist faith justifies all means, Communist hope forbids acceptance of the fact that there are many roads toward the Kingdom of God, Communist charity does not even allow its enemies the right to die an honorable death.” He continues:

  The sublime end excuses the revolting means. Profoundly moralistic in regard to the present, the revolutionary is cynical in action. He protests against police brutality, the inhuman rhythm of industrial production, the severity of bourgeois courts, the execution of prisoners whose guilt has not been proved beyond doubt [ . . . ] But as soon as he decides to give his allegiance to a party which is as implacably hostile as he is himself to the established disorder, we find him forgiving, in the name of the Revolution, everything he has hitherto relentlessly denounced. The revolutionary myth bridges the gap between moral intransigence and terrorism.

  Some civil parties write of their distress at the Jarvis affair. The court’s reaction is to ride out the storm. A UN spokesperson tells the media: “Every staff member has a right to personal political views.”

  Helen Jarvis herself says little. She feels wounded by the victims’ challenge. “I have spent ten years working to establish this tribunal,” she reminds her opponents. She has written a book about it.

  In any event, the victims of Cambodia’s Communist dictatorship never organized themselves into an advocacy group. They carry very little weight.

  The storm passes. Ideas and ideology, we’re told, aren’t relevant. Jarvis keeps her job.

  But unlike Jarvis, who can dodge the media, Duch cannot dodge Judge Lavergne’s questions in the courtroom.

  “Did you believe that the end mattered, not the means? Was that the way you saw it at the time?”

  “Exactly,” replies the former Leninist.

  CHAPTER 11

  ONCE THE MIDDLE-RANKING OFFICIALS PRAK KHAN, SUOR THI, AND HIM HUY, have given their testimony, it is the turn of the lower ranks.

  One former guard wears rectangular glasses with a thin, dark frame. He parts his well-cut black hair low on one side, his hair so thick that the part is barely visible. It is so neatly trimmed that he looks like he’s wearing a wig. He is fifty-one years old, with the demeanor of a well-behaved schoolboy. Thirty-five years earlier, he served as a guard and messenger at S-21, the bottom of the ladder. He sits straight and still in his seat, and positions his forearms confidently on the armrests. He looks like he’s sitting in the electric chair. When he speaks, he purses his lips at the end of each sentence, which makes him look like a prude who’s just heard a swear word. He ends each answer by clenching his jaw, swallowing, and lengthening his neck like a turtle.

  The former guard’s brother was arrested and killed at S-21, and the witness says he was terrified that he would be, too. He says he owes his life to Him Huy, the head guard. But he levels serious accusations against Duch. Before the trial, he told investigating judges that when a prisoner’s answers weren’t clear, Duch would say to them, “Are you going to talk?” then hit them a couple of times before adding, “You’ll know soon enough.” The former guard swore it was true. He also said that Duch came to the prison almost daily.

  But in court, he plays all this down, saying that he had been “a bit excessive” in his earlier testimony. He describes to the court the severe interrogation as he remembers it.

  “When I came back from lunch, I saw Duch in a villa next to a wooden building. I saw that and it’s the truth,” he says, before swallowing and extending his neck.

  “Did you see Duch beat up the prisoner?”

  “Duch used a rattan cane. He didn’t beat him too much before I left.”

  “You saw this with your own eyes?”

  “I saw this with my own eyes because I was guarding the two-story building and that’s the truth.”

  “Did you see him torture other prisoners?”

  “No.”

  Wearing a pale lilac shirt, untucked, Duch is dressed like a member of today’s Khmer ruling class. He says he feels sorry for the witness, whose testimony is generally accurate—except, of course, for the bit implicating Duch directly in the interrogations. “My crime was indoctrinating personnel. That was my crime against those who weren’t arrested by the Angk
ar. The interrogators resorted to torture because they had to. I don’t deny that. But the guards had to do their job, not conduct interrogations.”

  Duch recognizes before the court that the witness, now a farmer, was a combatant who suffered greatly. He says he shares this man’s suffering and offers him his condolences. He sits down and carefully puts into a plastic sleeve the documents he used during his statement. He looks at the former guard before he leaves the room. Duch slides the plastic sleeve into a big red binder.

  Another rice farmer takes the stand. He’s wearing the gray suit jacket in which a succession of witnesses has now appeared, each of them swimming in it. Whenever he doesn’t understand a question, he grins. A French advisor to Prince Sihanouk wrote that the Khmer smile

  [C]onceals brilliantly the true feelings of men. Throughout the Far East, the smile is the polite mask from behind which people watch one another, congratulate one another or fight one another. But in Cambodia, this mask is more often than not one of pleasant-enough and ambiguous indifference that people hold up between themselves and others. One should never mistake a smile for an invitation to start a conversation. On the contrary, a smile signals the worry and embarrassment provoked by an outsider. The smile, in Cambodia, indicates that one has neither the intention to answer indiscreet questions nor to ask them.*

  The farmer leans toward the microphone, his eyes twinkling. He has the easy good cheer of one so unaccustomed to the pomp and ostentation of the rich and powerful that they cannot intimidate him. He was fifteen years old when he was sent first to the S-24 reeducation camp, then to S-21, where he worked as a guard in Building B. He entertains the court with his naive, transparent answers and the smiles with which he punctuates them; a murmur of appreciation rises in the public gallery. The witness knows little and remembers even less. He neither saw nor met Duch, and he has forgotten what he told the investigating judges only last year. He is illiterate—or, at least, he was at the time of the crimes—yet the court asks him to confirm whether the prison rules and regulations were posted in each cell. He initially told investigators that he had witnessed numerous rapes. Now he says he saw none.

  Duch explains that the witness was exactly the type of person he had sought to recruit: a young, uneducated, mentally and politically pliable member of the “base people.”† In court, the farmer comes across as a useless witness.

  Criminal investigations work in mysterious ways: prestigious international courts do not keep count of the sensational statements made in confidence during the investigation and then publicly disavowed at trial. If, in the absence of documentary evidence, a court must issue a judgment based solely on testimony, then that judgment will often be little more than an act of faith. The more trials you follow, the more you disbelieve everyone: witnesses, the police, judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and victims.

  The abundance of documentary evidence at Duch’s trial makes it tempting to fall back on the principle set by the defendant himself: where there is no documentary evidence, there is reasonable doubt; and if there is doubt, you must not convict. The abundance of archival material takes pressure off of everyone’s conscience: there’s no need to believe in justice in order to form an opinion about it.

  WHEN A CERTAIN LY HOR takes the stand and claims to be a survivor of S-21, Duch immediately makes it clear that he doesn’t believe him.

  Once a Khmer Rouge soldier, Ly Hor tells the court how, after his arrest, he was transferred from S-21 to S-24 (which never happened); that the roof over his cell was of corrugated iron (which the one at S-21 wasn’t); that he was taken out to wash every three days (even though it’s common knowledge that the prisoners were hosed down in the cells); that he was served rice (even though no prisoner at S-21 was allowed it); and so on.

  Duch smiles, leans forward over his desk, intrigued by the poor wretch testifying. The victim’s lawyer, tricked by the local NGO he works for, endures the worst day of his short career. Judge Cartwright upbraids counsel for the civil parties for their lack of preparation, and laments the consequences for those put on the stand. Judge Lavergne is furious about the “utter vagueness” of the documents relating to someone called Hor, from a certain “Bureau 43-44,” which are supposed to prove that the witness was indeed a prisoner at S-21. The lawyer has no answers. Nor does the prosecutor.

  But Duch does.

  Off the top of his head, he remembers that in one of the case documents—“Document B-57, Appendix 003”—Bureau 44 appears to be that of the Army Division 703. As for Bureau 43, he adds, no documentation exists. He hazards a guess, but is careful to say that there’s no proof. The court adjourns. After the break, the prosecutor returns with new documents, ones that Duch has never seen. He asks to see them. He flips through them, then embarks on a fascinating reconstruction of the possible path of one Ear Hor, the S-21 prisoner as whom Ly Hor has tried to pass himself off.

  With his arm folded behind his hip, Duch looks almost professorial as he carries out a thorough analysis of the archives. He has already found in them the prisoner’s date of execution. He cites the legal classifications by heart. He notes that three years separate the birth dates of Ly Hor and Ear Hor. And you only have to compare Ly Hor’s document filing for civil action with Ear Hor’s written confession, says Duch, for the fabrication to become blindingly obvious. “I can see that the handwriting is 50 percent different. Comrade Ear Hor and Mr. Ly Hor are therefore two different people. Finally, Ear Hor is dead and I will do nothing which may offend his soul.”

  Duch the super cop, whose talents had long ago been singled out by his Khmer Rouge masters, has just given a brilliant performance at his own trial. The court has wasted the day on one witness’s fabrications. With just a few words, Duch has generated a consensus and in the process done himself the favor of coming across as more respectful of the victims than those who speak on their behalf.

  Duch has an excellent grasp of the documentation and can find his way through it with a mathematician’s precision. Everyone is amazed when he cites without notes the classification reference for such and such a document, or the page to which he is referring. Duch compiles, compares, checks, and memorizes the relevant documents. It’s true that, when working with the various lists from S-21 (some of which overlap), Duch reaches conclusions that any diligent and painstaking accountant could have reached. But it’s at this point that Duch adds something that only he can bring: an intimate knowledge of the institution that generated all of this data.

  Duch’s trial is at this point the only one taking place at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Just four more Khmer Rouge leaders are scheduled to be tried after him. This means that many victims won’t share in this rare moment of justice, for the simple, unbearable reason that their prison or their cooperative or their dyke or their canal wasn’t one of the sites selected during the investigations. Courts such as the ECCC, that render symbolic justice, are faced with the bitter task of choosing which victims will have their day in court and which won’t. For Ly Hor, the lure proved irresistible.

  “When I heard about Duch’s trial, I became determined to be part of it. I suffered so much under the Khmer Rouge,” he says.

  Another alleged survivor of S-21 takes the stand. He is a handsome man with hair cut short, a round face, and laughing eyes. His eyebrows are slightly arched, and his lips are very pronounced and delicately outlined, not unlike those of the great Khmer king Jayavarman VII, whose face watches over his people from the four corners of the famous Bayon Temple. The man on the stand has a calm voice and keeps his eyes fixed dead ahead.

  He remembers being sent to S-21 in 1976. He remembers being given a little fish in his food ration, being let out of the cell to wash, and being sent out to work in the vegetable garden. Again, you would think that anyone who knows how S-21 worked would have immediately unmasked this witness. But the prospect of parading before the court a survivor unknown to anyone for thirty years proves too great a temptation for the NGOs,
and their discernment fails them.

  DC-Cam, the Document Center of Cambodia, was founded in the mid-1990s by Yale University. Within a decade, it had built Phnom Penh’s largest archive on the history of the Khmer Rouge. All of the S-21 archives are stored there, and when the tribunal was established in 2006, it proved an indispensable resource. But it was DC-Cam, perhaps swept up in the frenzy whirling around the tribunal, that “found” the daring substitute Ly Hor. Not to be outdone, the NGO Lawyers Without Borders produces its own improbable survivor.

  Faced with such fecklessness, Duch hardly needs lawyers. His opponents turn out to be his best defense. Even worse, they embarrass some of the victims. Judge Cartwright is furious, her face locked in a scowl. Judge Lavergne looks at his fingers, then around the room, careful to avoid meeting the eyes of the reserve judge, though she’s obviously as stunned as he is. The spectators who remain in the public gallery have—wisely—gotten unruly, and present a more genial scene than the one taking place in the courtroom: some villagers have noticed that they can see themselves in the background on the screens. They smile and chuckle and joke around. The air smells of Tiger Balm. There’s a palpable buzz, for this is no ordinary session: it’s a big day in court! Though there’s little doubt that the poor fool on the stand suffered physically and psychologically at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, it wasn’t at S-21, and no one bothers listening to him any longer. He may not have been locked up in Duch’s prison, but he is nevertheless one of Cambodia’s millions of victims. Sometimes, he tells the court, pus still oozes from his left ear.

  Next, an ex–Khmer Rouge soldier limps into the courtroom. He comes across as a humble and gentle man, despite his eyes sunken into their sockets, his hollow cheeks, and his sharp, angular face. The soldier helped to clear Phnom Penh of its inhabitants in April 1975. The following year, he was arrested during one of the many purges in the Northern Zone. He was reinstated as a radio operator, then rearrested in 1978. He gives a flawless description of his detention at S-21. He wasn’t photographed upon arrival, he says, but all his other details match. Unlike those of the fake survivors, his story contains no credibility gaps. That is, not until he describes being taken away to be executed. “It was probably the night of January 6, 1979,” he says, because he could hear gunfire. He was blindfolded and made to kneel beside a ditch. He told himself that his hour had come. Someone hit him in the ribs and he tumbled unconscious into the hole. Then, at around two in the morning, he came to. He didn’t know where he was. He felt dizzy, but managed to free himself from the rope binding him. He could smell blood. He climbed out of the ditch. There were no guards in the vicinity. It was only later, he said, that he realized that the place was Choeung Ek.