The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  He walked for an hour before lying down on a tree trunk. He was starving and tried to chew on a banana stem. He found his way to the river, where he put a trunk in the water, lay down on it, and pushed off the bank. He drifted downstream for two or three days before reaching the place known in Phnom Penh as the Japanese Bridge. Members of the army that had just driven out the Khmer Rouge found and rescued him. He remembers that there was still intense bombing going on. He was ill but safe.

  The witness speaks in even tones for almost an hour without pause, barely moving, his eyes riveted to the floor. Thirty years after the fact, like some magician pulling a rabbit from his top hat, the human rights association ADHOC (along with Lawyers Without Borders, who represent the witness in court) has just presented to the world the only survivor of the killing fields of Choeung Ek, and the sole survivor whose violent interrogation Duch would have personally attended.

  But there’s a problem, and it lies in all the other statements the miracle witness made before Duch’s trial: they differ substantially from what he tells the court. When he is confronted with this, the ex-soldier’s memory suddenly fails him, even though he remembered the tiniest details when telling his tale to the court. A murmur rises in the gallery. The public, made up mostly of peasants, has a sharp ear for nonsense.

  “This is utterly different from what you have previously told us,” snaps the presiding judge, determined to expose this miraculous survivor.

  The witness, suddenly nervous, begins to blink rapidly. He confesses that he had visited S-21 in 2008, during a trip organized by ADHOC, with the purpose of looking for the “biographies” of his cousin and his cousin’s wife. That’s when he first learned about Choeung Ek—the place that he claims never to have revisited since he dodged death there all those years ago.

  Now it is the judges who want to try a little police work. All the documentary evidence—the lists of those arrested and executed, the thousands of confessions, the photographs, the biographies—constitutes the vast terrain on which they play a kind of legal scavenger hunt. Bit by bit, each player has been drawn into Duch’s well-oiled machine. He has shown them the way, has demonstrated to them the efficiency of his system. Everyone knows how to use it now; everyone knows how to cross-check facts. Digital technology makes it even easier, and the players find the game irresistible. Another false “survivor” is unmasked. Though she’s loath to do it, his lawyer must beat a hasty retreat. She finds others to blame: “The human rights organizations collect the testimonies. The work is done by young, untrained investigators. They are amateurs using whatever means they have available.”

  CHAPTER 12

  AS SOON AS THE VIETNAMESE FORCES THAT TOPPLED POL POT DISCOVERED S-21, they made a propaganda film about it. Shot in early January 1979, the film shows the blackened and bloated corpse of one of the last victims of the regime’s secret police—a Khmer Rouge soldier, according to Duch. The body is lying on an iron bed. Behind the bed is a small desk with a typewriter on it; then a shot of the courtyard, where crows are landing by a decomposing body. The army reporter’s voice announces, “We found these children in an office.” Three children appear in the frame: one is wearing a white shirt and a cap, two are wearing the black uniform of the Khmer Rouge. One gives the camera a hard, challenging look. The camera zooms in for a close-up and you notice that “he” is wearing earrings. Another looks up toward the ceiling. The camera pans right and we see a half-naked baby lying on a mat. The commentator tells us that the children are “paralyzed with fear and hunger.”

  Norng Champhal is the oldest of the children found at S-21. He was nine years old at the time. Seven months later, he testified to the people’s court set up by Cambodia’s new government in order to judge the crimes of the “Pol Pot–Ieng Sary Clique” and to assert its own legitimacy in the process. The forces that deposed Pol Pot’s Communist regime were themselves Communist. The Soviet Union and China fought their proxy war in Vietnam and Cambodia, and things can get confusing when Communists put other Communists on trial. The Vietnamese-sponsored court denounced the Khmer Rouge regime as having been backed by “reactionary forces” in Beijing. Cambodia’s Maoists were reviled as “counterrevolutionaries,” “imperialist lackeys,” even “fascists.”

  Several witnesses called to testify before the court ended their depositions with a jarring cry of “Long live the revolutionary forces!” In a few short months, little Champhal had already had enough time to learn to use the term “Polpotists.” In his testimony at the time, he described in extraordinary detail what he saw and experienced at S-21:

  Each time Polpotists got angry, they beat us mercilessly. They hit us on the head. They kicked us in the back when we did not go quickly. Once, after we heard gunshots, my brother and I hid behind a heap of clothes taken from the prisoners. At that moment, I saw they were killing a boy a little older than me. He was bashed against a tree beside the kitchen. I did not know where they threw the body of the boy. [ . . . ] While I was in the prison, I saw the most atrocious tortures by the Polpotists against prisoners. They burned an iron stick and used it to perforate the noses of the prisoners. The women prisoners were plunged into water tanks. Some days before their departure, they showed me a photo of my disemboweled mother. [ . . . ] Once, after lunch, I saw five Polpotists taking a prisoner wearing white knee-breeches and a blue shirt to the gallows. After knotting [the rope around] his neck, they pulled up the other end of the rope in a way that the poor prisoner rose in the air. Then they loosened the rope and let the prisoner fall down from a high gallows. The victim suffered this sort of torture for the second time, before his body was dragged to a cell beside the electroshock room. After some time, they brought out another prisoner, who had on only knee-breeches. They killed him in the same manner. After his death, I saw his tongue [fall] out of his mouth. And then they led the third, who went slowly, because his hands were busy holding up his unbraced knee-breeches. They beat and kicked him in the back to make him go quickly. He was then hung up in the air. As his knee-breeches slipped down to his feet, the Polpotists burst into gleeful laughter.*

  When the liberating forces found them in S-21, Champhal and the other children were taken to an orphanage. Champhal was then adopted by Keo Chanda, an important member of the new ruling power, which comprised Khmer Communists opposed to Pol Pot who had returned in Vietnamese tanks. By coincidence, it turned out that Keo Chanda, the minister of information and propaganda at the time, was also president of the People’s Revolutionary Court, in which young Norng Champhal had testified. The little boy was introduced to Hun Sen, the young and ambitious minister of foreign affairs, who went on to become prime minister in 1985 and who has held on to the post ever since. Norng Champhal also met the real survivors of S-21, including Vann Nath. We don’t really know what became of the child survivor after Keo Chanda died at the end of the 1980s. Everyone who has studied S-21 knows of his existence; some met him in the early 2000s. Yet when the ECCC was established a few years later, its investigators showed little interest in him. Indeed, it seemed as though everyone had forgotten about little Norng Champhal, whose testimony as a ten-year-old had been so sensational at the show trial of 1979.

  Everywhere from Kigali to Phnom Penh, from Sarajevo to Baghdad, you will find men and women who have devoted their lives to bringing to justice those responsible for mass murders. Without their drive and commitment, they would never have the energy to carry out their work as activists, researchers, curators of memory, victim advocates and unwavering enemies of state violence. One can only admire the steadfast, single-minded, and pure-hearted toil undertaken by these enemies of impunity. And without the determination—the absolute faith, as Duch would put it—with which they stand guard against the rest of the world’s propensity to forget, and against the impure pragmatism of the powerful, there would be no archived record of these crimes, nor any hope of retribution.

  That such tribunals exist at all is thanks in part to the efforts of people who, for reasons know
n only to themselves, have dedicated their lives to pursuing justice. And when the trials for which they have labored in obscurity for years or even decades at last take place, these people often find themselves blinded by the glare of the media and public opinion, and unsettled by all the money that suddenly appears. It can prove to be a difficult moment. When a court is established, it is recognition of their work, but it also threatens to sideline them. For the international lawyers who swarm to the court in order to dispense justice in a matter about which they know nothing, these men and women are vital experts and mediators. The lawyers immediately reach out to them. At first, these specialists are pampered, praised, and heeded. Then, as the members of the court gain in prestige and become increasingly autonomous, things begin to turn, and the relationship between those who have dedicated their lives to the cause and those for whom it is merely a career move ends in disenchantment, embitterment, and divorce. In the end, such courts almost invariably disappoint those who have invested their heart and soul to bringing the truth to light.

  Among themselves, activists can be a hard-hearted bunch. Theirs is a world riven by bitter quarrels, scandal-mongering, jealous slander, and vindictive scheming. Taken one by one, they are each remarkable individuals; but when they are forced to share the crushing memories, they become carried away with the passion of old lovers. The world of guardians of memory and righters of wrongs, whether they’re from Cambodia or elsewhere, is neither virtuous nor particularly kind. To the activists themselves, it can sometimes seem overrun by enemies.

  In Phnom Penh, the collaboration between DC-Cam and the judiciary began cordially enough. But as the court started to make its presence felt, the NGO feared losing its preeminent position, and conflicts arose between the two institutions. Two years later, by the time the tribunal was ready to try Duch, its relationship with DC-Cam had degenerated into one of thinly veiled hostility.

  Just before the trial opened, DC-Cam announced with much fanfare that it had found a child survivor from S-21. Norng Champhal made his appearance. Yet, contrary to what some were claiming, he had not just been “found.”

  A press conference was convened; the survivor appeared, now thirty-nine years old. More drama: Norng Champhal had missed by a mere two days the court’s application deadline for inclusion in the trial as a civil plaintiff. DC-Cam asked the court to take into consideration his exceptional and moving case. The prosecutor stepped up to the plate and called Norng Champhal’s testimony “essential,” even though he was only a child at the time.

  Three decades earlier, Cambodia’s new, post–Khmer Rouge rulers had used the boy as a propaganda tool. Now, in the media uproar that flared up before Duch’s trial, Norng Champhal again found himself a pawn in a game the stakes of which were far above his head.

  While all this was going on, DC-Cam also claimed that it had obtained a never-released Vietnamese film shot at S-21. The prosecutor’s office wasn’t told about it until four days before the trial’s preliminary hearing. The tussle between special-interest groups and egos intensified—all on the victims’ behalf, of course. This was not a new phenomenon, nothing is new. But the demagoguery and hypocrisy in the air that day left behind a lasting sense of unease.

  The judges didn’t cave to the pressure, and Norng Champhal wasn’t permitted to assert his victim’s rights in court. He is now, however, called as a witness.

  Norng Champhal has kept an almost adolescent voice. He has the brown skin of rural Khmers. He keeps his eyes glued to the ground. Duch slips on his spectacles, reads a document, looks up, removes his glasses, and takes a long look at the witness. The defendant is leaning back in his chair, in that relaxed posture he sometimes adopts when he’s not particularly interested in the proceedings. Norng Champhal is talking about his mother being photographed upon entering the prison. He starts crying. Duch sits up straight.

  Norng Champhal’s 2009 deposition contains none of the terrible atrocities that he described in 1979. He describes the painter’s studio, the wretched gruel, mosquitoes, gunshots, the hiding place beneath the pile of clothes, his liberation by the Vietnamese troops, being sent to the orphanage. He tells how he saw mutilated corpses abandoned on iron bed-frames and how he fled in fear. There’s nothing that isn’t already known in his deposition; nothing of substance, from the court’s point of view, except for the miraculous story of a handful of children who somehow ended up at S-21 on January 1, 1979, two days before the prison was entirely emptied of inmates. Some prison staff took care of them, more or less. Incredibly, the children survived the final annihilation before being rescued six days later, when the city was liberated. In court, nobody challenges Norng Champhal’s 1979 testimony. Nor do any of the judges, prosecutors, or lawyers call into question his more-recent interview with DC-Cam in which he claimed, erroneously, to have been interned in S-21 for “three or four months” before the liberation.

  It’s probably better this way.

  During the adjournment, the defense team holds an agitated meeting. Duch seems especially nervous, his movements quick and sharp. He keeps his fingers pressed together, as though his former life as a soldier has left him forever a quick snap of the arm away from a salute. He gesticulates emphatically. His mangled left hand seems stuck to him like a flipper, which only underscores his agitation. The black robes flock around him; he gives his instructions.

  Duch first thinks that Champhal’s father hadn’t been killed at S-21. Then, after consulting the documentation, he concedes that Champhal’s father was killed at the prison, after all. Then, a few days after Norng Champhal has given his testimony and his mother’s “biography” is finally produced in court, Duch admits to the truth contained in the archives.

  Every now and then, while giving testimony, Norng Champhal gives a furtive sideways glance. He regularly weeps, his tears symptoms of a distant and irretrievable trauma pervading a life that others have partially rebuilt for him. What part of his suffering comes from being an orphan? Which of his woes bears testament to the troubles that unscrupulous adults sowed in him? Eventually, a stained veil will be drawn over this bitter episode of Duch’s trial. But what it has made clear is that the officials at the People’s Court of 1979 were not the only ones to stage the kind of tasteless scenes usually associated with show trials.

  CHAPTER 13

  TO BE A TORTURER USUALLY MEANS TO BE ON THE “RIGHT” SIDE OF A DICTATORSHIP. Yet even those who stood to gain from the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities found that quality of life is a relative thing. No one in Democratic Kampuchea was allowed to visit their parents. No one retained custody over their own children. Children under six were entrusted to older women. Those over six lived according to the collectivist mold, in which they were supposed to spend the rest of their lives.

  Enjoying oneself was out of the question. Falling in love was considered bourgeois. Married life was limited to seeing each other one day out of every ten. Couples avoided spending quality time together. All marriages had to have the Party’s blessing. Sex outside of marriage was a criminal offense. Communism adhered to a strict puritanical ideology.

  Duch weighed forty-nine kilos at the time. He was entitled to a small bowl of rice and two dishes a day, and he points out that his was a privileged diet. One former staff member describes how he was so hungry he resorted to eating the fake medicine that the painter Bou Meng described as rabbit pellets. Every three or four months, Duch went to a place that served Chinese beer. Going more often would have aroused suspicion.

  To ensure better control over staff and to keep the security perimeter around S-21 completely sealed, the facility was run as a family affair. The five members of the female interrogation team, for example, were the wives of male S-21 interrogators. Their team leader was married to Hor, S-21’s second-in-command.

  The wife of another staff member worked in the kitchen. This system made internal purges easier to carry out. Whenever a staff member fell from grace, his wife and children could easily be “resolved.”

 
Duch met his wife in 1974. They married in December 1975, four months after the creation of S-21.

  “I was a cadre of Democratic Kampuchea. The woman I married was a member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. I wasn’t allowed to marry any ‘April Seventeeners,’” he says, referring to those doomed souls who only came under the Khmer Rouge’s authority on the day of the victory of the Revolution, April 17, 1975.

  Their first child was born in April 1977 and a second in December 1978, three weeks before the prison closed and Duch’s family fled Phnom Penh.

  When the children were born, they were children of the Angkar. Let me be clear: that doesn’t mean that the children of the Angkar had to spy on and denounce their parents; it meant that they had to adhere to the Communist ideology and be loyal to the Angkar. All revolutionaries wished for their children to love and join the Revolution. S-21 was part of the Revolution. I didn’t think this meant that my children would become police officers like their father, but we did want them to follow the revolutionary line. The Party considered the children of cadres or peasants property of the Angkar. The Angkar was their parent. Whatever their status, they were children of the Angkar. And at the time I saw it that way, too.