The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  By early June, other things only add to the fatigue. At the start of the trial, hearing the defendant in his own words was one of its most interesting aspects; now it has grown tedious. The conduct of the proceedings has fallen apart. The presiding judge is so apathetic it’s as though no one’s in charge. The lawyers strive to outdo one another in the irrelevancy and repetition of their arguments. Duch is in control of the hearing and of his own case. He is his own prosecutor and his own defense and sometimes even his own judge. In fact, he so dominates the courtroom that it actually works against both him and his brilliant lawyer, François Roux. The sheer deftness of the master of confessions, combined with Roux’s artfulness, leads to an odd paradox: instead of being outraged by the prosecution’s ineptitude or the presiding judge’s incapacity, people resent Duch and Roux for being well-prepared and efficient.

  Then, on the day the prosecutor faints, the presiding judge at last measures up to his position. In fact, on June 22, Nil Nonn goes through a complete metamorphosis. From a weak, nonexistent, nervous, and mute president of the tribunal petrified by his own responsibility, he is suddenly transformed into an effective judge, one who even tends to be a little rash, perhaps, but who, most of the time, is reasonable and never excessive. It’s as though the long and patient effort of repetition has finally borne its fruit of wisdom. Yesterday, the judge balked at settling even a basic point of procedure; today, first he gives a clear and pertinent answer to a dissenting lawyer, then pulls the civil parties into line, then brushes aside a prosecutor, who retreats behind his desk, and finally frees himself from the defense’s domination—and all this without consulting his peers. Like anyone enjoying unrestrained power, Nil Nonn sometimes comes across as arrogant. But he is now firmly at the helm of a ship that had been in dire need of a captain.

  When Cambodians of the old generation say “Khmer Rouge,” they don’t pronounce the final consonant, the je sound. Thus, they call Pol Pot’s men “Khmer roo,” which in French can be written “Khmer Roux.” But when Nil Nonn addresses François Roux, he regularly calls him “François Rouge.” One day in the middle of July, a tired, stressed, and irritated Mr. Roux makes a number of uncharacteristic mistakes. The presiding judge doesn’t bother with either the cordial “Monsieur Roux” or the more comical “Monsieur Rouge.” With a big smile spread across his square face, framed by thick-rimmed glasses, the judge upbraids the lawyer for the first time in the course of the trial. In a cold and firm voice, he says, “Counsel for the defense, do you have anything more to say? I do not wish to be interrupted.”

  CHAPTER 15

  NOT COUNTING THE VIETNAMESE, seventy-eight foreigners died at S-21, including one “Arab,” five Indians, twenty-nine Thais, a Javanese, a Laotian, three Americans, three Frenchmen, two Australians, a Briton, and a New Zealander. But no list is complete.

  The law recognizes the overwhelming extent of the Khmer Rouge’s crime in the name it reserves for such atrocities: a crime against humanity. But it’s the non-Khmer victims who help embody the universality of it. The court pays particular attention to the Western victims. Only a handful of parents of foreign victims—all of them European or American—applied to be included as civil parties in the trial. The Arab and the Javanese remain utter mysteries. And in the end, the only foreigner whose story is told in any detail is the New Zealander Kerry Hamill. Like doubtless many others, it’s a harrowing and unbearable tale of bad luck.

  Kerry Hamill was the oldest of five siblings, four of whom were boys. In an old black-and-white photo, Kerry is on the bow of a sailing dinghy, its single square sail raised, with two other boys around his age. Sailing is their passion. In another photo, taken several years later, Kerry stands shirtless, sporting a sailor’s beard, his hair wet with seawater. The handsome, smiling youth in the photo (he was twenty-six) looks strong and healthy. It is 1978; Kerry and some friends have bought a yacht and are sailing around the world. He regularly writes to his family. For his youngest brother, Kerry’s letters are extraordinary tales of adventure. In July of 1978, Kerry sends a letter from Singapore. His girlfriend, Gail, disembarked there to spend a couple of months with her family back home. In August, Kerry and his two friends cross the Gulf of Thailand. Caught in bad weather, they seek shelter near an island. Then, out of nowhere, a boat starts shooting at them. Stuart, a Canadian, is killed. Kerry and John, an Englishman, are hauled away. The boat was a Khmer Rouge patrol.

  Kerry and John were locked up in S-21 and accused of being CIA spies. There’s little doubt that they were tortured into making their confessions and young Kerry gave up to his torturers the names of all the traitors in his network. Most remarkably, he managed to make a mockery of their macabre parody without their knowing. His handling officers, colonels, captains, and majors were all named after his friends in New Zealand. Names Kerry snitched to the Khmer Rouge included Colonel Sanders, Sergeant Pepper, and Major Ruse. His CIA instructor was called “S. Starr,” a nod to his mother, Esther. Despite being deep inside the dark and terrifying jail of the black-clad Khmer Rouge, despite the torture, the handsome sailor kept his sense of the absurd intact. After two months of incarceration, Kerry signed his “confession.” He was wiped out, along with John, shortly thereafter. His family’s pain was just beginning.

  Christmas of 1978 came and went with no news of Kerry since Singapore. Sixteen more months passed before his youngest brother, then sixteen, learned that Kerry had been captured, tortured, and murdered by Pol Pot’s regime, which by that time had been overthrown. Family arguments at home multiplied and got increasingly heated. Kerry’s second sibling, with whom he’d been very close, sank into a deep depression. Eight months after he learned of Kerry’s death, Kerry’s brother threw himself off a cliff. He was the same age that Kerry had been when he died.

  The youngest Hamill is forty-five years old when he takes the stand at Duch’s trial.

  “Duch, when you killed Kerry you killed my brother John as well,” he says, looking directly at the defendant.

  Duch gives a little nod. He is sitting straight, his forearms on the table, his eyes fixed on the witness. It’s his usual posture of respect and attentiveness.

  After losing her second son in a little over two years, Kerry’s mother rarely left her bed. Her room was like a mausoleum, says Kerry’s youngest brother. Depressed and suffering from shingles, she lost all interest in life. Kerry’s father, meanwhile, retreated into himself. He stopped going to work and soon retired. They couldn’t go on as parents.

  “Our immediate family became a little bubble, and we became very reluctant to interact with others,” says Kerry’s brother.

  For a while, the youngest brother lost himself to drinking. His schoolwork deteriorated. He couldn’t stop the images from eating away at him. He imagined Kerry seated among piles of tires, being burned alive. That’s how the Khmer Rouge erased every trace of the foreigners they killed—by burning them on street corners, though they probably killed them first. Then there’s the haunting photo from the archives of S-21: a man on the ground with his feet shackled, lying in his own blood yet propping himself up on one arm, bravely trying to raise himself as the photographer releases the shutter. The photo isn’t clear enough to give us the man’s identity. But for Kerry’s little brother, in tears, there’s little doubt: “For me, this is my gorgeous, beautiful brother Kerry Hamill at S-21,” he says. “This is the sort of image that haunted me when I was sixteen and still haunts me today. I have lost so much sleep over this image.”

  He stares at the former director of S-21. Duch sits up straight, looks at him and listens carefully.

  “Duch, at times I’ve wanted to smash you, to use your own words, in the same way that you smashed so many others. At times, I’ve imagined you shackled, starved, whipped, and beaten viciously . . . viciously,” repeats the little brother with venomous rage.

  I have imagined your scrotum electrified, your being forced to eat your own feces, being drowned, having your throat cut. I have wanted that to b
e your life, your reality. I have wanted you to suffer the way you made Kerry and so many others suffer. However, while part of me has a desire to feel that way, I am trying to let go and this trial is part of that. Today in this courtroom, I am giving you all the crushing weight of that emotion—the anger, the grief, and the sorrow. I’m placing this emotional burden on your shoulders. It is you who should bear the burden alone. From this day forward, I feel nothing toward you. To me, what you did removed you from the ranks of humanity.

  The little brother has a few more questions to ask the defendant.

  “Duch!”

  Duch immediately gets to his feet.

  “I acknowledge that you plead guilty . . .”

  Presiding Judge Nil Nonn steps in. He tells the defendant to sit down. The judge warns Kerry’s brother that he doesn’t want to hear any abusive language. He doesn’t want to hear any vengeful talk. He tells the youngest Hamill that he must put his questions to the judge, not directly to the defendant. Nil Nonn knows that some of his colleagues, unused to seeing victims of a crime participate in the perpetrator’s trial in this way, are horrified that Kerry’s little brother is allowed to say the things he does in court. “I am angry beyond words with you and what you did,” continues the younger brother after Nil Nonn’s warning, “but I acknowledge and respect your guilty plea. Your acknowledgment is a small but significant contribution to addressing the harm that you caused. You have proven to this court that you have a very good memory. Please answer this question: what do you remember of my brother?”

  “There were four Westerners,” says Duch in a slow, gentle voice,

  but I remember only a young Briton, John. He was very gentle. I did not meet Mr. Hamill. He wrote in detail his complete confession and I believed his confession. John and Kerry were executed simultaneously and their bodies had to be burned to ashes as ordered. The actual dates of the executions I cannot tell. They would be taken away and smashed after the confessions were extracted from both of them.

  Duch told investigators that he had entrusted the interrogation of Kerry and John to Pon, his favorite interrogator, who had a “good command of violence.” One night, Pon came to tell Duch how nice and polite the Englishman was. The next morning, Duch went to see for himself. Pon wanted Duch to initiate the interrogation session, but the boss wanted to watch his subordinate in action. He was also concerned about the skill of the interpreter.

  “What’s your name?” Duch asked the person who had been recruited to interpret.

  “Sarun Chon.”

  “How do you say kaun mi sampheung in English?”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “I knew then that he had all the skills,” Duch told investigators.

  It’s better to avoid imagining how the rest of the interrogation went. No doubt it was more direct than circular.

  Kerry Hamill’s youngest brother says he isn’t seeking any sort of financial restitution, which is just as well, since the court has no authority nor will to make any. But he asks Duch how he thinks he might atone for the harm he did the Hamill family.

  “The best I can do,” says Duch,

  is to get on my knees and pray for forgiveness. The victims and survivors can point a finger at me. I am not offended. It is your right and I respectfully accept it. Even if the people stone me to death, I won’t say anything; I won’t say that I am disappointed or that I want to commit suicide. I am responsible for my acts. It’s for others to choose whether they forgive me or not. I am here to accept my responsibility. I am filled with remorse for what I’ve done. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I’m not saying this as an excuse. I mean what I say.

  At that instant, I almost feel a connection between the two men. But this turns out to be just another one of those dreams that the trial abruptly shatters.

  CHAPTER 16

  IT WAS SUOR THI’S JOB TO CHECK OFF THE NAME OF EACH PERSON leaving through the prison gate. The prison clerk knew that if he made a mistake, he would be considered an enemy, and he was in a better position than most to know what became of the regime’s enemies. The gate opened just enough that no more than one prisoner at a time could pass through. Suor Thi ticked off each name on the list. The prisoners’ hands were bound, their eyes blindfolded. One by one, they were led aboard a truck parked in front of the gate. They used a chair that someone had put next to the back of the truck as a step. The truck was large enough to hold sixty people and there was a Land Rover available if more room was needed. The convoy left around six in the evening. The trip to the killing fields at Choeung Ek took about half an hour.

  No one kept a list of the children sent to their deaths. The regime liked to recruit the young to do its drudgework, because they were “blank pages”: when they were sacrificed, their “pages” stayed blank. According to Him Huy, the guard in charge of transporting prisoners from S-21 to the killing fields, the children were killed closer to the prison, in the center of town. But this wasn’t his responsibility, he clarifies. Maybe so. Or maybe he finds it too difficult to confess to their executions. Peng and Phal, the other executioners held responsible for the children’s murder, are both dead. The “others” are always dead.

  Important prisoners—that is, high-ranking cadres purged from the regime—also received special treatment. They were executed near S-21 and buried near the intersection of Street 163 and Mao Tse-tung Boulevard, says Duch, short of breath, with his mouth hanging open.

  These special prisoners were hit in the back of the head and then had their throats cut, like everyone else. But, unlike everyone else, they were sometimes disemboweled and photographed. This was to reassure the Standing Committee that their former colleagues were dead. The only other victims who were photographed postmortem were those who died in the prison, prematurely, from torture. Prison staff photographed their bodies to prove to the director that the prisoners hadn’t escaped.

  Once they arrived at Choeung Ek, the prisoners were led to a wooden shack, one at a time. The generator was turned on so that there was light and, some say, to drown out the sounds. The executioners gathered around pits similar to shell holes, dug into the field around the house. They carried torches and the tools they needed. Him Huy would then go through the list of that night’s victims, checking each name with each prisoner. He had to make sure that he had correctly checked off the names on the list he took back to the prison. An executioner would lead one prisoner at a time from the shack to an execution pit. The executioners would tell the victim that they were taking him or her to another house. The executioners tried to put the victims at ease, to make sure they died in silence.

  “We told them to kneel by the pit. We hit them on the back of the neck with an iron bar. We cut their throats. Then we took off their handcuffs and clothes,” says Him Huy.

  The men in black killed by night. The executions began around nine p.m. and could last until dawn, depending on the number of people they had to kill. At seven the next morning, Suor Thi had to provide his superiors with the “list of destruction” containing the names and jobs of those who had been executed, as well as the date on which they had been destroyed by the Revolution.

  “I DIDN’T PAY MUCH ATTENTION to the smashing. It was a practical issue,” says Duch.

  Yesterday, Duch broke down while listening to testimonies describing how things worked inside S-21. Today, the descriptions of the executions—quick, simple, almost mechanical acts that took place well away from the prison—help him recover. He goes back to speaking in that measured way that gives him self-control.

  I saw myself as a senior police officer, not an inspector. Have you ever been in the army? When an officer needs something done, he sends a subordinate. He doesn’t do it himself. You don’t need to teach a crocodile how to swim: it already knows. There was no reason for me to go and inspect their work. I never thought about the method or the practical aspects of execution. Their job was to make sure the prisoners were smashed by whatever method necessary.

  Duch can
describe how to make sure a victim is dead by cutting his throat. When he does, he lowers his voice. But just as he insists that he followed the interrogations and torture only from a distance, Duch also wants us to believe that he was in no way responsible for the executions. It was Duch’s decision to create the killing fields at Choeung Ek, some fifteen kilometers outside Phnom Penh, because, he says, he was worried about an epidemic breaking out in town. It was one of his responsibilities as the head of the prison. But he saw no need and felt no desire to attend the executions. Just as his boss, Son Sen, only visited S-21 once, “on principle,” Duch visited Choeung Ek twice, under orders. He claims to have only once seen executions with his own eyes, at five in the morning after a long, long night of killing at Choeung Ek.

  Even within the death mill that was S-21, the actual task of killing prisoners was considered a lowly one. None of Duch’s friends from the maquis nor any of his other protégés (such as the teenagers he recruited from Kampong Cham) were assigned to the execution detail. In court, Duch has a few compassionate words for those who, like Him Huy, had to carry out the loathsome chore. “I don’t believe they acted without conscience or remorse. I believe they had such feelings. I’m conscious of this; I understand it. I think everyone felt ashamed and remorseful about it.”