The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  HIM HUY’S “BIOGRAPHY,” found in the S-21 archives, reveals what a twenty-two-year-old revolutionary’s self-criticism looked like at the time. First, he wrote:

  I did my best to carry out every task—no matter how humble or important—entrusted to me by the Party, and to carry it out without hesitation or objection, regardless of how difficult, demanding, or complex it was.

  He then admitted that he still had a way to go:

  I speak rudely to my comrades. I sometimes play the fool. I’m easily offended and quick to anger. As a leader of the masses, I’m not passionate enough. My observation and analysis of the masses are insufficient. I have not followed the activities of the enemy with sufficient rigor. I still underestimate the extent of our enemies’ activities. I continue to be lazy when things need to be done immediately. I tend not to learn from my actions. I’m still too lenient. I still lack the concentration to lead the masses. Having taken stock of my faults, I want to express my determination to improve those parts of my personality that are still insufficiently revolutionary; I will constantly cleanse myself and build an unshakeable foundation from which to help build the Party.

  Such was the ideology of the time. Like his boss, Him Huy has since disavowed it. “My biography, like many others, isn’t truthful. We had to put what was expected of us in our biographies. I just followed the same template as everyone else.”

  Him Huy says that Duch’s deputy, Hor, taught execution techniques. He also says that he twice saw Duch at Choeung Ek, in 1977. It’s the most incriminating claim he makes against his former boss. Unfortunately, he gives several conflicting versions of what he saw. The testimony he gave during the trial’s investigation phase was damning. He told investigators, “Duch accompanied people. There was one prisoner left, and Duch asked me: ‘Are you determined or not?’ I told him I was. He ordered me to kill him.” But his testimony in court is much weaker: “Yes, I remember my statement. It was clearly my leader, Duch, but I had to rush to finish my job. At that time, I could not clearly say who was who.”

  “Did the accused order you to execute someone on several occasions?”

  “I am not really sure now whether at that time it was Duch or Hor, because it was almost dawn and we were in a rush to finish the job.”

  The judge asks the defendant to stand.

  “Was he the person who asked you to execute a prisoner?”

  “As I just stated, we were in a rush. So I was not sure if it was Duch or not at the time. It was either him or Hor, because he was also present at the time, along with Hor.”

  Duch knows Him Huy well, and shows him a degree of respect that he denies Prak Khan, for instance. Nevertheless, he counterattacks by deploring the “shortcomings” of Him Huy’s deposition. He keeps his eyes fixed on Him Huy, who leans forward like a penitent. The former prison boss lists all the elements of the former guard’s testimony that he deems correct, and contests all the elements that incriminate him directly. Him Huy should not have said what he said about Hor and himself, says Duch, because “he does not know.”

  Him Huy cannot bring himself to look in Duch’s direction. He limits himself to repeating: “When about a hundred prisoners were killed in one single night, Hor and Duch were there. They left before us. We were in such a hurry and worried that the work wouldn’t be finished before dawn. I stand by my testimony.”

  Roux has no intention of letting such a threat hang over his client’s head. He reads the following statement from the minutes of the on-site reconstitution of the crime: “The witness Him Huy has made conflicting statements about the number of times Duch visited [Choeung Ek].” The investigating judges noted that he said that Duch visited “from time to time,” then “once or twice,” then that he didn’t know whether it was more than once. During the hearing, Him Huy says that he saw Duch twice. The first time, “the situation was chaotic; it was almost dawn, there was a man by the edge of the pit. The executioners were rushing to finish their job. That’s why I’m no longer sure if it was him.” The second time, “I didn’t pay much attention, because he was still in his car.” Yet another version of events, quite different from what he initially told the investigators.

  “We’ll leave it there for the chamber to assess,” concludes the lawyer.

  But the chamber chooses to assess nothing whatsoever. If the judges have any opinions about Duch’s alleged visits to the killing fields, they keep them to themselves. Prudent in the extreme, they decide that there’s enough doubt that they do not have to decide.

  ON THE SECOND AND THIRD OF JANUARY 1979, the selection process for those to be transported to Choeung Ek was drastically expedited. The Khmer Rouge’s leaders knew that the Vietnamese troops’ rapid advance might force them out of the capital in the coming days. Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, ordered Duch to kill all the prisoners. Duch says that he asked him to spare four ex–Khmer Rouge soldiers for interrogation. The four had been arrested following the recent murder of a Western journalist who had been on an official visit to Democratic Kampuchea. Brother Number Two granted Duch’s request. Over the next two days, every other prisoner was executed. “I still couldn’t believe that the Vietnamese were approaching. I thought that the prisoners were being killed in order to make room for new ones, like before. But I was wrong. Then I thought it was going to be my turn. I was exhausted. I couldn’t work. I slept all the time.”

  Duch is an arduous worker, so when things go wrong for him he claims he is “ruminating,” which is to say he is overtaken by a paralyzing self-doubt. He has twice experienced such episodes, he says: once during the final weeks of S-21, and again two years later, when he was living a precarious life in the maquis at the Thai border. According to the psychologists before the court, such episodes are symptoms of depression:

  Duch’s doubts and his uneasiness increased whenever the Angkar’s line was no longer clear. A lack of clarity is extremely challenging for the psyche of someone with an obsessive personality. The result is a kind of slackening. Sleep becomes an escape, because you’re looking for answers; when you’re looking for a new way of living your life, you sleep. One can also speculate that the fall of the Khmer Rouge called into question all of Duch’s work. This is why he slept so much: sleep is a symptom of depression.

  Like Duch, Him Huy says that he didn’t like his job, but that he had no choice. Contrary to Duch, he was quick to leave the Revolution behind after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. In 1983, he was accused of being the director of S-21 and thrown into jail, as was Suor Thi. A few months later, Him Huy was sent to work in the rice paddies along the Vietnamese border. He suffered no ill treatment and, ten months later, was sent home.

  At the end of his testimony at the international tribunal, Him Huy is asked what he expects to come from it.

  “It’s like being born again—that’s how we feel. We are among the lucky ones who survived. We only want justice to be done.”

  Roux reacts immediately: “You have passed yourself off as a victim seeking justice. While I admit that the situation wasn’t one of your choosing, the fact is that the criminal machine only worked because leaders like you carried out criminal acts, or ordered them to be carried out, at every step.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” says Him Huy.

  “Along the chain of command, each person played a role, and each person participated in a criminal system by obeying his superiors’ orders.”

  “We had to obey orders or else we would be killed.”

  “Is that why you think of yourself as a victim?”

  “Yes. We were all victims.”

  CHAPTER 17

  THE REALITY OF THE TOTALITARIAN EXPERIENCE IS OFTEN GRAY. The woman on the witness stand today has come to honor the man the Khmer Rouge decided she should marry. A revolutionary soldier, he was killed at S-21 in 1977. She describes how she joined the Communist guerrillas in 1971 “because I was very angry about what we were suffering at the hands of the American capitalists and imperialists.” She went into th
e maquis “to liberate the country from those people,” and ended up with the rank of company commander in Democratic Kampuchea’s victorious army. When the Angkar arranged her marriage, she and her husband were one of three couples married simultaneously. Conveniently for a woman who found it difficult to celebrate being married to a man not of her own choosing, the Angkar had a remedy: there would be no celebration. Festivities were considered bourgeois.

  “It all happened very quickly,” says the woman.

  That morning, we were told that the wedding would take place at two in the afternoon. I was shocked and asked why we were being married so quickly. I asked if my parents, my family, and the people from my village were invited. The answer was no. I wasn’t happy about the way our marriage was celebrated, but the times were what they were. The time had been set, and I couldn’t refuse. I was also told that we were in a special unit and that we weren’t allowed to marry someone outside the unit; I was told that the Angkar was like our parents arranging our marriage, and that therefore we had to accept the arrangement made for us. I was very unhappy on my wedding day.

  One year later, her husband was purged at S-21 and she was sent to S-24 for “reeducation.” After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, she returned to her village, where her mother told her that it was because of her, the revolutionary, that her father was dead. She fell to her knees before an aunt and begged her forgiveness, but the aunt refused to give it. So today she says that she must reject Duch’s apology in order to prove that she isn’t Khmer Rouge, that she is loyal to the nation, and that she was “betrayed by that group,” symbolized in her mind by Duch.

  If we look beyond the anticipated punishment for the crimes committed at S-21, we see how they have torn apart Cambodian families; we see the terrible burden of family betrayals and insurmountable feelings of guilt.

  Another woman takes the witness stand. She’s wearing a burgundy-colored jacket over a white blouse and an elegant sarong typical of city folk. Her hair, touched lightly with gray, is cut short and neatly pushed back. A thin pair of spectacles rests on her nose. She is seventy years old, but looks younger. She pinches the hem of her blouse and nervously pulls it down. A victims’ assistant puts a hand on her arm. Of the hundred or so students who passed the entrance exam for medical school in her generation, this witness was one of the few women. She immediately apologizes: “Sometimes I feel as if I am mentally unstable.”

  She speaks quickly and forcefully. There are notes in front of her, but she doesn’t use them. As soon as she starts talking, her story carries her away. She describes how the entire population of Phnom Penh was evacuated in the hours after the arrival of the Khmer Rouge. She remembers each moment. She can still mimic the way black-clad soldiers with megaphones in hand insinuated that all educated people were to be eliminated. “They said that they would keep only the base people.”

  Her husband was deputy director of civil aviation at Phnom Penh airport. He was arrested. She was sent out to be “reeducated” by working on the dykes and dams. During the rainy season, her black-clad supervisor told her that if she passed this test, she would survive. If not, she would die. She closes her eyes to help jog her memory before diving back into the details of her tragic odyssey. Duch is sitting up straight, listening closely.

  “I’ve lived in despair for so long that when death comes, I won’t falter,” she says.

  After the fall of the regime, she returned to Phnom Penh and found work at the hospital. One day, her boss summoned her and told her to visit the museum at S-21. She knew very well the Ponhea Yat High School, where the Khmer Rouge had set up its detention center. Friends of her parents used to live close by. She reached the prison and was met by one of the survivors, she says. It’s at this point that, in court, the pitch of her voice rises and cracks. Her speech becomes a series of short, strident cries, and she addresses the court in that striking timbre that the Khmer language reserves for anger, grief, and incomprehension. At S-21, she was shown documents, including a photograph. It was the last one taken of her husband, Thich Hour Tuk, alias Tuk. The documents contained the date he was brought to S-21: February 2, 1976, and the date he was executed: May 25, 1976.

  In the photograph, the prisoner’s piercing gaze appears to defy the photographer. He wears a thin mustache and has a few hairs on his chin. He looks slightly cross-eyed. Tuk is pursing his full lips, which gives him a skeptical expression. His brother, a pilot, was also destroyed at S-21.

  The widow lowers her voice to give the court an impression of a conversation she had with a cousin, and another she had with a niece. Sometimes she seems disorientated and confused, as though suffering from the mental malady she mentioned at the beginning of her deposition. Then she reminds herself that the regime accused her husband of a “great crime.” And then her angry voice returns and cracks through the courtroom like a whip and she asks the same question over and again: “Why? Why? Why?”

  She says that men fall into one of two categories: those that resemble humans and have gentle hearts; and those that resemble humans and have animal hearts. An extremely devout woman, she prays for Duch’s reincarnation and that “all of these beings cease to be cruel like Pol Pot’s people.” Then that question again: Why?

  “Why should people who have done no wrong be locked up and mistreated? I don’t understand.”

  Her story returns ceaselessly to the inexplicable, a circle without end: they came for him, he disappeared, he’s dead. It is enough to drive you mad.

  “This is a good moment to take a break,” says the presiding judge.

  IT TURNS OUT THAT it was the witness’s older sister who denounced her husband to the black-uniformed guards. She considered her older sister like a mother.

  We felt betrayed. She had been indoctrinated. That’s why she said the things she did. Once, after all that happened, after all the suffering, I asked her what exactly Communism was. Now I know what it is: it’s jealousy; it’s competition and mass murder; it’s sending people to S-21; it’s betrayal; it’s the denunciation of kith and kin; it’s your loved ones getting arrested and executed. When I remember Buddhist teachings, I feel calmer; I understand that she did what she did because of the way the Communists brainwashed her. She denounced my husband. I blamed her, but perhaps she wanted to be Pol Pot’s wife. She’s the one who will have to suffer the consequences.

  The judges have fallen quiet. Her lawyer has cast her adrift on the river of her memory, aboard her raft of grief. Her lawyer doesn’t ask a single question; not one person in the courtroom interrupts her frenzied torrent of words, her heartbreak, her pain and madness, and that question—Why?—that keeps coming back again and again, the woman banging her head against it until it bleeds. “I was loyal to my country. I was loyal to my husband. Why have I been punished like this?”

  CHAPTER 18

  POL POT, SAYS DUCH, WANTED TO BUILD A MONUMENT on the Wat Phnom, the tiny hill in northern Phnom Penh where a temple stands. This first sign of a personality cult—so typical of totalitarian regimes—occurred at the end of 1977, and ran counter to the Khmer Rouge’s obsession with secrecy. The regime needed painters and sculptors. Duch searched through his lists.

  “Who in this cell knows how to paint?” shouted a teenage guard.

  Bou Meng raised his hand. Moments later, he was in a room on the ground floor of the prison. Someone handed him a snapshot which, he saw, had been developed in China. The man in the picture was unknown to him; nevertheless, Bou Meng was to draw his portrait. It was Pol Pot, the Revolution’s “Brother Number One.” Duch sat cross-legged behind Bou Meng while he painted. If he failed, said the prison director, he would be used for fertilizer.

  “I didn’t know if I was going to be used as fertilizer, or if I was supposed to produce some,” says Bou Meng. “It was a hard question to answer in those days.”

  Duch gave him a sheet of paper on which to sketch. Satisfied with the result, the prison director asked Bou Meng what materials he needed to paint a large p
ainting. He ordered his subordinates to fetch them.

  Vann Nath had been lying in a cell in Building B for a month when he, too, was called by a guard. Vann Nath was the last in his row of prisoners bound in leg-irons, which meant the guards had to unfetter all the others first before reaching him. He needed help to stand; he was starving. He remembers thinking he was so hungry that he would have eaten human flesh. He was led out of the cell, barely able to walk. He wasn’t blindfolded. He was terrified, convinced he was about to die. He entered a building to find four people waiting for him, including “Brother East”—Duch. He was asked to summarize his experience as a painter since 1965. Bou Meng was already there. Vann Nath was told that the Angkar needed portraits. He replied that he would do his best. He was given a photograph of Brother Number One. Vann Nath had never seen him before. His ears hurt. He stank of shit. He wanted to shave his mustache. He promised not to commit suicide. He felt on the verge of fainting: if he didn’t paint well, he would die; if he did paint well, he would also die, just a little later. He was told he could rest for three days. “I realized it was a matter of life or death. My first painting was a failure. It was in black-and-white, which was a new technique for me. I asked for colors.”

  A photo of Pol Pot appears on the courtroom screen and stays there longer than did the image of Bou Meng’s wife. A murmur rises in the public gallery, followed by whispers.

  At first, Vann Nath wasn’t much good, but “Brother East” thought he could get something out of him. On February 16, 1978, Duch used his red pen to cross out Vann Nath’s name from the list of people to eliminate. “Keep for use,” he wrote in the margin.