The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Each tiny event can seem meaningful when you’re desperately seeking an explanation. But just as the road leading to mass murder is, in many ways, an indeterminable one of historical accident, becoming a mass murderer is often the uncertain and contingent fate of ordinary men. Those of us who have also suffered a romantic letdown or have had a bicycle stolen know that these are setbacks that can be overcome; they are without lasting damage. Yet Duch, for reasons of his own, remembers these events with sharp and painful clarity.

  The third event is easier to link to his crime: Sihanouk’s police arrested ten of his friends, including one he considered a brother, on suspicion of subversive activities.

  According to Duch, these three events, whether directly or indirectly, helped drive him to Marxism.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE DEFENSE FAILS TO SEE WHY THE PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE insists on hearing from witnesses from M-13,” says François Roux, trying his luck.

  It’s true that the tribunal’s mandate doesn’t extend to events that took place before the Khmer Rouge took power on April 17, 1975, or after it fell on January 6, 1979. All international courts are thus constrained in space and time, their mandates limited only to certain crimes or certain groups of people. The court in Phnom Penh has nothing to say about the five years of war that preceded Pol Pot’s victory; it refrains from passing judgment on that war’s hundreds of thousands of bombs and hundreds of thousands of dead. Likewise, the ECCC must ignore the twenty years of war that followed the fall of the men in black, those two decades rife with hundreds of thousands of land mines and refugees; and the court must ignore the way the international community compromised itself when it continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s legitimate government for ten years after the party’s downfall—this even after Pol Pot’s crimes had come to light. Behind every international tribunal’s limited mandate lies a cold political calculation, one that is often the consequence of the great powers taking steps to avoid any chance of incriminating themselves.

  On the other hand, putting limits on an international tribunal is a sound precaution since, from the moment of their inception, such courts tend to become focused on their own survival and rarely restrict their own work. The men and women of the international judiciary are neither heroes nor saints. Whether serious and principled or vile and dishonest, they’re never disinterested parties.

  Yet, despite the limited mandate of the Phnom Penh tribunal, the answer to Roux’s question is quite simple.

  “There is continuity between M-13 and S-21,” says the prosecutor firmly.

  When he first entered the maquis, Duch briefly found himself under the command of Chhay Kim Huor, the teacher who had initiated him into the Revolution. But as of May 1971, he came under the authority of Vorn Vet, one of the movement’s principle architects.

  Vorn Vet was then secretary in charge of what the Communist guerrillas called the “special zone.” M-13 was the police headquarters of that special zone. Vorn Vet asked Duch to run it. M-13 was where they developed those methods that, at S-21, were refined and practiced on a much greater scale.

  The Khmer Rouge began its killings from the moment it took control of a tiny piece of territory. The most popular song in the maquis during those early days, says Duch, was called something like “The Cunning Infiltrator.” Finding and annihilating the enemy within was explicit Party policy from the very start. The atmosphere of paranoia and terror, though of lesser magnitude than it would be in the coming years, was there from the beginning. Prisoners were called “spies” and declared guilty a priori. They deserved to die. There was no end to the executions. If higher-level officers were arrested, their subordinates had to be, too. No quarter was given to the “enemy,” and that enemy didn’t necessarily wear the uniform of the opposing army. The part of Duch’s story that takes place during those years in the maquis is hard to swallow for those who maintain that the Revolution lost its way only after the Khmer Rouge’s victory. How many revolutions are needed? How many victories?

  It took comrades Duch and Pon no time to learn how to be torturers; they took to it with talent and dedication.

  “I had no capacity for critical thinking at the time. The only thing that stayed stuck in my mind was the fear of being removed,” says Duch. It’s not clear whether by “removed” he means losing his job or his life—the English interpreter gives nothing more than the word “removed.”

  Duch asked no questions when he was given the job. “We intellectuals had to be strict. Yes, I authorized torture. And I went to the interrogations myself.”

  At M-13, Duch first received “spies” sent from the zone controlled by Lon Nol’s army. For the most part, they were poor people who hadn’t had time to get away, he concedes. The great purges hadn’t yet begun. Eliminating the camp’s own personnel wasn’t yet on the agenda. At this point in time, the Vietnamese were allied with the Khmer Rouge in the anti-imperialist struggle, and so weren’t yet targets.

  “The most shocking thing was the purge of the base,” Duch says, referring to the masses in whose name the teachers were leading the Revolution. “It hurts every time I think about it.”

  Every fortnight, Duch went to a self-criticism meeting. Each person had to forsake his or her personal opinions and adopt the position held by the group. Individual consciousness was to be erased. Duch was no longer a citizen—he was the collective, he was the Party, he was the Revolution.

  “In the psychology of extreme situations, the greatest danger occurs when an individual’s affiliations are limited to one group,” says the psychologist. “To safeguard against sacrificing individuality and self-awareness, it is vital to belong to more than one membership group.”

  JUST AS S-21 WAS COMPOSED of S-21 and S-24, M-13 was divided into two camps. One of Duch’s deputies ran the first, where prisoners were “reeducated” and eventually freed. Duch himself ran the other, where people were held, interrogated, and, in all probability, killed. Duch remembers the names of some prisoners he was unable to free because, he says, the military chief, Ta Mok, opposed it. He freed around a dozen people in all, and once again, he remembers most of their names. “It was a very small number compared to the number of those tortured and killed. So it wasn’t an act of valor. I cannot congratulate myself for it, but it’s the truth. It is just a drop of water in the ocean of crimes I committed.”

  Nobody in that drop of water is more important to Duch than François Bizot.

  Bizot was a twenty-five-year-old ethnologist when he arrived in Cambodia in 1966. He was conducting research at L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient, the French School of the Far East. For a century, this institution has been at the heart of the rediscovery and conservation of Angkor, the exceptional complex of temples in northern Cambodia. Bizot specializes in Khmer Buddhism. On October 10, 1971, while visiting a monastery, Bizot and his two Cambodian colleagues, Lay and Son, were ambushed by the Khmer Rouge. Bizot appeared before a summary people’s court. He was accused of being a CIA agent and put through a mock execution. Then he was taken on a long march to a prison camp, where he was reunited with Lay and Son. According to Bizot, the officer who received him immediately showed himself to be “cynical and aggressive.” Bizot was shackled to a metal rod to which ten or fifteen other prisoners were already chained. He had been walking for two days and two nights without washing. He was covered in mud. The officer denied him permission to wash. Bizot begged; a younger man intervened and told him, “Go and wash.” It was Duch. Bizot had just arrived at M-13.

  The camp was made up of three rudimentary, raised-floor shelters, one of which was reserved for sick prisoners. The captives had to urinate in a bamboo stick. To defecate, they had to go to a pit 1.5 meters wide, filled with excrement, a ditch which every prisoner “talked about with horror.” Food was distributed twice a day. It consisted of “succulent rice, milled that morning by two prisoners.” But there was nothing else with it. Malaria wreaked havoc.

  “I was struck by Duch’
s poor health; like most of the prisoners he was unwell,” explains Bizot. There was no medicine. Many of the prisoners who weren’t executed died from their illnesses.

  American B-52s were dropping bombs, says Duch, so they dug three trenches and kept the prisoners in them. The only thing the Khmer Rouge protected its prisoners from was bombs, lest they deny the guards the choice of when to kill them. There were ditches where prisoners were held and others where they were killed by a single blow to the back of the neck, economically, without making a sound.

  Duch saw the B-52s passing high overhead, but he never experienced a bombing raid himself. He was never a combat cadre; he was a commissioner in the political police.

  There were still neither prisoner lists nor archives. It was wartime. When a person was executed, his documents were destroyed with him. Over time, the cadres’ diet deteriorated. The prisoners’ diet, meanwhile, became downright inadequate. By the end of 1974, they were getting nothing more than rice dust.

  M-13 was relocated three times in four years. When the camp was near a muddy river, the prisoners could wash and relieve themselves daily. The women were allowed to bathe unencumbered; the men were tied to each other with hammock rope.

  According to Duch, the Khmer Rouge was still sparing children at that time. But this is ambiguous, to say the least. He describes how he looked after three children who somehow ended up at the camp. All three died. “They were with their parents at night, with me during the day. My superiors questioned my attitude, and I couldn’t argue with them. They believed the children would avenge their parents. The three children died of illness. We let them swell up until they died.”

  M-13 was a prototype, one with notable shortcomings. For instance, one day in 1973, one of the prisoners managed to grab a guard’s weapon. Mam Nai was wounded by another guard while chasing the fugitive. Like so much else, Mam Nai doesn’t remember the incident. He says he was planting potatoes at the time. Some thirty prisoners escaped that day, leaving the camp practically empty. Duch was in the hot seat. “I told Vorn Vet to punish me. But he just sent me more people to destroy. It was probably my destiny to do that work.”

  “Did you consider doing something else? Did you contemplate escaping?”

  “I never imagined anything but obeying orders to survive. I knew that my job was inherently criminal, but I had to follow orders. If that was my destiny, the one I couldn’t avoid, then I had to carry out the tasks assigned to me.”

  Duch ordered executions. He remembers a few of his victims from those early days: a writer; one of Ta Mok’s subordinates; cadres from Hanoi suspected of being Vietnamese spies. “My aim was to liberate my people, yet I did the opposite and became a part of the killing machine. M-13 wasn’t only hard. It was cruel and odious. It was a place where we crushed humanity. It was beyond hard, beyond cruel.”

  Once, during the rainy season, around September 1974, the M-13 prison camp became heavily flooded. By around eight that morning, the water had risen significantly in the space of one hour. The prisoners were trapped, chained in the trenches. Duch claims they didn’t drown, that everyone was moved to higher ground, and that the prisoners only died later, from illness. He says this emphatically and turns toward the public gallery, as though he’s looking for someone in particular. He freezes, his mouth slightly open. “We didn’t eat that day. Everything was floating around us.”

  His deputy Mam Nai remembers the flood. However, he cannot remember the fate of the prisoners. “I don’t know if anyone died in the flood. I have no idea. Even pigs died,” he says.

  It wasn’t unusual for Khmer Rouge leaders to concern themselves with the fate of animals. When Brother Number Two surrendered at the end of 1998, he said: “We regret not only the people but also the animals that lost their lives to the war. We are very sorry.”

  “I HATED POLICE WORK and I hated the killings,” says Duch. “But they told me it was because of a lack of direction in the Party. At M-13, I came to hate shit, but I had to walk through it every day. I tried to solve things by my own means.”

  Duch turned to an old trick common to some Communist regimes since Stalin: the confession. He admits that extracting these sometimes got physical, for instance the day he was interrogating a prisoner while fighting a fever; two guards armed with pistols started to beat the prisoner, who gave in and made his “confession.” Duch was infuriated not by the beating but by the fact that the prisoner failed to confess before it began. So, he says, he started hitting him himself, to punish him for not confessing until being beaten.

  Duch says he used another prisoner, a poet, to test the techniques he had learned. The poet’s interrogation lasted a month and Duch admits to beating him. Thus, Duch accounts for “at least two people” he admits to having beaten. “I don’t remember the others now.”

  “So there could have been more than two and you don’t remember the others?” asks the prosecutor.

  “Yes. That’s correct.”

  One witness says that he saw Duch whip a woman unconscious and laugh when she came to. But Duch vehemently denies this: “I interrogated that woman. I never beat a female prisoner. When a prisoner was beaten, no one helped me. The interrogations took place in the bush, away from everyone. I never let a prisoner see an interrogation. No one could see the interrogations.”

  Vorn Vet recommended using plastic bags. Duch, ever practical, was disinclined to do so—it wasn’t easy to find plastic bags back then. The prisoners were often left tied to posts. “That’s how I remember it,” says Duch. The question arises of whether they were tied or suspended, as some witnesses have claimed. Duch gets to his feet and mimics the way a person was attached to a post. He uses the headphone wire of his simultaneous-interpreting device to show how the prisoners had their wrists and forearms tied. The prisoners sometimes stayed like that for four days. Someone asks if they were fed.

  “I’ve forgotten.”

  One prisoner was burned with a torch. At least one other was made to stand in the cold wind. Women suffered the same treatment. But the young torturer declared this method inefficient. Furthermore, it offended Duch’s sense of morality.

  When a woman’s clothes cling to her body, you can see her shape and then suddenly there’s a discomfort. Comrade Pon and I felt that discomfort. That’s why we stopped when we did. Also, it was a useless method. The woman, whose name was Sok, didn’t change her answer. She said that she had been sent alone, with no one to accompany her. I concluded that that type of torture was not only dangerous but could lead to an incident.

  Duch remembers this woman in startling detail. She doesn’t exist in any archive, and the events he is remembering go back thirty-eight years, to August 1971, but his memory is sharp.

  “Her background was prostitution. She had been sent to spy in the liberated zone. That was what she said in her confession,” he says, giving the impression of still believing it. “I asked her how old she was. She said twenty-eight years old. I told her to open her mouth so I could count her teeth. She didn’t have thirty-two teeth. Anyone in their twenties has thirty-two teeth. So she was lying.”

  NOBODY KNOWS HOW MANY DIED at M-13. One former prisoner, who later became an auxiliary guard in the camp and who has since died, gave testimony to DC-Cam. The witness made a number of haphazard claims, including that thirty thousand people died at M-13, based on the following simple calculation: twenty executions a day over nearly four years add up to thirty thousand. The court has prudently decided not to use testimonies from such fickle sources as provided by NGOs.

  According to Duch, between seventeen and twenty people worked at M-13, and there were never more than sixty prisoners there at any one time—both details match testimonies from others, including Bizot. The defendant claims that roughly two to three hundred people were executed at M-13 over those four years. Other experts, aware that the higher figure isn’t credible but mindful of validating the executioner’s own, succumb to a temptation commonly faced by those who tally the numbers in cri
mes against humanity: to split the difference and pick a number between the two extremes. People started saying that around three thousand victims died at M-13, but this is pure speculation. The reality, unpleasant as it may be, is that we have no idea. The remaining traces of the camp provide nothing on which to base any estimate; no document from M-13 survives; the Party had yet to develop its obsession with record-keeping, or the appetite for bureaucracy typical of totalitarian regimes. The Party was still at war and not yet in power. Duch says, “There were no orders to keep this sort of information. There was no reason to keep records about a person once he or she had been destroyed. The task had been accomplished. The mission was over.”

  DUCH REMINDS THE COURT that a twelve-year-old child is an adolescent. At twelve, a child can serve as a messenger. At sixteen, he can belong to a special execution unit.

  I wasn’t a role model when it came to killing, since I was frightened of doing it. We intellectuals assigned such tasks to children or peasants, who did them better. It was the same with Communist revolutionaries everywhere. The sons of the poorest families learned very quickly. I was from the intellectual class. I reminded them not to let people escape and to stop them from screaming or shouting. I never went there myself. I committed an enormous crime against the people of Amleang. They sent their children to me for education, so that they would become perfectly loyal to the Party. I say again, I hate shit and yet I walked through it. We had a good relationship with the villagers. They supported the Revolution. They agreed to send us their children to help us. But they had no other choice. I felt a lot of affection for them. I wanted to educate them so that they would join the revolutionary path. The role of Party cadres was to train people to have a position on class, to hold an absolute position against the enemy. But in reality, we indoctrinated them to commit crimes.