The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Nhem En is beaming. He reaches out, strokes my belly, and affectionately takes hold of my chin. He is absolutely delighted by our visit.

  CHAPTER 26

  PEOPLE ALREADY VISIT S-21 AND CHOEUNG EK. More and more will visit Pol Pot’s tomb. But no one will ever visit Prey Sar, known as S-24 under the Khmer Rouge and an integral part of the concentration complex under Duch’s authority. Prey Sar was a prison before and during the Khmer Rouge years. Prey Sar is still a prison today. During the revolutionary period, it was called a “reeducation camp.”

  “The long-term purpose of S-24 was to smash prisoners, so the term ‘reeducation’ was just political-speak, wasn’t it?” a judge asks Duch.

  “That was the general idea. Everyone could see it. The Revolution’s aim was to smash them progressively, one by one.”

  In many ways, the entire nation of Democratic Kampuchea was turned into one vast forced-labor camp. S-24 wasn’t so different from the many cooperatives established throughout the country where Cambodians died from starvation, illness, or exhaustion by the thousands. What distinguished S-24 from the other labor camps was that its inmates were people who had committed “infractions.” If other cooperatives were run on the basis of class, most prisoners at S-24 were Communist Party combatants. Yet again, the tribunal metes out justice on behalf of those who, for the most part, had served the regime before falling victim to its purges, rather than on behalf of the masses of ordinary people whose lives it destroyed.

  S-24 was where the Party parked those combatants it deemed ill-disciplined enough to lock up but not enough to execute—at least, not right away. It was for those whom the Party hadn’t yet decided whether to wipe out or not. The prisoners at S-24 were referred to as “elements.” Their job was to grow rice and cassava and raise animals. There were around thirteen hundred elements at S-24, divided into three groups. The least troublesome were sometimes released and reintegrated into their combat units if they behaved well, worked hard, and survived the inhuman conditions. The intermediate elements were held for evaluation. The serious elements were either worked to death or exterminated at Choeung Ek. According to the surviving archives, 590 S-24 prisoners, including 50 members of its own staff, were transferred to S-21 and killed. We don’t know how many S-24 prisoners died in the camp or were sent directly to the execution fields.

  Duch says he can remember having gone to S-24 four times. The last time was in December 1978, a few weeks before he fled Phnom Penh. He had gone there to arrest his deputy, Nun Huy, the head of S-24 and one of S-21’s three-man leadership team. Duch says he had many reasons for arresting Nun Huy, but has forgotten most of them. The main reason was that a radio operator had run away, he says. “I asked my superiors that he be arrested. Nuon Chea agreed to it.”

  Nun Huy was planting potatoes when he saw Duch coming for him. His wife, Comrade Khoeun, the deputy head female interrogator at S-21, was arrested the next day and executed. Yet another “line” erased.

  IN 1977, BOU THON’S HUSBAND, a motorcycle chauffeur named Phuok Hon, was arrested and never seen again. Though he had been a low-ranking soldier in the Revolutionary Army, Phuok Hon had had the misfortune of having been introduced to the Revolution by a high-ranking Party cadre called Koy Thuon, who was both Cambodia’s minister of commerce and responsible for its northern region. Koy Thuon fell from grace in 1976. By the beginning of 1977, he found himself in S-21. Phuok Hon fell in the wake of his mentor’s fall, one more dot on Koy Thuon’s line; one more domino in that bloody game of traitor networks that Duch was in charge of unearthing and eliminating. Three months after her husband’s disappearance, black-clad guards came to tell Bou Thon that her husband had stolen some petrol; they told her she could go to him. Instead of being reunited with her husband, she was put in prison and beaten. Pol Pot’s agents decreed that when a soldier was eliminated, his wife and children were, too. While Phuok Hon was sent to S-21, where his photo remains to this day, Bou Thon was sent to S-24.

  Bou Thon and Phuok Hon had four children, all of whom died. In court, she tries to overcome her pain while villagers stream into the public gallery. There are some new faces on the bench reserved for civil parties: the parents of victims of S-21, who have come from abroad to give statements the following week. From their bench, Duch appears so remote that his head, visible over the top of the lectern, looks like a durian fruit sitting on a shelf. A security guard slaps a mosquito as Bou Thon begins describing everyday life for convicts during the Revolution. At first, her grim litany of Cambodia’s collective enslavement wears me down and I find it hard to focus. The trial has been going on for four and a half months now. You get inured to it. Some mornings, you even feel oddly cheerful.

  But Bou Thon speaks with great intensity, as though she’s longing to speak. At sixty-four, with beautiful gray hair, she has grown out of any shyness. She wears a white blouse and a silk gray-green-and-gold scarf. Her sophisticated elegance makes it easy to forget that she’s illiterate. She smiles. She, too, seems oddly cheerful.

  In contrast, Duch’s wrinkles and the bags under his eyes appear especially pronounced this morning; he looks tired after so many difficult days, like one of Marcel Marceau’s sad mimes. But he doesn’t hesitate to corroborate Bou Thon’s identity, which he does in his most honeyed voice. He has no choice: her biography and photograph are in the prison’s archives.

  “My husband used to say that he didn’t want to live under Pol Pot because there was never enough to eat,” she says.

  Bou Thon was living in Phnom Penh in 1973. When Pol Pot’s men seized power, she found she was the wrong type of person, a city-dweller. In court, Bou Thon talks and talks and talks. But instead of making me drowsy, her story grips my attention. She uses fragments of dialogue and description to recreate the banality of camp life, and to evoke how the twin obsessions of hunger and interrogation hung over everything. Her anecdotes are precise and detailed, and I sometimes wonder why her memory favors some stories over others. Why she remembers the banana story, however, is obvious.

  One day, while working in the fields, Bou Thon saw a cluster of bananas. She said out loud that they would be good to include in the daily meal. That was enough for the guards to accuse her of being the enemy. Her face still bears traces of the beating they gave her.

  Every day, the “elements” planted rice, carried water, checked the corn, and cultivated vegetables. Their work quota was strictly monitored. All production went to the mysterious, shadowy Angkar. “We weren’t allowed to eat what we grew. And we didn’t dare protest. They had complete control over me. We had to obey their orders. We weren’t allowed to question them. They could’ve decided to kill me whenever they wanted to.”

  No one spoke to anyone else. Everyone had watched someone get dragged away, never to be seen again. In this prison without walls, no one said a word.

  Until the day Vietnamese troops invaded Phnom Penh.

  “We ran for two days. I was loyal. I stayed with the group. I was stupid to follow the prisoners. I followed blindly. I don’t know why. We reached the town of Amleang. We found shelter there for two nights. People said that was him, the prison director. Of course I knew him!” she shouts, sitting tall in her chair. “He was a small-framed man”—Duch smiles—“and I even knew his wife. She was tall and well-built.”

  Shortly after her escape, Bou Thon found out that all her children were dead. She went back to her native village. Going home frightened her. Being alone frightened her.

  “I suffered so much,” she says in a hushed voice. Her voice breaks beneath a tide of tears.

  My uncle is the head monk in our village. He advised me to try and forgive and forget. But when I was working in the fields and paddies, I would ask myself: “What’s the point? There’s no one left to work for.” My mother also told me to try to relax. But I want to be here, at this tribunal. I want to be here so that justice is done on behalf of my husband and my children. Why were my children executed?

  The court declares
a recess. Bou Thon pours herself some water. Duch lingers behind his table, his mouth hanging slightly open, wearing that mask he puts on when he’s troubled but doesn’t want others to know it. He watches the people leaving the public gallery. Then he turns to his Cambodian lawyer and assistant, both of them relaxed and smiling, and he seems to immediately recover his work attitude, standing with his hands in his pockets.

  Bou Thon was no Khmer Rouge cadre. Prey Sar is the forgotten place, the relegated place, the place from which, on July 23, 1977, 160 children were sent directly to Choeung Ek and executed because the Party feared that they would grow up and seek vengeance, and because they were too expensive to feed. Prey Sar hasn’t been turned into a museum like S-21. Today, Prey Sar is still a prison, just like it was before Pol Pot, when Duch, Mam Nai, and Pon were incarcerated there. In court, Bou Thon’s testimony focuses everyone’s attention on Prey Sar, and for a day the prison is remembered. And then it is forgotten again, consigned to history’s oblivion.

  Duch starts to speak and Bou Thon begins to weep. Her sobbing triggers Duch, who starts crying, too, shedding long-repressed tears.

  “The tears that fall from my eyes are the tears of innocents,” sobs the former director of S-21 and S-24.

  I want to be close to the Cambodian people; if they choose to condemn me, they can and I will accept it. I must accept it, no matter how heavy the sentence. I won’t use a bucket to hide an elephant. At the time, we thought that the Yuon [Viets] were invading Cambodia. Now, finally, before all of you and before the Cambodian people, I would like to share this pain from the bottom of my heart. I will accept this court’s judgment. I wish for the Cambodian people to condemn me as quickly as possible.

  Total silence fills the public gallery. A rustle, the sound of people brushing against one another and the sounds of joints cracking betray the first hesitant movements of people in the gallery. Duch had them rapt, stone-still, and now they’re surprised and a little embarrassed for it. Duch salutes the court, then bows low to the public gallery. With her carefully groomed hair, elegant sarong, and dignified bearing, Bou Thon walks quietly from the room.

  CHAPTER 27

  WITH THE VIETNAMESE APPROACHING, people stampeded out of Phnom Penh. Duch didn’t spare a thought to the fates of the dozen prisoners—the painters and sculptors, the electrician and mechanic and dentist—whose temporary usefulness to the Party had delayed their execution.

  When Nuon Chea ordered me to empty the place, I didn’t think about those people I was keeping for my own use. I never imagined that the Communist Party of Kampuchea would be overthrown. When the Vietnamese got close, I fled, leaving the prisoners behind. That’s why they survived. Not because I had pity on them or had a plan for them. I simply didn’t think about them.

  “Eventually, they, too, would’ve been smashed, correct?” asks a judge.

  “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

  Duch left S-21 on foot, late on the morning of January 7, 1979, with Vietnamese tanks on his heels. Like Bou Thon, he walked for two days without food or water. The fates of the dozen prisoners who worked at S-21, or those of the “elements” at S-24, or of its staff, no longer concerned him. From now on, it was each man for himself. Duch fled northeast, toward Amleang. They say a murderer always returns to the scene of his crime. For a while, Duch took refuge on the former site of M-13, the place where his career in the revolutionary police had begun. The men who had then been under his command were now under that of Ta Mok or had scattered or been killed.

  Duch ended up in Samlaut, in the northwest of the country, under the command of the military chief Sou Met with whom he had worked before, during the purges of 1977. There are nine damning letters in the S-21 archives, in which Duch sends the Khmer Rouge division commander information acquired from prisoners’ confessions. Around three hundred of Sou Met’s men were eliminated at S-21. Sou Met later achieved the rank of general in the national army. He is now retired peacefully in the quiet town of Battambang. The government opposes putting Sou Met on trial. No one involved with Duch’s trial—not the prosecution, defense, civil parties, or judges—has seen fit to summon him. Justice, in this court as much as in any other, bends to political power.*

  Duch describes how he became head of transport for the region, how he refused the offer to command a division, and how he became a sort of private tutor to Sou Met’s children. It was at this point that his career as a torturer ended as suddenly as it had begun less than eight years earlier. Duch was still a member of the Khmer Rouge, but he no longer held any position of responsibility within its security apparatus. The man once described as one of the most powerful, enthusiastic, and well-connected officers of the Khmer Rouge, privy to the Politburo’s most sensitive secrets, became a nobody. He sidelined himself. Once again it was the guerrillas and their war that mattered, not the police and their purges. Duch avoided taking on a military role. No one in the courtroom has properly explained why his political career ended so suddenly: neither the prosecutor, nor Duch himself.

  “I LIKE TO HUNT BIRDS.”

  In 1980 or 1981 (he’s no longer sure), Duch was in his secluded house in Samlaut, cleaning the rifle he used for hunting, his new pastime. He assembled his weapon, put a bullet in the chamber, poured a little lubricant in the magazine, and pointed the barrel toward the sky. His wife, wondering how he could assemble a weapon in such manner, suddenly reached out and put her finger on the trigger. The gun fired and Duch’s hand was partially torn off. His wife, a nurse, quickly wrapped it up in a bandage and took him to the nearest clinic. He had to have a finger amputated and, ever since, his mutilated left hand looks sort of like a flipper when he waves it about in that curt, martial way of his. Once, during the trial, a journalist friend whispered to me that she thought it looked like a bird’s foot. Duch stopped hunting birds after the accident.

  In the mid-1980s, Duch went back to teaching. He taught at a primary school in what was then still Khmer Rouge territory. His wife gave birth to two more sons, in addition to the two children born during Duch’s years at S-21. Son Sen asked him to go to China and teach Khmer literature there. Kaing Guek Eav, a.k.a. Duch, asked to change his name again. He became Hang Pin. The name Hang is from his Chinese clan, and was the perfect introduction with which to go and teach in the land of his ancestors. For Duch, pin meant “lazy student,” the opposite of duch, “good student.” The Buddhist Institute Dictionary, on the other hand, defines pin as “summit” or “superiority.” Thus, pin connotes both the useless person Duch became and the superior one he always aspired to be.

  He took off for Beijing in September 1986. When he returned two years later, he worked under the supervision of Son Sen’s wife before taking charge of the economic affairs of the village of Phkoam. Peace talks were taking place at the time, and the UN was overseeing the establishment of multiparty elections in the country. Duch was there to prepare the campaign for the Khmer Rouge faction. In the end, the Khmer Rouge rejected the 1991 peace accord and resumed armed combat. But its fighters only lost ground and Phkoam fell under government control. Duch (going by Hang Pin) lost contact with Party headquarters. He no longer believed that the Party would win. Like many Khmer Rouge soldiers, Duch started thinking about ways to get out, though he was careful to maintain his relationships with his peers. The Revolution was dying. The Brothers were starting to claim that the Vietnamese had invented S-21. Son Sen’s wife said the Swedish experts who examined the prison grounds established that the corpses found there belonged to people who had died after January 1979. This was one lie too many for Duch. In the universe of untruths he had inhabited for twenty-five years, he had reached his limit. Worse, he found himself being stripped of his biggest contribution to the Revolution. “I couldn’t really accept it, because they were talking about history. I knew the real history. How could anyone say that S-21 was a Vietnamese invention?”

  Duch returned to the institution where he got his start before he had set out to become a New Man: the public edu
cation system. He taught physics and chemistry at the high school in Phkoam. Then, in November 1995, under circumstances that aren’t entirely clear, Duch’s wife was stabbed to death during a burglary at their home. That part of the country was still dangerous: there was combat nearby, and crime was endemic.

  “There was a great deal of instability at the time. Every day, there was gunfire and robberies. No one obeyed the law,” says one witness.

  Duch now believes that he had been targeted by his dreaded enemy, Ta Mok. He describes his wife’s murder without a trace of emotion, just as coldly as he described his brother-in-law’s murder within the prison walls. When he speaks of his mother, who’s still alive, or his father, who died in 1990, he also does so in the most detached tone imaginable.

  “I have never dreamed of my father,” he says. Nor does not seeing his children appear to provoke any sign of sadness in him.

  “Disempathy is the inability to think another person’s thoughts and to feel another person’s emotions; it’s the inability to imagine that others are different from one’s own self,” explains the psychologist. “There are signs of it in Duch, who killed off his own personal identity in order to identify with a collective one. Yesterday, it was Communism; now, it’s Christianity. This disempathy is neither absolute nor total. Another of his characteristics is what psychologists call alexithymia. This is a clinical concept that designates, in this case, the defendant’s inability to both consciously feel emotions and articulate them. This can’t be blamed wholly on Sino-Cambodian culture, though there are contributing cultural factors. Duch thinks pragmatically. He thinks about what is ‘practicable,’ to use the word he employed.”

  CHRISTOPHER LAPEL IS A PASTOR based in Los Angeles, California. He was thirty-seven years old when, one day in late December 1995, he met Hang Pin during one of those evangelical “crusades” that the West has been sending out into the Third World for the last thirty years with an energy not unlike that of the swarms of locusts that fall upon the crops of the Sahel. The pastor knew nothing about the past of the man he was welcoming. But what did it matter? Hang Pin, suddenly and violently a widower, wanted to give his life to the Lord. He came across as a kindhearted man, a servant of God, warm and welcoming. On January 6, 1996, after two weeks of religious instruction and seventeen years to the day after having shut down S-21, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, alias Hang Pin, was baptized in the river. He was declared ready to preach. Pastor LaPel immediately instructed him to go out and spread the Good News. Three years later, when he learned of his new convert’s real identity, the pastor was surprised but happy. “It fills me with joy to see God transform a man’s life by turning a killer into a believer.”