The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  But, of course, it’s hopeless. For Him Huy, a young soldier with no education, Phung Ton was just a number or a name on a list on which there were so many to check off.

  There’s little doubt Mam Nai knows more than anyone. He was in charge of interrogating the professor, who had been his mentor. Even worse: the professor’s father-in-law, the dean of the Pedagogical Institute, had taken the young Mam Nai under his wing.

  The prosecutor is the first to try to learn more about Phung Ton’s fate. Without difficulty and with impeccable poise, Mam Nai immediately boxes him into a corner: “I don’t remember interrogating Phung Ton. It’s not coming back to me.”

  Silke Studzinsky, the lawyer representing the professor’s family, doesn’t do any better.

  “I knew him, but I don’t remember having interrogated him at S-21. I just don’t remember” is the old Communist’s unwavering reply. If the archives hadn’t been kept so meticulously, or if they had been destroyed as they had been elsewhere, then Mam Nai’s answers would be the end of it. The family would never know where the professor disappeared. Duch and Mam Nai could’ve denied the professor was ever even at S-21.

  But there’s that photo and those four sheets of paper with Mam Nai’s writing on them. Faced with irrefutable evidence, Mam Nai grudgingly acknowledges that he drafted the professor’s confession. Someone reads a paragraph out loud. Duch, a hand over his chin, looks at the screen on which the document is displayed. The conclusion reached by Mam Nai at the time was that the professor agreed with Communism. Now he has nothing to say about it. He reminds the court that once a person had been arrested and sent to S-21, that person had to disappear.

  The defense lawyers manage to get a bit more out of him. With much effort, Mam Nai finally admits: “I carried out the interrogation. But no one made him confess. It was the same with Professor Chao Seng. They both spoke from their hearts.”

  “Thirty years later, how do you view that period in your life?” asks Roux.

  “Can you be more specific? Are you talking about the current regime, or the previous one?”

  “What do you think of Democratic Kampuchea?”

  “Back then, there was nothing to eat. That was because of the war. But there were also positives: independence, self-control, self-sufficiency.”

  “Do you know how many people were killed at S-21?”

  “My job and my position meant that I couldn’t know that kind of thing.”

  “Do you know how many people died in Democratic Kampuchea?”

  “I know even less about that. I just don’t know.”

  “Do you regret having been an interrogator at S-21?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Do you have any regrets today about having been an interrogator at S-21?”

  “Yes, I have regrets.”

  “Can you tell us about them?”

  “I believe that there were good people at S-21, and that wrongdoing took place there. But from what I saw, there were fewer good people than bad. I have regrets for that small group of good people.”

  “You have no regrets for the ‘less good’ people who were smashed?”

  “I have never regretted the deaths of bad people.”

  CHAPTER 30

  IT’S A DICEY SITUATION FOR DUCH. If he stands up for Mam Nai, it could be held against him; people might not believe he’s telling the truth, despite his promise. If he sells out his former colleague, on the other hand, he betrays a loyal subordinate who, up to this point, he has appeared eager to protect.

  Mam Nai and Duch both studied at the Pedagogical Institute in Phnom Penh when Professor Son Sen was its director. Mam Nai studied mathematics, physics, and natural sciences, and went on to become deputy head teacher at a high school. He discovered the Revolution in Mao’s China. After spending two years in Prey Sar prison with Pon and Duch, Mam Nai returned to teaching, while his two comrades went into the maquis and set up the M-13 prison camp. In 1973, the repression of dissident teachers by General Lon Nol’s military dictatorship drove Mam Nai and others to join the rebels. Duch had a job waiting for him at M-13. In 1975, the three former teachers became part of the team responsible for establishing S-21.

  Within every mass crime lurk infighting and long-standing enmities, backstabbing and endless struggles between insiders and outsiders. Mam Nai describes how he lost Duch’s full confidence around 1976, after a prisoner at S-21 implicated Mam Nai in counterrevolutionary activities. Duch made no exception for his colleague: he passed on the incriminating information to his superiors and let Mam Nai know what he had done. In the end, Son Sen let Mam Nai off the hook, saying he was a trustworthy intellectual. But the witness says Duch stopped trusting him with sensitive cases after that. From then on, Pon was in charge of interrogating important Party cadres.

  Duch freely admits that he preferred Pon, one of his earliest comrades and a merciless interrogator. He puts it bluntly: Mam Nai was “slower” than Pon.

  So, in fact, Duch hasn’t always protected Mam Nai. Yet in court, he’s quick to defend his former lieutenant. He maintains, for instance, that Mam Nai took no pleasure in torture. And whenever a problem arises with some document or other, the former prison director always manages to find an excuse. Mam Nai can’t remember a list bearing his signature? Duch “understands” his subordinate’s surprise. Someone else must have signed Mam Nai’s name without him knowing it; the list’s real author was Comrade Hor, who is dead, says Duch. Judge Lavergne gets peevish.

  “I don’t understand your explanation. What are you trying to hide?”

  Duch offers no clarification.

  “Fine. If these muddled explanations are the best you can do, we’ll stop here. You may sit down,” says the judge.

  Duch’s support for his former colleague has had a patently negative effect on the court. So when he takes the floor, he changes his tack completely. He gets to his feet and, snapping his arm in his brusque, martial way, berates Mam Nai and urges him to tell everything he knows about the fate of Professor Phung Ton.

  Please, don’t be frightened by death. Just tell the truth. We stand here today before History. You cannot hide an elephant carcass under a basket. That’s enough! Don’t even try! I’m prepared to accept responsibility and answer for all the crimes I’ve committed. I want you to do the same. Please, remember that the civil parties are here and they want to know where our professor died. I think it is right that we should help them find the place. I don’t think that we should let Communism live in our minds and stop us from telling the truth.

  NO ONE WOULD DESCRIBE Silke Studzinsky as easygoing. The counsel for the civil parties makes no effort to please. “Silke,” as everyone calls her, has a wiry frame, disheveled brown hair, and kohl-lined eyes; her robe is devoid of the white collar favored by the more showy lawyers. She glares at the defendant or at a hostile witness until the whites leap from her eyes like blades. Standing alone against the world doesn’t bother her in the slightest. She seems quite impervious to the reactions from the outside. She’s a rebel. She can be insulting and rude in court and in meetings; the wall she is fighting to tear down is a symbol, in her eyes, of a world unwilling to carry out justice. For a court lawyer to question a decision made by the president of the tribunal is considered the height of presumptuousness. Yet Studzinsky does so openly and bluntly, and more than once. In her own way, this unconventional lady is as absolutist as anyone.

  It took just one quick question from Studzinsky at the start of the trial for Duch to get the measure of his opponent. His lawyer, Roux, offered some protection by quickly asking the judges to call Studzinsky to order; the presiding judge, though he hadn’t yet taken control of proceedings, reassured Duch that he understood the need for courtesy. Duch was quick to adapt to Studzinsky’s aggression. Whenever it was her turn to speak, the lawyer for the civil parties did so with the haste of someone worried that the victim lying on the ground has only moments to live.

  “Do you acknowledge that M-13
was a killing center?” she says without offering any greeting.

  “Good morning, counsel,” says the defendant, eager to slow her down. “M-13 was a criminal operation.”

  “Can it be called a killing center? And please, keep your answers brief and precise,” says the lawyer with a degree of venom to which she appears oblivious.

  “I have no objection to that.”

  “Please answer succinctly, with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ Did you explain to the children what kind of work they were going to do?”

  She doesn’t like Duch’s answer.

  “Could you please listen carefully to the question: what did you tell the children?”

  “You’re not listening to my answers.”

  “Did you tell them that they would be working in a killing center?”

  “We didn’t use that term. My duty was to teach them the Party line. They’d been called up to work for the Revolution. What did working for the Revolution mean? At that time, it meant killing people.”

  In theory, at least, the court forbids its participants from asking the same questions over and over, and Duch points out that those posed by Studzinsky have already been asked. He’s pleasant enough at first. But eventually he loses his temper, raises his voice, and tells the lawyer not to interrupt him. “Let me remind you that I have the right to remain silent,” he warns her. “That question has already been asked many times and I wish to remain silent,” he says firmly. But the lawyer, stubborn as a goat, never lets up, even when she puts herself on the wrong side of the judges.

  Studzinsky came to Phnom Penh to work for a German aid agency. She was the first Western lawyer to take an interest in the representation provided for victims at the trial, at a time when no one involved could care less about them. She met her clients, listened to what they had to say, and spent time consulting with her Cambodian colleagues. Her devotion to the cause is beyond reproach. But when she has to deal with the many foreign lawyers who are in Phnom Penh only for the short term, or with members of the court, she’s as abrasive as sandpaper. It’s as though she’s at war with the world without knowing it. That Duch is running the show in court and imposing his version of history leaves her feeling as outraged as her clients, she says. In speaking so openly, she tells me, she feels “honest.”

  Psychologists tell us that each person is the product of both an individual past and a collective one. Lawyers who work at international tribunals tend to develop characteristics typical of stateless people. In the composite and amorphous international legal community, your home country is a big part of your identity. Accordingly, during her closing speech, Studzinsky introduces herself as a “German who lives every day of her life with the memory of her country’s brutal crime.” It’s not the whole story, but it does give her a narrative at least. Her parents moved from East to West Germany six weeks before the Berlin Wall was built. She was seven months old at the time. Silke Studzinsky is no militant. Her background and her upbringing mean she dodged the siren songs of European totalitarianisms. But she seems to carry in her an obsession with the preceding generation’s violence. For most of the trial, the bitter rancor she displays in the courtroom does her no good whatsoever and sometimes even does a disservice to her clients. Then, sometimes, this same unyielding vigilance saves her. She extracts from Suor Thi, the registrar of death, explanations that only he can provide. The explanations shed light on conflicting details in the detention documents related to Professor Phung Ton. Facing Mam Nai, Studzinsky has her moment of grace.

  “Remember that the civil parties are here and they want to know where our professor died!” shouts Duch, hammering the point for his former subordinate.

  The defendant hasn’t yet had time to sit down when Studzinsky launches her attack. She immediately grasps the opportunity that Duch has given her and urges that Mam Nai be given one last chance to reveal what he knows. Her quick reaction is powerful. In front of the professor’s widow, who is holding a handkerchief over her mouth, the former chief interrogator appears unsettled.

  “I wish to express my regrets to the family of Professor Phung Ton,” Mam Nai says.

  Mam Nai the denier, the doctrinaire hardliner, cracks. His body starts to shudder and he breaks down in sobs.

  I was enormously remorseful because my brothers and my parents suffered and died under the regime. My wife died. I think that it was a chaotic situation and that we can only be filled with regret. It’s the only thing we can do. Now, I try to find solace by thinking about my karma; I turn to my religious faith. Of course I had many regrets and I believe that through this court, the family of Professor Phung Ton is now aware of my feelings.

  Duch opened the breach in his former comrade’s defenses. But it was Silke Studzinsky who seized the decisive, fleeting moment in which good professional reflexes can swing a trial around and split open a man’s shell. Mam Nai’s moment—painful, brief, and human though it is—will long be remembered by many of us who watched the trial.

  When Studzinsky is finished, presiding judge Nil Nonn tries to push Mam Nai further. But the witness has already retreated into himself. He says that delving any deeper into that particular corner of his conscience would be like “shooting into the black night.” That’s all there is. Phung Ton’s family won’t get any new information about the circumstances of the professor’s interrogation or death. But for a minute or two, for the first and last time, the curt, provocative Mam Nai broke down. The survivor Bou Meng, who was harassed by Mam Nai, rubs his forehead. Leaving the courtroom, Mam Nai passes within a few feet of the professor’s daughter. She looks at him. He doesn’t look at her. He walks stiffly away, an old and disgraced soldier.

  CHAPTER 31

  SON SEN, DUCH, MAM NAI, PON: The men who ran M-13 and founded S-21 were all teachers. Revolutions, particularly those carried out on behalf of the “proletariat,” are always imagined, willed, and led by intellectuals. To those betrayals that tear families apart—the brother who denounces his sister-in-law, the child who denounces his father, the wife who denounces her husband—can be added the betrayal of the elite by its own members, intellectuals denouncing their peers.

  In the early ’70s, the Cambodian elite—that is, the aristocracy and those who passed their baccalaureates and had access to university education—was so small that its members frequently crossed paths. In court, the victims’ families often describe this privileged class’s self-destruction, its members crushed by a revolution that they either couldn’t or wouldn’t flee in time, or which they embraced only to then be suffocated by it.

  When Professor Phung Ton’s widow walks to the witness box, Duch stands. She greets everyone except him. He waits for her to sit before taking his seat. She embodies everything that the Revolution tried to eradicate: an educated, elegant, urban teachers’ daughter who worked in the civil service of the ancien régime. She represents everything Duch destroyed and everything that he most wants to be loved by. She calls the Khmer Rouge the “black-clad regime.” Those three words contain all her horror of the Revolution. Phung Ton’s widow feels no need to embark on a historical analysis of the legitimacy of Marxism; she harbors no naive nostalgia for some pseudo-egalitarian society. What she has is the kind of common-sense wisdom that comes from observing things with her own eyes: a regime that forces all women to get the same haircut and everyone to wear the same monochrome outfit can lead to only one thing: the end of happiness. If we were to reduce Pol Pot’s ideology to just his fashion sense, any talk about the glorious future he trumpeted would fall apart. Fashion according to Pol Pot spells misery without end. Idealistic and well-intentioned people continue to debate Communist ideology, but more pragmatic minds who give such rhetoric and Maoist casuistry short shrift merely have to look at the Khmer Rouge uniform to see the grim future promised by Communism. For Phung Ton’s wife, the clothes do indeed maketh the man. The regime’s idea of itself couldn’t have been clearer: it was the black-clad regime.

  When her father fell ill at the fo
rced-labor camp where they had been sent, Phung Ton’s widow was obliged to address a young guard with a show of respect Cambodians usually reserve for their elders. The guard shrugged her off with a revolutionary slogan: there was nothing to gain from keeping the old man, and nothing to lose from getting rid of him.

  “That isn’t what Cambodian culture is about,” says the seventy-year-old lady.

  Her father died. Then one of her seven children died. Then an uncle. Then an aunt. One day, she brought up the idea of eating a chicken. The young, black-clad guard told her not to talk about such “bourgeois food.” One of her sons was good at catching fish and tortoises in the swamp. He was punished for misconduct. Phung Ton’s wife was accused of being a liberal city-dweller. They told her to “construct herself.”

  “I didn’t know what ‘construct yourself’ meant.”

  ALL THIS TOOK PLACE thirty years ago, she says, but the suffering has only increased since then. “I have never been happy. I survive only because I’m on medication. Some people think I’m here for revenge. That’s not true. I’m here to see that justice is done for my husband, and to hear the truth: why did they commit such barbaric acts?”

  The court takes a recess. Duch talks with a member of his team. A moment later, he’s sitting alone on the defense bench. He looks across the room. The only person still there is Professor Phung Ton’s daughter, reading her notes. She doesn’t look at him. Eventually, Duch’s lawyer returns, ending the defendant’s solitude. Though she sits on her own, unlike Duch, the professor’s daughter never seems alone.

  Wearing a green blouse and dark, Western-style trousers and a jacket, Phung Ton’s daughter takes the stand. Duch doesn’t stand up for her. When the Khmer Rouge forced her to leave Phnom Penh and work in the fields, they also forced her to write her “biography.” Rashly, she hid nothing, hoping that her candor would help her father find them. She didn’t realize that such a “biography” could condemn its writer to death. By some good fortune, the Khmer Rouge didn’t make her pay for her honesty.