The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Time doesn’t resolve anything for Ouk Ket’s widow, either. “For the past thirty-two years, Ket’s absence has been unbearable. I miss him always,” she says, looking up to try to stop her tears. “The pain hasn’t faded; it has only gotten stronger. It’s like an ocean in front of you. The result, for me, has been a complete breakdown.”

  Ouk Ket’s daughter is older today than her father was when he died. She says that the day she put her finger on the S-21 register, a drop of poison entered her. Shortly after, she abandoned her studies. Like Kerry Hamill’s younger brother, she ended up haunted by wild and uncontrollable thoughts.

  “It was necessary for me to imagine it. Unfortunately, I imagined the worst.”

  When she found out that blood was taken from S-21 prisoners, she lost control. She sometimes feels as though she’s the only survivor of all the children killed at S-21. Whenever she watches a ceiling fan spinning, she sees American bombers overhead, which, of course, she never actually saw. A deep sense of revulsion has taken root in her. When she describes it, her voice becomes cold, arrogant even, to help her hide her internal disintegration. She thought about suicide, about jumping from the window without knowing why. She reassures the court, says she’s doing better. Yet a great sorrow hovers over Ouk Ket’s daughter and wife. The older one gets, says the daughter, echoing her mother, the more the poison spreads. “The only way to return to my life is to testify.”

  CHAPTER 33

  UNLIKE TIOULONG RAINGSY, LIM KIMARI, OU WINDY, AND OUK KET, Chum Narith wasn’t born into Phnom Penh’s upper class. He came from a background similar to Duch’s, with whom he became friends. Narith’s parents, though poor, wanted to give their children a good education. One of his younger brothers won a scholarship to study in France from 1960 to 1968. Narith received a similar offer, but the youngest boy was already in Paris and the family couldn’t afford to send both. So Narith, the responsible one, turned down the scholarship. He became a teacher in 1965, like Duch. Mam Nai was one of his colleagues. Then, in 1968, again like Duch, and like Mam Nai, and like professors Phung Ton and Chao Seng, Chum Narith was arrested on suspicion of having links with the Communist guerrillas.

  Chum Narith’s younger brother is among the witnesses to testify before the tribunal. Circumstances in Cambodia forced him to become a French citizen before returning to Cambodia in 1999. By the end of the 1960s, he says, Cambodian society was already split into “blue Khmers” and “red Khmers.” He draws a parallel between the situation in Cambodia and the uprisings then taking place in France. Cambodian intellectuals still had close ties with the former colonial power. They followed the events of 1968 closely and supported left-wing ideas. They opposed the social injustice that was widespread under the monarchy. Chum Narith’s stint in prison only strengthened his political commitment and his opposition to the regime, just as their respective prison terms did for Duch, Pon, and Mam Nai.

  From 1970 on, the civil war intensified and life became a lot harder. Refugees crowded into Phnom Penh, there were countless bombing raids, gas was scarce, and Cambodians went days on end without power. In 1973, there was an open revolt at the Pedagogical Institute. General Lon Nol’s police believed Chum Narith was the ringleader and went to arrest him at his home, but he had already disappeared into the maquis, along with Mam Nai and several other teachers.

  After the Khmer Rouge victory, Chum Narith joined its propaganda unit in Phnom Penh. On October 29, 1976, he was arrested, along with his younger brother, Sinareth, and Sinareth’s wife, Dong Sovannary. It turned out that one of the teachers with whom he had gone into the maquis had later been arrested and sent to S-21. There, he was tortured by Pon—another former colleague from the national education system—before he denounced Chum Narith in his confession.

  Chum Narith was accused of forming a group opposed to collectivization. At the trial, his younger brother asks the court how anyone can believe a confession obtained by torture. Yet despite this, he seems to want to believe that the charges against his older brother were true, as though Narith’s admissible arrest by a regime founded on lies, fabrication, and slander could mitigate his powerlessness and rage.

  Chum Narith was executed on January 1, 1977, after sixty-five days of prison and torture. His brother’s voice swells until it fills the room: “I don’t understand the point! If you want to kill, why not kill immediately?”

  Chum Sinareth also died at S-21. The ignominious sign around his neck bore the number 59. His date of execution is unknown. His wife, wearing Khmer Rouge clothes and a Khmer Rouge haircut, was number 18. All that remains of her is a photo.

  The youngest Chum brother happened to be in France in April 1975, and ever since he has been struggling with the sense of guilt so common among those who, by sheer luck or fortuitous circumstance, survived. He feels deep regret, he says, for not being intelligent enough, for not having the presence of mind, for misreading the situation, for failing to foresee the coming terror. But from Kigali to Phnom Penh, people never imagine the worst will actually happen, even when all the signs are there.

  Where were his brothers executed and buried? The question still haunts him. It wasn’t at Choeung Ek, which didn’t exist yet when they were killed. He wrote to Duch, asking him, but Duch replied that he didn’t know. The youngest brother doesn’t believe that Duch had no choice but to follow orders. He thinks Duch enjoyed his work; he thinks Duch was a predator.

  In Christianity, there is the story of Cain. He killed his brother, but Abel’s eyes followed him everywhere, to the point that he could never be at peace and had to ask someone to dig a hole and bury him in the earth. A French author once wrote: “And after they had shut the crypt upon his brow, / The eye was in the tomb and looked at Cain.” So even though he was buried, his brother’s eyes followed him into the grave; they followed the corpse. More than twelve thousand people died at S-21, which means twice that number of eyes. Twenty-four thousand eyes follow the defendant every day and ask him to explain. In Christianity, his sins are forgiven. But in Buddhism, good is rewarded with good. I believe that, right now, there are more than twenty-four thousand eyes following the defendant. There is nowhere he can go to hide from them.

  During the recess following Chum’s deposition, Duch stands and smiles. Members of the victims’ families have been testifying one after another, each account proving tenser and darker than the previous one. For the former executioner, there’s no way out. The sense of discomfort and contrition he showed early in the proceedings seems to have disappeared, as it has been continuously rebuffed by the victims, who communicate their mutual support to each other through the glass wall. The fierce and eloquent testimony given by Narith and Sinareth’s brother has galvanized them.

  Duch’s Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth, wanders among the rows of civil parties. He talks to Phung Ton’s widow. The professor’s daughter joins the conversation, which appears cordial. Kar Savuth is of the same generation as the professor, and belonged to the same Cambodian elite of the 1960s. Phung Ton had been his law professor. Lon Nol’s former minister of culture, whom the Americans evacuated on April 12, 1975, is in the audience. His elegant wife, who has all the poise and grace of the old, cultivated elite, had once been a student of the wife of Son Sen, head of Pol Pot’s security apparatus. Son Sen’s wife had once been a decent but strict woman, her former pupil tells me. Then she became a hard-nosed revolutionary and ended up devoured by the revolution she served.

  If it weren’t for all the adversities and betrayals, you’d think you were at a family reunion. Cambodia’s elite constituted a small world in which everyone knew everyone else and in which, before the Revolution, everyone’s path crossed everyone else’s. The story being written during the course of the trial is like an explosion in midair: how Cambodia’s intellectuals clung to the privileges that had allowed them to flourish even as the wings fell off and they found themselves hurtling toward the ground; how they allowed the flames of change to flicker to life among them, never imagining t
he conflagration to follow.

  “Many old friends were imprisoned at S-21,” says Duch.

  Chum was among those I betrayed. I really had to keep away from them. I didn’t want to see them. I couldn’t face it. As for the twenty-four thousand eyes, I understand that thinking, and it’s because of this that I accept that the civil parties point the finger at me. I am being very sincere at this moment. I feel compassion and I am filled with remorse. I honestly acknowledge and accept all the statements you have made.

  A little earlier during the trial, Duch pointed out that no steps were taken to alleviate the mental suffering of prisoners at S-21. The prisoners, he said, were considered no more than animals, or even less. Had he distinguished between friends and strangers, he would have been accused of consorting with the enemy. This, he said, was the trap preventing him from showing even the slightest degree of empathy for the prisoners. Nor had he wanted to risk showing any emotion, he said.

  Psychologists call this type of behavior “reaction formation.” Duch resorted to blind obedience, overzealousness, and total allegiance in an “over-adaptation to terror” in order to suppress his own fear and silence his own doubts.

  “How would you characterize this attitude of avoidance?” is how one of the judges poses the question to Duch.

  “I don’t know. I shut my eyes and ears. I didn’t want to see reality,” he says, his voice cracking slightly.

  “Was it cowardice?”

  “I think it was more than cowardice. I didn’t go to see my friends at S-21 because I didn’t know what to say to them. Certainly, I was a coward. But it goes further than that, because I betrayed my friends and teachers in order to survive. It was more than cowardice.”

  CHAPTER 34

  DUCH DOESN’T HAVE ANY PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS. He isn’t suffering from any neurosis, psychosis, or psychopathy. We cannot comfort ourselves by dismissing as deviants those men and women who perpetrated mass crimes in extreme political circumstances. Duch is neither mentally ill nor a monster, and that’s the problem. He wasn’t dangerous before 1970. And he most likely wasn’t dangerous after 1979. The same applies to Him Huy, Suor Thi, and Prak Khan. Duch will be punished for the rest of his days, because somebody must be punished. But he could be rehabilitated: the twenty years between the day S-21 was shut down and the day of his arrest prove it. What’s more, no one has questioned whether it’s safe to let Mam Nai and other former members of the S-21 staff—or the tens of thousands of former Khmer Rouge cadres who, for the past fifteen to thirty years, have been living freely alongside those they persecuted—to continue doing so.

  A year and a half before the start of the trial, the S-21 survivor Chum Mey told me that he could see no reason why Duch should be released. He wanted and demanded a severe sentence for his torturer. Yet he also seemed more worried about Duch’s safety than his own: “We are safe now. I wouldn’t be frightened if he were released. It’s the tribunal that should be worried: what will it do if he’s killed?”

  The psychologists have less trouble addressing political crime. Their training precludes them from believing that anyone is born a monster or devil.

  “Whether they sponsor it or carry it out themselves, people aren’t born torturers. They turn into them,” says the court-appointed psychologist.

  Every torturer who dehumanizes his victims was first dehumanized himself. This isn’t an excuse but rather the key to understanding the psychology of someone who commits a crime against humanity. A person can be dehumanized by experiencing or witnessing cultural humiliation or personal humiliation. The person then does everything he can to compensate for those humiliations and disappointments, to the point of denying the humanity of the person or class of people he deems responsible. The person who commits crimes against humanity first eradicates his own individuality before denying it in others. Duch always falls back on reason, on logic, on mathematical models. He has literally smashed his own personal identity, if I can put it that way, in order to make room for the only kind of identity that matters to him: the collective kind.

  One night after the trial, I was eating dinner in a café with some acquaintances who were passing through Phnom Penh. One of them confidently declared: “Duch is a pervert.”

  That seemed to settle it for him. He had found an explanation. The denial, the manipulation, the effort to control others, the desire to please, the striving to impress people for his own self-benefit: aren’t all these constituent parts of perversity in its broadest sense? And aren’t they all blatantly obvious in Duch? The answer to both questions, of course, is yes. But, alas, to say that this explains Duch’s actions is to mistake observation for explanation.

  “We could talk about the notion of perversity,” says the psychologist. “But then we’d simply have to work out where that comes from. Perversity doesn’t exist in and of itself.”

  The perversity explanation might provide some intellectual comfort, but it resolves nothing.

  We all develop “life strategies” with which to negotiate our inner contradictions and overcome the obstacles of life. Duch developed strategies first to serve the Khmer Rouge, then to survive it; his strategies included zealotry and compartmentalization. Today, he has psychological mechanisms that allow him to exist, or survive, both with and despite his crimes.

  In order to understand Duch’s actions, say the psychologists, we must examine the extreme way in which his collective and personal stories overlap. Duch’s psychology cannot be separated from the society around him, or from the collective history in which he has been swept up. Duch doesn’t exist ex nihilo. Both he and Cambodia went through “successive and massive acculturation,” followed by a brutal and radical transformation into the New Man: that identity manufactured and demanded by the Khmer Rouge in which the individual exists only for the group, in an atmosphere of mistrust and generalized fear, and with all emotions and personal thought eradicated. Either you adapted or you died. In ethno-psychiatric terms, Communism constitutes a “deculturation.” It flourishes in the uprooting.

  “The man who lives in a country under totalitarian rule has a different psychology than the man who lives in a democratic state,” says the expert.

  Five months into the trial, the quality of the silence in the courtroom has changed. No longer is it that breathless and dumbstruck silence that knows it is watching history being written, nor is it the solemn quiet of a legal drama. The silence that fills the courtroom now is that of fatigue, of weariness, of exhaustion with both the trial and Duch’s words. His performance has lost its shine. Now he sounds like he’s rambling aimlessly. David Chandler, who has dedicated so many years to studying the tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea, and who has spent more time immersed deep in the S-21 archives than anyone else, has another way of measuring this decline: he believes the Khmer Rouge leadership’s disconnect from reality, and the extent of the catastrophe that its reign brought about, points to its “profound stupidity.”

  Duch reveals the limits of his own intelligence and cunning. On the stand for a final cross-examination concerning his personality, he maintains his story; other than a few minor details and dates, he no longer has anything important to say that he hasn’t already said many times over. He talks in tedious, ineffectual circles. He has lost his mental agility. He is a shadow of the man who, five months previously, had the upper hand. He no longer cares, and he no longer holds our attention—his luster is tarnished. After forty minutes, he ends his own deposition and lets the presiding judge take over. The trial isn’t over and yet it’s already over. We face the remaining six days the way a boat enters port: motoring slowly, sails furled. The last six days have been set aside to hear defense witnesses. Duch’s mother, who is on the list, won’t testify. On the penultimate day of the trial, the defendant reiterates his apology:

  I must bear responsibility for the crimes I committed. As I’ve repeatedly said, you can’t hide an elephant under a rice basket. The enormity of the crimes committed can’t be concealed bene
ath two leaves from the tamarind tree. I think that’s all I need to say to the court, and that’s the real truth.

  Duch respects the two shrinks who examined him. Their work, he says, “is based on purely scientific, unbiased reasoning.” His lawyer François Roux also praises the experts’ psychological report; at the start of the trial, Roux had framed the issue thus: “Have you ever known a child who dreams of growing up to be an executioner?” From the first day of the trial, Roux warned the victims that his client would be unable to answer all their questions, and that there was no simple, unambiguous, comforting answer to the single question haunting the survivors and the families of those who perished: Why? The lawyer tried to prevent the victims from harboring false hopes. Yet in so doing, he laid bare his own: “Will we be up to the task of not only giving back to the victims their humanity, but of readmitting to the human race someone who has abandoned it? That is the great challenge facing our court.”

  At first, Duch keeps his lawyer’s dream alive. He takes care to politely greet the judges, then the prosecution, then the civil parties. Walking past the long window separating the court from the gallery, he sees the survivors Chum Mey and Bou Meng, and salutes them. They smile and return his greeting. When the first lawyer representing the victims’ families addresses him, Duch gives him his undivided attention. He strives to be cooperative, to give full and detailed answers. He is even more considerate with the next lawyer, who wants to know how Duch ranked different transgressions at S-21: “I will try to answer. If I don’t, please ask me again.”