The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Including Duch.

  But at the last minute, the government decided that noble Chaktomuk Hall wasn’t spacious enough and that holding the trials there would cause traffic problems. So the government generously suggested—or rather decided—to move the tribunal to a military base on the outskirts of town, some forty minutes by car from the city center. In symbolic terms, there’s something almost wanton about the turnaround.

  However this exile from the city center has done the tribunal no harm in terms of space or attendance. Its public gallery is by far the largest and most comfortable of the seven international courts established in Africa and Europe over the past two decades. In fact, the five-hundred-seat amphitheater is so vast that we observers end up watching much of the proceedings on the flat-screen televisions installed in the gallery, rather than directly. Witnesses in the courtroom have their backs to us when they take the stand, so we only see their faces on the screens. It may seem strange, but we watch on television the trial taking place in the courtroom before us.

  Every day, dozens of flashlights, plastic water bottles, pots of Tiger Balm, cigarette lighters, and various other provisions accumulate on the shelves next to the metal detector at the entrance to the public gallery. Hundreds of villagers are bused in by the tribunal’s Public Affairs Section or by local associations. One of the first things that these villagers learn when coming face to face with international justice is that international justice considers dangerous or discourteous items that are practical or essential for villagers: water, ointment, and newspapers are not allowed.

  Three flags hang above the judges’ heads: that of the Kingdom of Cambodia, with its restrictive motto “Nation, Religion, King”; that of the United Nations, with its fragile olive branches of peace; and that of the tribunal itself, with its cumbersome name—the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia—on which the UN olive branches curl around a Khmer prince from Angkor times sitting cross-legged and holding a sword in his right hand, tip pointed to the sky. The judges, three Cambodians and two Westerners, thus find themselves under allegiance to three discrete entities: to their country (or host country), to the United Nations, and to themselves. Some say that holding multiple allegiances keeps a person from making extremist choices. This precarious triple fealty, however, hovers over the judges like damnation over the heads of churchgoers.

  To enter the gallery, spectators must pass through two metal detectors. Once inside, a massive, soundproofed, plate-glass window separates them from the courtroom. Five guards stand sentry inside the vast public gallery.

  If repression can be ranked by degrees, then the tribunal’s security detail is certainly at the lower, more benign end of the scale. The sentries in Phnom Penh are nothing like those at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, who, elsewhere and in other circumstances, wouldn’t seem out of place in the darkest of militias. As for those guarding the tribunals of the Third World, a cheerful nonchalance often belies their uniforms and regulations. A Dutch guard is much ruder and infinitely more hostile than a Khmer, Sierra Leonean, or Tanzanian one. Wherever they’re from, though, they’re all exposed to the same crushing boredom.

  There is little chance of any trouble arising at the tribunal, and none at all of an attack. But if there’s no threat of trouble, then it must be prevented with even greater zeal. The tedium is as great for the public as it is for the tribunal staff, and one way to break it is to ban something new. One nuisance specific to Phnom Penh is the ban on Tiger Balm, an ointment as precious to those who work in Khmer fields as lipstick is to Parisian women. Yet a guard at the last checkpoint before the courtroom quickly ferrets out the aromatic rub.

  Inside, some guards work just as zealously to impose a proper sense of decorum on the public. Shutting your eyes is forbidden, as is raising a knee above the back of the seat in front. Letting your eyelids droop was also banned at Nuremberg in 1945, as was crossing your legs if you were sitting in the front row. Yet despite the intense security during the Nazi trials, the journalist Rebecca West described how one of her female colleagues once smuggled into the courtroom a loaded pistol in her jacket sleeve. Nothing so sensational happened in Phnom Penh. But the occasional buzz of a vibrating cell phone, or whiff of menthol, or magazine sticking out from beneath a notebook reminds us, with reassuring regularity, of how one can always make a mockery of law and order.

  Most of the people in the public gallery have skin the color of mahogany, of burnt umber or old leather—colors that give them away as country folk.

  Their presence alone is a blithe challenge to the endless crush of rules and regulations. The only thing that equals the surprise a Khmer peasant feels when his Tiger Balm is confiscated is his bewilderment on being scolded for napping. One day a woman falls asleep on her neighbor’s shoulder. She can’t help it: she had to leave her village at one in the morning to make the session. The guard tries to shake her awake. He fails and, flummoxed, gives up. Old farming women, as supple as they are slight, curl up on their chairs in that position so natural to Khmers but so awkward for everyone else: with their legs folded back, in parallel and off to one side so as not to offend Buddha. And not even the most zealous guard dares prevent people from kicking off their sandals. In Asia, even the rich go barefoot.

  For those bused in from the nation’s rice paddies, no courtroom rule stays sacred for very long. With a blissful lack of awareness, they ignore the rule about not standing until after the president of the tribunal has stood, just as they ignore the diktat that no one should leave until the last judge has exited the court. From the first recess on the first day of the trial, the guards are spectacularly overwhelmed, and there’s a cheerful, gratifying buzz when, much to the guards’ consternation, everybody gets up at once. It’s a metaphorical victory of the people over the mighty and a refreshing sight, like a revolution without the dogma, or a massive jailbreak. Throughout the rest of the trial, the guards never once succeed in calming the ruckus kicked up by these common folk. Watching the guards, arms dangling by their sides, stumped by their inability to corral the cheerful flood of people, is a daily and secret pleasure; one that lets you believe, even for a fleeting moment, in freedom.

  One day, while Duch is giving a painstaking analysis of the Party’s propaganda machine in the courtroom, an eye-catching group of observers swarms into the public gallery. All of them are wearing the same T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the tribunal, and their presence makes the gallery feel like a more cheerful rendition of a Communist party meeting. Scores of baseball caps, T-shirts, and notebooks bearing the court’s name had just been manufactured and distributed. Present-day Cambodia is run by former Communists, including some notorious erstwhile Khmer Rouge, and certain habits, such as producing propaganda for the masses, die hard. The four hundred people brought in every day from different parts of the country or from the schools and universities of Phnom Penh sometimes seem like a perfect example of mass political mobilization.

  Still, despite all its quirks, Duch’s trial will give thirty thousand Cambodians the chance to spend at least a day inside this court, unique in their country. No other international trial has had an audience as vast and wide-ranging as this one.

  THE CRIMES COMMITTED BY the Khmer Rouge are thirty-five years old, and the trial draws members of at least three generations. First, there are those who came of age in the 1970s, when the Communist guerrillas seized power. For the Cambodians among them, this was their greatest misfortune. For many Western Communist sympathizers of that generation, the rise of the Khmer Maoists in the midst of the Cold War became a focal point of their political activism—until it transformed their utopia into a killing field.

  Then there are those who came of age in the 1980s and for whom Pol Pot, deposed but still a threat, stood alongside Stalin and Hitler to complete the twentieth century’s blood-soaked totalitarian triumvirate.

  Finally, there are those born while international Communism was dying its ugly death and who learned about M
arxism-Leninism the way you might learn about steam engines, with their old-fashioned jargon. For them, the most interesting thing about the twentieth century’s blood-stained ideological experiment is the case studies it now provides, where we can see international justice at work.

  All these disparate elements converge around Duch’s case. I was born the year Duch swore allegiance to the Communist Party. I was twelve years old when the Vietnamese Communists put an end to his crimes, twenty-two when the Berlin Wall fell, and thirty-one when Pol Pot died and Cambodia’s civil war, then as old as me, ended. Many in the gallery had personal reasons to be here. I had none other than having turned twenty years old during the Cold War.

  This trial brings us all together. Sometimes we connect, sometimes we avoid each other—but all of us are in it together.

  CHAPTER 3

  BOU MENG WAS TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD IN 1970, the year he answered Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s rallying cry against the forces that had just deposed him. The following year, Bou Meng went into the maquis, bands of guerrilla fighters, by then controlled by the enigmatic Khmer Rouge. The fledgling revolutionary movement was quick to make use of his artistic talents, and he soon found himself painting portraits of Marx and Lenin, mimeographs of which were distributed to Khmer Rouge combat units so that their fighters could recognize the founding fathers of Communism. Four years later, on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. Bou Meng cheered the victory, but his cheers turned to dismay when the movement forced the capital’s entire population to evacuate. The following year, his superiors were arrested, and Bou Meng started losing confidence in this revolution that rewarded its soldiers so poorly.

  “I wore the black shirt, but my spirit wasn’t in it,” he tells the court.

  In the land of the Khmer Rouge, when a commander was arrested, his men soon followed. It was known as a “line.” A few months after the fall of his commander, Bou Meng and his wife were transferred to what he dubs a “hot reeducation” cooperative: in effect, a forced labor camp run with ruthless discipline. Like hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, Bou Meng became a prisoner. He dug canals and built dykes until he was on the verge of collapse. Then he had the good fortune to be transferred first to carpentry, then to the vegetable garden. He grew cabbages and eggplants for the collective. In May of 1977 (or maybe it was June, he doesn’t remember exactly) he was slaving away in a vegetable patch when a group of black-shirted men jumped out of a jeep like a murder of crows. They told Bou Meng and his wife to pack their things; they were going to become teachers at the School of Fine Arts. Bou Meng was thrilled—he was a painter, not a gardener. He and his wife cheerfully got into the vehicle. The vehicle drove away from the camp, then stopped. They were ordered to get out, to sit down, and to put their hands behind their backs. They were tied up and blindfolded. Bou Meng’s wife began to cry. He sank to the depths of despair.

  In the courtroom, Bou Meng pauses in his story. He brings a hand to his forehead, as though the ghosts of the past are pounding too hard, as though he’s about to lose consciousness. Duch is in the dock, sitting upright and perfectly still.

  Unlike Bou Meng, Vann Nath—also a painter—didn’t serve in the army. He was just nineteen when the Khmer Rouge won the war. But on December 30, 1977, like Bou Meng, he was arrested by men in black by order of the Angkar—“The Organization,” in Khmer—the secretive, all-knowing, and all-powerful body that controlled everything in the new “Democratic Kampuchea.”

  Vann Nath is just sixty-three when he takes the witness stand, but he looks feeble and tired. He’s a tall man and he wears a billowing, pale yellow shirt. He greets the judges, the prosecutors, and the defense. Duch doesn’t move. The painter’s hair is cut very short and has gone gray. His eyebrows, slightly disheveled at their outer edges but still black near his nose, are the predominant feature of his face, the roundness of which is emphasized by his full cheeks that have only just begun to sag with age. His deep voice contrasts with the presiding judge’s high-pitched one. Vann Nath speaks with his eyes almost closed and glued to the ground. He continually massages his stomach. Even though he has told it countless times over the past thirty years, emotion overcomes Vann Nath almost as soon as he begins to tell his story. Like Bou Meng, he raises his hand to his forehead, grabs a handkerchief, and pulls himself together before continuing.

  Vann Nath spent his first night of detention bound in leg irons in a pagoda-turned-prison. Then he was taken away on a motorcycle. Upon reaching his destination, he was interrogated for the first time. “You’re a traitor,” they told him. How many secret meetings had he held? “You’d better remember. The Angkar never makes mistakes.” To help convince him, his interrogators pulled out electrical wires. Vann Nath saw bloodstains and plastic bags hanging on the wall. So, how many meetings? They gave him his first shock. He passed out. Someone threw water in his face. He came to. Then a second shock. He passed out again. Then another, and another after that. Afterward, he couldn’t remember what answers he had given his torturers. He was ordered to get into a truck, where he was bound to six other men. There were eighteen prisoners in total. At around midnight, the truck pulled up somewhere. (They were on Street 360 in Phnom Penh, but Vann Nath didn’t know that.) The prisoners were weak and exhausted. They couldn’t stand. They were made to sit on the ground in two rows. Then they were roped together by their necks, blindfolded, and, despite their exhaustion, ordered to march single-file. Voices taunted them as they walked blindly, each man with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front. A question barreled around Vann Nath’s head: what had he done wrong?

  It was January 7, 1978. He had just entered S-21.

  IN THE CAMBODIAN CAPITAL, emptied of its inhabitants, the secret police established a security perimeter around S-21 that extended far beyond the prison’s single building. The prison itself constituted a small section of a much larger zone. A whole neighborhood was sealed off, with no one allowed in or out. Those who worked at S-21 lived, ate, and worked in the zone without ever leaving. Vehicles delivering prisoners didn’t go straight to the gates of the detention center itself. They usually stopped somewhere in the vicinity in order to protect the absolute secrecy of its location.

  Him Huy, a member of the guard unit, escorted newcomers from the arrival point to the prison itself, where he handed them over to Suor Thi, whose job it was to note down their “biography” and to register them in the system.

  In the courtroom, Suor Thi looks like a bank teller. He sits straight, his face expressionless and smooth, his demeanor mechanical without being cold, as though he’s put his smile away in a box labeled POINTLESS AND DAMAGING EXPRESSIONS. He sits with his arms crossed and his eyes lowered, perfectly still, showing no emotion. Only his constantly blinking eyelids break his otherwise statue-like stillness, though he does sometimes glance at the judge interrogating him:

  After I took their names, the prisoners were sent to the photographers. Then they were blindfolded again and taken to the cells. I had to keep a record of which rooms in which building they were being held, so that we could keep track of the number of prisoners per cell and to make it easier for the interrogators.

  In the English interpretation, Suor Thi uses the word “rooms” to denote the shared cells. The prison clerk describes his workday in the same neutral, even tones that someone managing a large hotel might use to describe the number of short- and longer-term guests currently checked in. Once a photograph of a new prisoner had been taken, Suor Thi attached it to the short “biography” he had written. He was twenty-four years old, and his job was to keep the list of detainees at S-21 up to date, to record the names of the incoming and outgoing prisoners. In other words, he was the registrar of death.

  Suor Thi didn’t deal directly with the important prisoners, who were received separately. He was given their names for the register only later by Hor, the number two at the prison and the person in charge of its daily administration. Nor did foreign prisoners pass through Suor Thi’s office.
There was a different procedure when the personnel of S-21 themselves were arrested and thrown into irons in the very place where, the day before, they had been carrying out their tasks. They were led in with their faces covered so that their colleagues wouldn’t recognize them. As for the children who ended up in S-21, there was no point writing down their biographies or taking snapshots of them, says Suor Thi: “I paid no attention to the children because I had to pay such close attention to the prisoners. None of the children would survive. All of them would be killed.”

  Suor Thi reminds the court that he was alone in his task and that sometimes his workload was considerable. He had to be available to the prison at all times, without exception. On a normal day, he would process between one and twenty people. But he remembers that in 1978, prisoners flooded in by the hundreds. It was during this period that some prisoners were photographed inside the cells themselves, an anomaly that was against the center’s strict regulations. At the time, the engine of death was at full throttle, overheating even. In all the hustle and bustle, a new arrival might inadvertently be taken to their cell without having been photographed first. So they tried to work through the backlog by taking the photos inside the cells, explains the former registrar.

  While Suor Thi is describing the registration and record-keeping processes, Duch is nodding. Leaning forward with his chest over the table and wearing an elegant white shirt, he shows no sign of scorn. There’s a look of concentration on his face, of concern, a look he reserves for those he respects or deems legitimate. During the court’s recess, he seems very relaxed, laughing with his Cambodian lawyer Kar Savuth, under the curious eyes of one of the two policemen guarding him.