The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  SUOR THI IS WEARING a gray suit jacket that looks uncannily like the one worn by several witnesses over the past few days. The jacket looks well-made, but Suor Thi is drowning in it, just as those who testified before him were. A few days earlier, the tribunal employees in charge of preparing the witnesses needed a jacket. Pressed for time, they found the one Suor Thi is now wearing, forgotten by a prosecutor. They were happy with the result: not only did the jacket protect witnesses from the chill of the air-conditioning, but they looked nicer in it, too.

  Like their compatriots in the public gallery, many of the witnesses are from the countryside. Their poorly made and badly cut shirts, the breast pockets misshapen by the objects they carry in them, give them away. Their shirts are sometimes so oversize you could fit two people in them, and their wrinkled collars fall limply. Through these shapeless clothes, you can make out undershirts clinging to their dry bodies.

  At first, these simply dressed farmers brightened the sterile atmosphere that prevailed in the court. Then, midway through the trial, the court started making them wear the jacket, and the atmosphere lapsed back into that gray gloom where everyone looks the same, like detainees.

  When a prisoner arrived at S-21 and had his photo taken, a number would be hung around his neck. Bou Meng’s wife, Ma Yoeun, wore number 331, indicating that she was the 331st person to enter the prison that month. In her photo, Ma Yoeun wears her hair in the only style available to women in Democratic Kampuchea: a bob reaching halfway down her neck and parted square in the middle—though a few coquettish rebels pushed the part slightly to one side. In the photo, Ma Yoeun is a pretty twenty-five-year-old with a slightly frightened look in her eyes—a normal reaction in someone who has been arrested and just had her blindfold removed. The photo taken at S-21 is the only trace Bou Meng has left of his wife, and though it was taken by those who killed her, he never parts from it. She never leaves his wallet. Bou Meng has remarried, and his devoted second wife is twenty years his junior. But his memory is unfailing in its devotion to his first love.

  After being photographed, Vann Nath and his fellow prisoners had their compulsory black clothes taken from them. The prisoners were left wearing nothing but their underpants. They were no longer worthy of the Glorious Revolution, and their clothes would be redistributed. This also prevented them from hanging themselves with the clothing.

  Once the detainees had been identified, registered, photographed, and relieved of their revolutionary attire, Suor Thi handed them over to a guard, who took them to their cells. Sometimes he went to the cells himself to check prisoners off his list. But when he did, he says, he paid little attention to the conditions in which the men were incarcerated:

  I know they suffered a lot. They were extremely thin, malnourished, and the air circulation was terrible. But I didn’t really worry about it. My job was only to check them off the list and then hurry back to my office. I had just enough time to notice that they had become extremely weak.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE S-21 PRISON WAS SET UP IN A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL. It is made up of five buildings shaped like a giant E. Buildings A, B, C, and D, which form the perimeter, rise over three floors, each with wide balconies running alongside the classrooms-turned-jail-cells. In the middle of the structure, the fifth block is a big, single-story house with a covered inner courtyard that divides the space into two distinct areas.

  Bou Meng was incarcerated on the top floor of Building C. For months, he slept on the floor, weak with hunger to the point of feeling dizzy. When lizards crawled across the ceiling, he prayed they would fall on him so that he could eat them. Once, to his horror, the guards threatened to skin him alive. And like Vann Nath, like so many other prisoners in so many other prisons in Democratic Kampuchea, he kept asking himself, “What crime have I committed?”

  Bou Meng shared the cell with about forty other detainees, including, for a while, a few foreigners. They all had long and dirty hair. They were covered in lice and infected sores. And though the guards tolerated no noise, they sometimes whispered among themselves. They were searched every night. Once a week—or maybe every fortnight, he can’t remember exactly—they were hosed down. The floor flooded, so all the prisoners took off their shorts. Everyone was naked. Sometimes the guards would make fun of their genitals, remembers Bou Meng, apologizing to the court for mentioning it. They were treated worse than dogs or pigs, he says.

  Vann Nath was thrown into a cell on the second floor of Building B. In his recollection, the collective “shower” took place twice a week. Getting undressed while in leg irons was difficult. Those damned bindings were so uncomfortable, he remembers with a grimace. It took him thirty minutes just to carry out the maneuver. When a tactless judge asks him how he accomplished it, Vann Nath, as supple as ever, raises a leg to a right angle to demonstrate.

  A month went by in these inhuman conditions. Sitting down without the warden’s permission was forbidden. On a blackboard were chalked orders to not talk or to listen to the guards. The prisoners were served a meager bowl of gruel at eight in the morning and another at eight in the evening. They had to relieve themselves in the same room in which they were shackled, in an old munitions container, an iron box some fifteen centimeters deep. Vann Nath was covered with lesions. He couldn’t stop scratching himself. He, too, hoped that a gecko would fall from the ceiling. But if it did, he’d have to gulp it down right away without being seen by the guard. If not, they would beat him. Unfortunately for him, Vann Nath was too far from the window, where the insects and lizards clustered: “Death loomed over us. People died one after another. They took the bodies away at ten o’clock. We didn’t even care. We were like animals.”

  Vann Nath counted as many as sixty-five prisoners in his cell, lying on the ground in rows, their ankles shackled to a long metal rod. In one month, he saw four of his cellmates die. Sometimes the number in his cell fell to forty, when others were taken away and never seen again. The hardest thing was knowing that you hadn’t done anything wrong, he says. The hardest thing was making up stories in order to survive, in order to avoid being tortured.

  “DID YOU CONSIDER IT an ordinary type of job, or a special one?” Judge Lavergne asks a former prison guard on the witness stand.

  “From what I saw, it was an ordinary type of job.”

  “What was ‘ordinary’ about it?”

  “The Angkar assigned me to stand guard. I did the same thing all the time.”

  “If you were asked today to do an ordinary job of that nature, would you do it again?”

  “No! I wouldn’t!”

  The public gallery bursts into laughter.

  “What does the word ‘Angkar’ mean for you? Is it an ordinary word or does it evoke fear?”

  “The term ‘Angkar’ was just an ordinary word used at the time. I wasn’t frightened to use it, because it was widely used.”

  “And the word ‘pity,’ was that used?”

  “I never once heard the word ‘pity’ used at S-21. Not once.”

  “Did prisoners ask you for help?”

  “Yes, they asked me for help. But I told them I couldn’t. It wasn’t up to me.”

  “And was that an ordinary job?”

  “I only remember some parts of the job. I don’t remember the details.”

  “You spent almost four years at S-21. Are the memories you have ordinary or painful ones?”

  “I suffered during my time there, but I had no choice. I couldn’t run away. I didn’t realize that the regime was exterminating a large part of the population. I was just trying to survive.”

  “Are the memories painful because you suffered, or because others did? Or was it just ordinary suffering?”

  “The suffering at S-21 was immense, because we had to work hard. We had no choice.”

  “Was the suffering worse for you or for the prisoners?”

  “The prisoners suffered more than the staff.”

  The daily tedium of the trial lulls its participants into forgettin
g the magnitude of the crime. But after hearing four former S-21 officers on the stand, Judge Lavergne is left seething by the way their testimony reinforces the banality of evil. Four months into Duch’s trial, the judge continues to guard against any slump in the collective sense of outrage. We’re told a process of dehumanization was required, to enable such crimes. The judge wishes to ensure we remain emotionally invested, if restrained, throughout the trial. The defense lawyer’s job is to make us see Duch’s humanity and thus underscore his potential for rehabilitation. Regardless, the judge insists that the trial’s moral compass remain the solemn and uncompromising refusal to accept the transgressions that took place at S-21.

  Each person at the prison had his own, strictly defined tasks. The warden Him Huy’s relationship with the interrogators was not a close one. He oversaw the officers who guarded the cells, but not the prisoners themselves. When an interrogator wanted one of the detainees, he gave the prisoner’s name to Suor Thi, who would tell Him Huy in which cell and in which building the guards could find him. In return, the interrogators informed Suor Thi in which individual cell the prisoner was to be kept during his interrogation. Once it was over, the interrogator sent the prisoner back to the group cell without going through Suor Thi.

  “Whenever a prisoner died in the cell, I received a medical report and then made the necessary adjustment to the list,” explains the dull, conscientious bureaucrat Suor Thi.

  When the medical unit wanted blood from prisoners, they put in a request to Hor, who asked Duch, since no prisoner could be removed without Duch’s authorization. I did not personally witness any blood-taking, but all those prisoners who had blood taken died. Hor then received a report with a list of names from the medical unit. I checked those names off my list and that was the end of it.

  Suor Thi’s testimony triggers a gasp in the gallery, but the soundproof glass wall separating the former registrar and the tribunal from the public prevents the court from hearing it.

  The media go after the interrogators and the guards, because theirs is the raw story; they can provide the narrative and imagery behind the brutality and killing. The media is less interested in Suor Thi, even though he personifies the silent bureaucracy that underpinned the crime. Suor Thi has the accuracy of an accountant and the cold meticulousness of his former boss, Duch. No one spoke to more people condemned to die than Suor Thi.

  IN ONE OF THE PHOTOS taken inside one of the group cells, you can make out a tangle of men lying on the floor in the background. One of them, his arm folded beneath his head, seems to have a blanket. In the foreground, another man, in a shirt, is sitting up and looking at the lens.

  “I don’t see how that man could be sitting. It wasn’t allowed. Even crying wasn’t allowed,” says Chum Mey, flushed with anger.

  Along with Bou Meng and Vann Nath, Chum Mey, aged seventy-six, is the third and final still-living survivor of S-21. In the courtroom, he stands up and, with his hands pressed together in front of his face in sampeah, the traditional Khmer greeting, he turns toward the Buddhist monks sitting in the front row, then to the rest of the public gallery, which on this particular day is filled with students. When he tells the story of the exodus of April 1975, during which his two-year-old son died, no detail seems to him too trivial. Chum Mey has repeated his story so many times over the past thirty-five years that he remembers even the smallest detail. The spirited, intense, uninterrupted flow of his speech contrasts sharply with Vann Nath’s sober and sparse monologue. When he reconstructs the terrible days he spent in the individual interrogation cell, Chum Mey stares ahead, his eyes filled with pain. When he describes how thin he was, his voice rises at the end of his sentence to a pitch so high it sounds like a soprano’s vocal scale. He describes hearing voices shouting at him: “You sons of bitches, the Angkar will destroy you all! Don’t worry about your families!” His hands were tied, his eyes blindfolded, his ankles in chains.

  Chum Mey remembers sitting in a room into which he had been dragged by the ear from his cell. Someone took off the blindfold that had covered his eyes from the cell to the interrogation room. He saw fresh blood on the ground. His interrogators asked him how many people in his network had joined the CIA and the KGB. Chum Mey had no idea what the CIA was. Or the KGB. He had heard those terms before, but he didn’t know what they meant. For the Khmer Rouge, the enemies of its enemies were also its enemies. Thus, they denounced both the American CIA and the Soviet KGB. The Americans were the imperialists par excellence, of course. But the Soviets and their Vietnamese allies were dangerous, expansionist reactionaries with whom the Chinese and their Khmer Rouge allies were engaged in a struggle for the mantle of international Communism. As the “highest tower of proletarian truth,” the Communist Party of Kampuchea considered Vietnam and the Soviet Union like “bones stuck in their throat that had to be removed,” as Duch wrote in a letter to a very high-ranking prisoner.

  All this gave a humble handyman like Chum Mey a great many enemies to learn about in short order. Formerly a tractor mechanic in Phnom Penh, he had been working maintenance in a clothing factory when he was arrested. He tried to show deference to his captors by using reverent forms of address, even calling them the Khmer equivalent of “sir.” He got a hundred lashes for his efforts. He was to address them as “brothers.” Then Comrade Hor, Duch’s deputy, rolled up his sleeves and began beating him with a stick. When Chum Mey tried to protect himself, they broke his fingers. Then they clamped electric wires to his earlobes. The wires ran not to a manual generator, as Duch has claimed, but directly from the wall sockets to Chum Mey’s ears.

  “Kyoukyoukyoukyoukyou . . .” emits Chum Mey, smacking his tongue against his palate in imitation of the electric shocks, before miming how his eyeballs jumped out of their sockets. “Duch didn’t beat me personally,” he says. “If he had, I doubt I would ever have seen the light of day again.”

  No prisoner at S-21 was addressed by his name alone. Instead, these survivors were addressed as a-Meng, a-Nath, or a-Mey. In Khmer, to use the diminutive prefix a- when addressing a man is a sign of contempt. A-Mey describes again how he was called a son of a bitch. The presiding judge asks him to watch his language. Tell us about the torture but don’t swear is the message.

  Chum Mey was beaten and insulted for twelve days and twelve nights. A guard sat on his head. His toenails were torn out, a process that took two days. Presiding Judge Nil Nonn won’t tolerate swearing but doesn’t flinch at gory details.

  “Were the toenails ripped out entirely, or just partially?” he asks. “Did they grow back?” The survivor is now standing in the middle of the courtroom. Someone asks the cameraman to zoom in on his feet, and in an instant, the courtroom is a circus. It doesn’t matter which courtroom I’m in—Arusha, Freetown, or Phnom Penh—I’ve seen it happen time and again.

  Finally, Chum Mey confessed. The torture came to an end. Before his imprisonment, he hadn’t known that the CIA and the KGB had even existed. Now he admitted to working for them both. What’s more, the pain brought on by the beatings had become sufficiently unbearable for him to remember the names of his many accomplices. He named sixteen of them. No one could save anyone else, he says. It was every man for himself: “They just told me to think about my network. I didn’t have much time to respond. I don’t know if others had denounced me, if that’s why I was arrested.”

  It’s more than likely. Chum Mey’s boss, the director of the factory where he worked, was arrested before him. His deputy followed. Then another employee. Then Chum Mey. They were all dots on one of those “lines” that had to be erased.

  IN A HOUSE SITUATED behind Building A, Bou Meng was forced to lie on his stomach. The windows and door were shut. Someone asked him to pick the stick with which he’d like to be beaten.

  “I said, ‘That’s for you to choose, brother.’”

  It was the chief interrogator, Mam Nai, a man with pimply skin covered in red rash, who started, says Bou Meng. Then someone else took over. They heaped insult
s on him. They made him count the strokes. When his lacerated skin began to bleed, someone threw salt water on his wounds. Sometimes, as many as five interrogators unleashed their fury on him at once. They threw jackfruit skins at his head. After the beatings, they sometimes gave him tablets, so-called medicines produced by the Glorious Revolution. Bou Meng calls the medicine “rabbit pellets.”

  Bou Meng raises a hand to his forehead, looks up to the ceiling, pulls out a handkerchief, continues. Duch sits perfectly straight in his chair, his attention unflagging, his eyes fixed on the survivor. He drinks more water than usual.

  “I didn’t know anything about any CIA or KGB networks. I didn’t know what to say. I would be happy if 50 percent or even 60 percent of justice had been done. Because I had committed no offense,” says a visibly upset Bou Meng.

  For thirty years, this thought has been boring through his brain like a gimlet: what crime had he committed? He had done every single thing that the Angkar had asked of him. Yet his torturers told him again and again that it was pointless to ask himself such questions, since the “Angkar was like a pineapple”—it had hundreds of eyes that saw everything, everywhere.

  One day, Bou Meng was taken to Building D. He was electrocuted until he lost consciousness. They woke him by throwing water on him. But he still didn’t talk. So, weary of waiting, his tormentors ended up writing his confession for him. All he had to do was sign. Remembering this, he says he would’ve preferred to die of malaria in the jungle. Then he massages his forehead with Tiger Balm:

  I don’t remember what was in my confession. I had conflicted feelings at the time. I was fearful, I was worried, I did what I was ordered to do. They had absolutely no reason to suspect me of being a CIA or KGB agent. I signed with my hand. But in my heart of hearts, I did not confess.