The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  No single image can illustrate my remorse and suffering. I feel so much pain. I will never forget. I always say that a bad decision can lead in the blink of an eye to a lifetime of grief and remorse. I defer to the judgment of this tribunal for the crimes that I have committed. I will not blame my superiors. I will not blame my subordinates. I will not shirk my responsibilities. Although these crimes were committed under the authority of my superiors, they fall within the purview of my own role at S-21. On the ideological and psychological levels, I am responsible. I carried out Party policy and I regret it.

  Bou Meng nods approvingly. Duch looks like he’s trembling. The judges barely look in his direction. He removes his spectacles and leans on the desk with both arms. He looks at each person in turn, first left, then right, giving most of his attention to the prosecutor’s bench.

  “I never liked my job,” he says.

  When he describes his arrest in May 1999, Duch’s breathing grows heavy and he sounds ill. He finally mentions the sheet of paper he’s been clasping since the start of his address to the court. It’s a drawing that he has made, he says. He would like to show it to the judges. He sits back down while waiting for their permission. People have been waiting thirty years to hear Duch speak out in his own defense. The public gallery is abuzz. Yet the moment is utterly devoid of emotion.

  Duch tries to explain his peculiar drawing. He points to three chairs on the sheet of paper, which he says are occupied by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, and Ta Mok—Brothers Number One, Two, and Four of the Khmer Rouge leadership. Along with Brother Three, Ieng Sary, this was the structure of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, explains Duch. The presiding judge keeps his eyes glued to the defendant. The other judges look away. Duch’s first address to the court is a resounding flop.

  AFTER ARRIVING IN PHNOM PENH on June 21, 1975, Duch, like everybody else, went through a few days of political training. He was taught “the revolutionary conception of the world,” he says in French. Each person was made to write down his “biography” and ideology. Celebrating the “great victory of April 17,” the date the Communist insurrection took Phnom Penh, was mandatory. So was committing oneself in writing to the good of the collective, to the teachings of socialism, and to the continuation of the Revolution. Once a person had written down his biography and commitments, he read them out to his comrades, who were then encouraged to ask questions. He also had to reveal his family background, which was far more perilous than it sounds: having the wrong family tree could get you killed. Duch made sure not to mention that he was related to the niece of Lon Nol, the recently deposed field marshal with a price on his head. Duch says that it was at this time that he tried to quit the Party’s security services after having worked for them for four years. He asked a high-placed contact for a transfer to the Ministry of Industry, he says. When the court asks him to elaborate, Duch answers with a proverb that the judges, particularly the foreign ones, are free to interpret however they choose: “Is it necessary to crack open a crab to see its shit?”

  When asked whether he hadn’t developed a taste for police work, if he hadn’t found fascinating the secret and all-powerful world of the Party security apparatus, Duch has no good answer. Pressed, he dodges the question. Pressed further, he rehashes the explanations that his conscience has already endorsed: that his work was evil by its nature, or that the confessions were half-false. But the difficult question of whether he enjoyed committing the crimes won’t go away, and eventually Duch makes an effort to answer it.

  His effort fails.

  “I was just an instrument of the Party,” he says, defeated, “an absolute, authoritarian instrument.”

  THE S IN S-21 stands for Santebal.

  In the Buddhist lexicon, the Santebal are those who keep the peace and maintain order, like the police. Under Pol Pot, Santebal was the name given to the internal security service, more commonly known in Communist regimes as the secret police. At the end of June 1975, Son Sen, the head of state security and minister of defense, informed Duch that a detention and intelligence center was being created in Phnom Penh. He told Duch that they were to follow the French “counterespionage” model.

  The 21 in S-21 was, according to Duch, the radio code that belonged to the center’s first director, Nath.

  Duch was sent to search government buildings and the homes of former government employees. He gathered reports and archives from the fallen regime. From the judicial police headquarters, he took documents on torture. S-21 was created on August 15, 1975, with Nath as its director and Duch as his deputy.

  It was set up first and foremost to eliminate the ancien régime. This included army officers, civil servants, aristocrats, and “new people”—those who stuck with the old regime right to the end and those who lived in the cities. The revolution soon found that it had no use for the mentally impaired, either: in its earliest days, S-21 served as a psychiatric hospital as well. What became of its patients?

  “Based on my own analysis, more than 50 percent of patients were smashed,* though I’m not entirely sure,” says Duch.

  He has a better recollection of what he was ordered to do with lepers: destroy them all. Communism must liberate man. Communism abhors the handicapped, the sick, the mentally ill, the religious, homosexuals, and intellectuals.

  On March 30, 1976, Party leaders signed a secret order authorizing purges within the Party itself. It would prove a watershed moment. That decree is the most tangible proof we have of the policy of extermination implemented by the secretive Angkar. The order formalized as policy the already existing practice of summary execution by giving the zone committee, the central committee, the standing committee, and the military staff the authority to kill. Thus began the great purges, ministry by ministry, division by division, region by region. Nath lost his job, Duch was promoted, and S-21 had a new mission. Its focus was now on the internal purges, as per the decree of March 30. Yet Duch was unaware that this decree even existed. He would only learn of the Angkar’s decision some thirty years later, while in prison.

  “Why were you chosen to run S-21?” asks Judge Lavergne.

  First, it’s true that I was a much better interrogator than Nath. But it was more than that. The Party had no confidence in him. Son Sen used to say that Nath’s methods were dubious and that he was a schemer. I was honest. I would have rather died than lied to a Party member. And I was loyal. I reported every single thing I learned. I was methodical about it. All my life, whenever I’ve done something, I’ve done it thoroughly.

  Duch claims to have been terrified when he took over. He says he even suggested that someone else take the position instead. But Son Sen threatened him, he says. When he tries to reenact their conversation in court, the pitch of his voice climbs until his Khmer sounds metallic, jarring.

  “I was their sheepdog,” he says.

  But for the prosecutor, he was clearly the perfect fit for the job.

  THE HISTORIAN DAVID CHANDLER likes to say that S-21 was probably the most efficient institution in all of Cambodia during the Khmer Maoists’ tragic and grotesque reign. Its own impeccable archives showed that S-21 was efficient, modern, and professional. The archives, down to the smallest detail, convinced the Party leadership that its suspicions were well-founded. They satisfied the Party’s need to prove that it had eliminated all its enemies and that it had emerged victorious, even if newly conjured enemies constantly surfaced.

  Chandler doesn’t think the Khmer Rouge followed any particular Communist model. Similar security centers existed in China and the USSR, where the security apparatuses extorted the most dubious confessions and “reeducated” reactionary minds with the same unabated enthusiasm as the Khmer Rouge did at S-21. From Lenin onward, the Russian Revolution was blighted by purges. What Chandler does believe is unique to S-21, however, is its completely secret nature. And he calls the practice of “reeducating” prisoners only to then kill them unprecedented. The systematic killing that took place at S-21 made it a unique combination of
a secret police prison and death camp.

  A network of prisons and interrogation centers in which black-clad agents carried out violent abuse abounded across the Khmer Rouge’s Democratic Kampuchea. But each little island in this police archipelago was isolated from the others. S-21 had no authority over any other prison, nor any autonomous or direct contact with them. Everything had to go through the “center.” S-21 was unusual because it did have a sort of national jurisdiction in that it could receive prisoners from anywhere in the country, and because it was directly linked to what everyone called the “upper echelon.” S-21 was an arm of Santebal directly linked to the center of power: the standing committee, the true Angkar, which comprised between five and seven members. This prison was its exclusive tool. The most important arrestees were sent here and nowhere else, including those made within the Central Committee or the Politburo.

  But S-21 is also unique in that we have its archives. It is often emphasized that no other prison in Democratic Kampuchea was run as efficiently or with such sophistication. Perhaps. But no other prison in Cambodia remains with its archives intact. We know little about the two hundred other centers of the secret police that have been identified, just as we would know nothing about S-21 had Duch been ordered or had the presence of mind to destroy its records.

  Duch’s confession makes him unusual among the members of the Khmer Rouge’s inner circle. But would he have confessed had he not left so much evidence behind? Duch is a mathematician; his arguments adhere to logic. He has admitted nothing that can’t be found in the archives.

  “If documents exist then I can’t deny it,” he says simply. “I recognize everything that comes from S-21. I accept no other evidence.”

  His first great error was not anticipating the rapid Vietnamese invasion in early 1979, and his second was not destroying his archives before fleeing. His superiors made the mistake of not ordering him to do so. Didn’t they know about their warden’s meticulous record-keeping? Did Duch leave the fruits of his endeavors intact out of haste or simply out of lack of foresight? Or was it because he had been too proud to destroy the exemplary work he had accomplished for the Party and for the Revolution, the testament to his talent and proof of his ability to establish a successful and efficient institution?

  Had Duch destroyed his archives, we never would have known much about the prison nor the magnitude of the crimes committed there. We might never have known the true identity of its director, “Brother East.” It’s true that a handful of survivors might have told us about a terrible place that had once existed in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. But with no written records, how many other terrible prisons have been erased from the pages of history? Without the written confessions, photographs, and “biographies,” there is no S-21. In short, S-21 exists today because hubris or professional oversight prevented its director from destroying his work.

  The archives are of exceptional quality and incredibly thorough. Without them, the history of Democratic Kampuchea would be much murkier and less detailed. And if we had all the regime’s documents, says Chandler, “We would have a completely new history of Democratic Kampuchea.” Ever the iconoclast, Chandler tells the court:

  Maybe S-21 was not as important [to the Angkar] as it is to those of us seeking evidence about the Democratic Kampuchea regime. I think if we had [all the minutes of Angkar] cabinet meetings, I’d be very surprised if S-21 gets mentioned very often. Certainly the top leaders were very interested in the confessions of high-ranking cadres, but for the people who were not high in the chain of command, [they] would not be interested.

  CHAPTER 7

  DUCH WAS NOT A MEMBER OF THE PARTY’S CENTRAL COMMITTEE, which means he was among the middle rungs of its hierarchy. He was, however, high up in the secret police—a commissar, he says, returning to orthodox Party jargon, at the head of its most strategic and sensitive department. With feigned modesty, he describes his position thus: “I had three important jobs: to teach and train; to send confessions to my superiors; and to deal with any questions having to do with S-21. My duties were more political than technical.”

  According to Chandler, Duch was an outstanding administrator who expertly accomplished the work asked of him. Little of the prison’s operation escaped his attention. Yet even so, says the historian, not even he could instigate and manage everything that happened there.

  Duch maintains that he went infrequently to the prison, and never into the cells. He left the menial tasks to his subordinates, he says, taking care to cultivate the mysterious and menacing persona of the inaccessible boss who appears rarely and then only by surprise. He devoted himself entirely to his strategic role: reading and annotating confessions, sending them back to the interrogators with comments, then reporting on them to his superiors so that they would “understand them more easily.” He did not wish to see the conditions in which the prisoners were kept, and in any case he paid them no attention whatsoever. This is what psychologists call “avoidance.”

  “S-21 was only for people who were going to be executed. There was no protection of their rights. We fed them like animals and treated them as such. We were only waiting for the moment when they would be smashed. No one cared about their well-being. That’s it.”

  “You admit that you didn’t consider them human?” asks a lawyer for the victims’ families.

  “We didn’t think about it in such complex terms. We distinguished between friends and enemies. Now, looking back through the prism of human rights, it was absolutely wrong and constituted a criminal act. But at the time, we thought about it differently. We told ourselves only that the police work had to be done,” says Duch.

  Duch oversaw the logistics of death, but from a distance. He left the daily management to his deputy, Hor, who had an office inside the prison, where the clerk Suor Thi worked.

  Apart from closely monitoring the confessions, Duch’s other tasks were to train his staff in interrogation techniques and to ensure their political education. The crimes perpetrated at S-21 were the work of many, and though Duch certainly got his hands dirty, his real aspiration was to become a bureaucrat. To a certain degree, he succeeded.

  OF COURSE, HE KNEW EXACTLY what was going on. He is an expert on torture. The method of covering someone’s head with a plastic bag is “very dangerous,” he asserts. Throwing water over it makes it even more sophisticated. The prison’s first director, Nath, had a predilection for electrocution and whipping. Duch says he himself authorized four types of abuse: forcing water up people’s noses, beating people up, whipping, and electric shocks. He doesn’t believe that prisoners had their breasts burned, or that his interrogators used venomous insects such as centipedes to extract confessions. Above all, he tries to convince the court that he did not pay close attention to the technical aspects of what went on at S-21; he left that to his underlings: “I didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t know what I was doing.”

  It’s a stance that makes it easy to avoid remembering too much. In reality, all kinds of tortures were practiced at S-21. Chum Mey describes having his nails pulled out, though Duch claims he put an end to that method. One written order directs an interrogator to force one of Duch’s former teachers to eat spoonfuls of excrement. Brother Number Five, Duch’s former boss, was forced to take a cold shower and then sit in front of a fan—“to induce fever,” says Duch. Some were made to drink urine. Others were forced to pay homage to an image of a dog with the enemy’s face superimposed over it, or made to kneel in front of a chair, or a table, or any other object that only a contemptible person would honor. How should such methods be labeled? Are they cold, lukewarm, or hot?

  Duch vows that he never tortured anyone himself. He admits slapping a prisoner around once when Nath was still director of S-21, but he only acknowledges that because he has to—it is documented in the archives. His clumsy explanations are difficult to believe. Even the way he phrases his answers suggests that he knows more than his conscience will admit:

  Usually, to
rture took place when I was angry. Chet Eav was the police inspector under the old regime, who interrogated Khmer Rouge prisoners; he was very aggressive. Nath wanted to beat him up. He asked me to interrogate him, and Chet Eav finally confessed. I slapped him around to keep Nath from beating him.

  “What characterizes torture for you?” asks Judge Lavergne.

  “That’s a difficult question. Could you phrase it in a different way?”

  “Can you imagine how the prisoners felt? The water technique, for example. How do you think that feels?”

  “Once the stomach is filled with water, the prisoner is shaken until he vomits and sometimes loses consciousness. When he comes to, we carry on with the interrogation.”

  He remembers one victim in particular, to the point that he even remembers his name, as well as many details of his interrogation:

  The water wouldn’t go through his nostrils. When he arrived at S-21, all sorts of interrogation methods were used on him, but he still wouldn’t confess. I discussed using other methods with my deputy Hor. I ordered them to try it, but they found out the water wouldn’t go through his nostrils.

  “Can you imagine what it feels like to have a plastic bag over your head?”

  “It feels like you’re dying.”

  The only rule to the torture—though at times broken—was that the subject had to be kept alive until he or she had made a complete confession.