The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  “Is it easy to know when to stop?”

  Quite frankly, before I hit anybody I used words. I only started hitting if words failed. I knew how to control my emotions and my actions. I knew when to stop. But the young interrogators didn’t know. They were extreme. They didn’t have any self-control. Some of them were crueler than others. The more I think about it, the more I am moved.

  NEVERTHELESS, DUCH HAS NO TROUBLE admitting that he ordered torture. The more specific the documents are, the less he equivocates. When Brother Number Ten wrote in his confession that he had been severely tortured by Duch’s men, Duch crossed out the passage in question and wrote to the prisoner: “You have no right to report this problem to Angkar. I am the only one who decides.” In another report, an interrogator named Pon made a note of the number of lashes a prisoner had received; Duch wrote instructions to give him more. Elsewhere, he wrote to Pon to torture a prisoner by the hot method, “even if it leads to death.” When asked in court what he has to say about this particular note, Duch claims that it was a bluff to frighten the prisoner into confessing; it wasn’t for real.

  Duch wrote his annotations in a clear, neat hand. They are as elegantly written as they are ruthless.

  “I’m very jealous of the neatness of his calligraphy,” David Chandler, who has analyzed a thousand confessions extorted at S-21, comments with sarcasm.

  Duch wrote instructions to his torturers in a red pen:

  Did not confess. Torture him!

  Hit him in the face

  We must apply pressure, absolutely

  Beat them all to death

  Smash them to pieces

  The radical, uncompromising revolutionary never wavered from inflicting suffering, from destroying men. The young, thirty-three-year-old Duch who reigned over his secret prison and who made these annotations in red ink some thirty years ago, seems to have little in common with the elderly Kaing Guek Eav who appears in court today. He may be a manipulative old man, and he’s certainly hiding things, but he’s not a threat.

  Duch wants to convince the court that, under his authority, torture was at least practiced with a certain amount of objectivity: “I wouldn’t say that torture was common. It was carried out only when necessary.”

  It’s true that one of the principal interrogators that worked for Duch, Mam Nai, wrote in his copious notes that putting greater emphasis on torture than on politics and propaganda was an “erroneous position.” Mam Nai, a former teacher and a resolute and conscientious subordinate, took notes during the training sessions organized by Duch. To carry out a good interrogation, he wrote, the first step is political pressure, whereas “torture is a complementary measure.”

  The fact remains that we don’t know how systematic the torture was. All we know for sure is that it happened abundantly.

  “It’s impossible to know how much torture was used and it’s quite possible that some confessions reached a conclusion deemed satisfactory with minimal or almost no torture,” concludes Chandler.

  In 1976, S-21 was moved to the Ponhea Yat High School and Tuol Sleng School, says Chandler, to conceal its existence from the many Chinese advisors then in Phnom Penh. (It is now the site of the Genocide Museum.)

  Secrecy: nothing was better maintained than secrecy. So precious was secrecy to the Khmer Rouge leadership that for a long time the Party’s very existence was kept hidden, and the name of Brother Number One, Pol Pot, wasn’t divulged until more than a year after the 1975 victory, and then only discreetly.

  “I was instructed to share nothing with my colleagues,” remembers Prak Khan. “I was told to keep everything secret. Each of us had to keep things secret. We were supposed to look after only those things that concerned us, or else we would be reported.”

  Duch taught his staff that secrecy was the very soul of their mission and that, without it, their work made no sense. Guards and interrogators were not authorized to communicate with other units. Merely having contact with the outside world was deemed suspicious. Secrecy was an obsession, the Party’s alpha and omega. It was also a formidable instrument of control that, like everything else in Democratic Kampuchea, eventually imposed its own insane logic over all other lines of reasoning. The systematic execution of prisoners at S-21 was in large part due to the absolute imperative of keeping the prison secret. Due to secrecy becoming of utmost importance, it was decided that nobody could get out alive. And if someone were arrested by mistake, then the secrecy of the institution took precedence over that man’s life.

  Then there was the fear. Nothing was more widespread than fear. In court, the prosecutor doesn’t like it when the defense team emphasizes the atmosphere of terror that reigned over the country at the time. He worries that it’s too easy an excuse for the defendant, who, he says, freely chose the path that led to his crimes and who enthusiastically organized the execution of his people.

  Nevertheless, under the regime, the threat of annihilation hovered over everyone, as those who worked at S-21 knew better than anyone. Most of the staff working at the prison complex was recruited from a single division of the Army of Democratic Kampuchea, the 703. Both of Duch’s deputies, Hor and Nun Huy, were from Division 703, as was his predecessor, Nath. The day the division—like so many others before it—fell from grace, Duch did some housecleaning. Nath’s life ended in the prison he used to run. His wife followed him in death. Nun Huy, the third-in-command at the prison after Duch and Hor, was wiped out in December 1978, along with his wife and children, a month before the Vietnamese troops entered the city. Hor, Duch’s number two, was also on the hot seat, guilty of having compromised the interrogation of a high-ranking Party official: “The secretary of Division 703 was eliminated first. Then his subordinates were placed under the upper echelon’s supervision. They couldn’t avoid being purged. It was only a matter of time. That was the process.”

  Duch had no illusions about his own fate. “I knew it was only a matter of time before I would be arrested.”

  During the trial’s preliminary investigative phase, Duch makes a point of emphasizing the appalling absurdity of the system in which he was caught:

  After each arrest, I would ask myself, “Are they really guilty? Are they really traitors? Am I going to be arrested, too, before I get the chance to know whether it’s fair or not?” And I thought, well, I’ll just have to wait for them to arrest me before I can dare say that the arrests are unjust.

  Yet despite waiting for his own end, Duch’s zeal never flagged; he continued to write damning reports about his own subordinates. In no sense could any of them have been described as his protégés.

  “Were you aware that your reports meant that these members of your staff would be ‘smashed’?”

  “I knew that the decision would be made to arrest them,” replies Duch evasively.

  “That’s not a straight answer, but it doesn’t really matter,” says Judge Lavergne.

  Secrecy, fear, and obedience were omnipresent; there was no questioning authority: “I am alive because of my loyal obedience. I never hid anything. Honesty and a commitment to doing things correctly are why I survived. Other survivors probably share these same qualities.”

  The final quality required by the Khmer Rouge was enthusiasm. There was no better precaution than fervor—a revolutionary cannot, by definition, be lukewarm—and Duch’s passion was exemplary. He bent over backward to please his superiors and completed every task assigned to him with the utmost devotion. Judge Cartwright asks him: “People say that you were more enthusiastic than you needed to be. In other words, you did more than was necessary to stay alive. Do you have anything to say about that?”

  What is the norm for measuring enthusiasm? The Communist Party was a paranoid organization. They suspected everything, and they believed that anyone could turn out to be a traitor. There was no criterion for measuring what was within the parameters of an acceptable result and what wasn’t. This is my most frank answer, Your Honor.

  In psychology, “ambivalence�
�� is a state where two conflicting notions exist within the same person. Not at the same moment (that’s ambiguity), but rather almost consecutively. Everyone is capable of it. As one’s sense of disgust grows, then, so, too, can one’s zeal for the job.

  “We cannot live long in an ambivalent situation,” the psychologist expert witness tells the court.

  We look for ways out, for ways to adapt. We lean one way or the other. Then denial sets in. It’s not conscious, of course. But the zealotry is part of it. That is to say that we can definitively silence that which we cannot accept in ourselves. We search for reasons to silence the shame or disgust. If we can’t get rid of the ambivalence, then we risk getting physically sick and suffering major somatization, depression, and mental illness.

  Yet that wasn’t the case with Duch. He managed to adapt.

  FOR THE PROSECUTION, the extent of the extermination can’t be blamed entirely on the Politburo’s policies. Duch made his own contribution.

  “One could say that the purges were driven by the methodology used to search for enemies, which was developed and enforced by the accused,” says the expert witness Craig Etcheson.

  “How was the methodology used by Duch different from the line imposed by the Party? How was it his own personal initiative?” asks François Roux, Duch’s French lawyer, who systematically refutes this thread of the prosecution’s argument.

  My understanding is that the accused was very much an innovator, a creator, a developer, and an institutionalizer of the method of making very detailed confessions, which were extracted over long periods. Those lists [of names were] used to go out and round up new batches of traitors. You see a very nearly exponential growth in the number of accused traitors and in the number of victims of purges. In part, it is the zeal with which the accused person pursued this project that caused this methodology to result in such a large number of victims.

  “Did he have a choice?”

  “One always has choices in life,” says the academic, a little haughtily.

  “And yet you agree with me that today Duch is still alive?” says the lawyer, clearly very irritated.

  “Yes, he is.”

  The historian David Chandler is more careful. Once the regime of death and terror became a daily reality for everyone living under the Khmer Rouge, perhaps they no longer had a choice, he suggests. “It’s most unlikely that if these decisions were made at the top, that dissent would have come from the middle ranks; it began to roll on once the decisions had been made.”

  He hesitates, takes a breath, rubs his face.

  In a way, I’m reluctant to say this, because I’ve never been in any kind of a situation where I would have been in danger by refusing to do something, but I can’t help but think that the people who inflicted this terrible damage on everybody knew what they were doing and, almost worse, did not seem to suffer themselves from what was happening. It didn’t seem to cause them to lose sleep. It didn’t seem to make their handwriting more unsteady. It didn’t seem to lessen their enthusiasm for coming back to work the next day.

  When Etcheson is on the stand, the prosecutor tries to come to the rescue: “I would not wish an impression to be left that there [were] only two choices for a Communist Party cadre—death or duty. Perhaps to complete the picture, the expert should be asked whether he knows of a third way—namely, escape?”

  However, under the Khmer Rouge tyranny, only a few thousand Cambodians fled to Vietnam, estimates Chandler. The Vietnamese border was more porous and the refugees were well-received. A few hundred others fled toward Thailand, where they were hardly welcome. All in all, then, only a tiny number of people escaped. And one had to live near a border in the first place.

  None of the witnesses state that escape was possible. The country and all of its citizens were being closely monitored. The guard Him Huy, like Suor Thi before him, articulates the twin threats that paralyzed everybody at the time: “Even if I had tried to escape from S-21, I would’ve been arrested. I was sure of it. Where would I go? To enemy territory? I would’ve been arrested on the spot. And if I was arrested, or if I fled, what would have happened to my family and loved ones?”

  CHAPTER 8

  EVEN BY THE STANDARDS OF A REGIME that banned fallow fields, rest, and recreation, Duch was an exceptionally hard worker. By his own estimate, he sifted through some 200,000 pages of prisoner confessions. He had a peerless command of the many interrogation techniques required of him, including the use of subterfuge, charm, deception, bluffing, intimidation, chastising, punishment, analysis, and summary. Duch saw interrogation as a fascinating and exciting game, even if it was one-sided and fixed. He saw it as an opportunity to apply his intellect, exercise his influence, and win favor with his superiors.

  Duch offers the court a glimpse of his skills when he describes the interrogation of Koy Thuon, a very high-ranking member of the Central Committee. First and foremost, he says, it was vital to prevent the prisoner from committing suicide, to which end two guards were posted permanently in his cell. A telephone line was installed so that Duch could be contacted at the first sign of a problem. Duch made sure the prisoner slept well and that he was served the same food as Duch. Upon hearing that Koy Thuon hadn’t responded to questions for an hour or two, Duch went to the prison himself and interrogated the cadre leader one-on-one. Rather than use the diminutive prefix a-, which he and the guards used to deride the low-ranking prisoners, Duch addressed Koy Thuon as “Brother.” When the mighty fall from grace, they get a little respect prior to being tortured and killed. “Koy Thuon was quick to react. Sometimes he would break a pen or a glass. I’d let him calm down, smile, and say, ‘You have no choice but to send your confession to the Party through me.’ And he understood.”

  Koy Thuon also grasped what he would endure if he didn’t talk. After two interrogation sessions, Duch handed the prisoner over to his right-hand man, Pon, because he “didn’t want to be involved any further.” Pon had more persuasive methods, as Koy Thuon would soon learn. Pon was a chief interrogator with an “excellent command” of violence, says Duch. In other words, he was very good at torturing people without killing them. The confession of the great fallen revolutionary Koy Thuon ran more than seven hundred pages.

  Once a confession had been extracted from a prisoner, Duch’s task was to make life easier for his superiors. To that end, like any good chief of staff, he wrote helpful and cogent notes that let them read through confessions quickly.

  “My notes simply tried to help my superiors grasp the substance of the confession,” he says.

  Duch is the master of confessions and, in his heart of hearts, proud of it. But he seems unwilling to admit the deceit that underlies his success. In other words, he doesn’t see that all those confessions he compiled were born of terror and torture. He doesn’t see how the climate of fear and the use of torture make his accomplishments deceitful and spineless.

  At one point during the pretrial investigation, Duch seemed almost lucid when he told investigators: “I don’t see what purpose confessions such as Tiv Ol’s could have served.”

  “Tiv Ol was a teacher of literature, yet his confession had no purpose. What does that mean?”

  “Do you think each confession served a purpose? We wanted truthful confessions. But they weren’t confessing the truth.”

  “True or not true—what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem with beating people up and using violence.”

  Duch explained that he wanted to check with field agents whether confessions were true or not, but that Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, told him, “Comrade, you must think of the truth of the proletariat.”

  “What did he mean by that?” asked the investigators.

  “I still don’t understand it. Nuon Chea is someone who doesn’t like to explain. The main thing was that the proletarian class emerge victorious, no matter what. He wasn’t thinking in terms of justice or injustice.”

  Once the trial starts, Duch prov
es more reluctant to accept any fact that calls into question the performance of his duties:

  Son Sen informed us that they had found a CIA agent in Sector 32. He asked me why we hadn’t found any CIA agents at S-21. I was speechless. From then on, we were required to find CIA agents. I spread the word and suddenly the confessions contained plenty of mentions of CIA agents. My job was to point them in the right direction.

  “Did you really think there were so many KGB and CIA agents?” asks Judge Cartwright.

  “They were probably forced to say that,” says Duch hesitantly, as though saying it will send him over the edge.

  “Were all the prisoners permanently subjected to a climate of absolute terror?”

  “Quite frankly, yes. Definitely.”

  SOME OF THE CONSPIRACIES that emerged from the confessions were staggeringly coarse. For example, one nineteen-year-old girl, so terrorized by Prak Khan that she soiled herself, was convicted of sabotage for having defecated in the soup served in the Khmer Rouge command’s hospital, as well as in its operation unit. A number of fantastically implausible plots were discovered, such as one about tunnels burrowed into the flooded bowels of the alluvial plain beneath Phnom Penh, where hundreds, even thousands, of Vietnamese soldiers were supposedly holed up.

  “Was the point of the violence to extract truthful confessions or ones that conformed to what you wanted to hear?” asks Judge Lavergne.

  I never believed that the confessions told the truth. Forty percent at best were true. As for the denunciations, only 20 percent of those were true. There was no scientific way of monitoring the confessions. There was no scientific method to ensure that they were true.

  The former math teacher’s statistics fluctuate. He has previously declared that, at best, only 20 percent of the confessions reflected the truth, and 10 percent of the denunciations. To this day, despite knowing how specious they are, how much they are travesties of genuine confessions, Duch still needs to assess their value. As long as they retain some fraction of truth, it doesn’t matter whether it is 40 percent or 20 percent or 10 percent. But he does admit the following: “I never believed that they represented the truth. Even the Party’s Standing Committee didn’t completely believe them. The point of it all was to get rid of people who were in the way.”