The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  The M-13 prison camp was shut down after the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975. We know that some prisoners were transferred to a new camp named, according to the same mathematical model, M-99. As for the personnel, a dozen or so interrogators, guards, and messengers quickly found new jobs at S-21.

  CHAPTER 22

  He was twenty-seven years old and I was thirty. I was so furious at being mistaken for what I wasn’t, for being accused of being a CIA spy when such things were not even on my mind, that when he questioned me I retaliated and asked my own questions back. This went on for weeks and weeks.

  After he arrived at M-13 in October 1971, ethnographer François Bizot was chained apart from the other prisoners, to one of the thin pillars holding up a bamboo awning. The day after his arrival, Duch began his interrogation. Bizot had to compose the first of a series of “declarations of innocence.” Duch wrote very late at night and very early in the morning. He was known as a tireless worker who said little and who took his responsibilities as camp commander very seriously. Unlike the other Khmer Rouge men, says Bizot, Duch responded whenever a prisoner greeted him.

  For the prisoners, making confessions was an ordeal. But confessing was a way of life for everyone in the camp. The guards came together for self-criticism sessions. First, each person took turns lamenting his own revolutionary failures; then, he helped his neighbor recall the mistakes he had made but no longer remembered.

  “Was this to encourage people to denounce one another?” asks Judge Lavergne.

  Absolutely. But, Your Honor, informing on others was considered a good thing. It was a prerequisite, even. They held up as examples those young revolutionaries who inculpated their parents without thinking twice. Denunciation, which is just another form of lying, is the very essence of the work of—how can I put it?—of spreading the Revolution.

  Bizot neither saw nor heard any violent acts during his captivity. His two friends told him that prisoners were beaten in the ribs with canes, but no one could see the marks under their black button-up shirts. After many days spent watching the guards and listening to them speaking among themselves, Bizot knew that they were beating prisoners. One day, during his daily swim in the river, he slipped away to the other bank. There he discovered a cabin, where he found “a vertical bar of thick bamboo with rattan rings attached to it, which,” he realized, “were designed for tying wrists.” On another occasion, he came across a former prisoner who had hung around there and who was busy whittling a rattan cane. Bizot called out to him: “‘Hey, comrade! Who are you going to beat with that rattan cane?’ The poor guy looked at me and said, ‘I’m not going to be giving the beating!’”

  Duch toyed with his French prisoner at least twice. On the day he came to tell Bizot that he was going to be released, speaking French to him for the first time, Duch told his captive that he had been unmasked. Bizot fell to his knees, and then Duch said he was joking. On another occasion, aware of Bizot’s friendship with Lay, Duch told him that he had to choose which of his Cambodian friends would go free and which would remain in captivity.

  Yet despite this, once he was convinced of Bizot’s innocence, Duch took a rare risk with his superiors. He went against the rule, and in front of the dreaded Ta Mok he asked for permission to release Bizot.

  I informed Vorn Vet that Bizot wasn’t CIA. My superior laughed. He asked why I was frightened of the French. Ta Mok sent me a message saying, “Duch, never agree to release this researcher and the other two.” I didn’t reply. Vorn Vet came and I spoke with him. He went to find Ta Mok, who was eating. And that’s when he told me, “You can release him.” There was a Party meeting, chaired by Ta Mok, at the end of which we gave the Party pamphlet to François Bizot. But only Bizot was released. The two Cambodians remained prisoners at M-13.

  Bizot is the only person who can say, “Duch released me.” Consequently, Duch protects Bizot in the way of someone nurturing the hope of redemption. When a daughter was born to Duch a few years later, while he was running S-21, he gave her his grandmother’s name—just as Bizot had done with his own daughter, Hélène. So, when Duch’s “friend” Bizot steps onto the stand to testify, albeit indirectly, to the fact that the defendant personally inflicted violence on prisoners, Duch faces a real problem: how to protect both Bizot and himself. Someone asks him, “Who is telling the truth?” It’s one of the rare instances during the trial when Duch does a miserable job of defending himself. He pretends to have never read Bizot’s book, The Gate, only to quote from memory a passage “on page” a minute later.

  THE ETHNOLOGIST LOOKS DOWN when he talks and keeps his body very still; he weighs his words, thinks hard, and gives testimony as though from a meditative state. Every now and then, a memory will bring a bitter smile to his lips; then he lowers his head again as a severe expression of concentration and hidden torment returns to his face. When he describes those terrible chains, his weariness and inner rage are obvious.

  Bizot was scheduled to be released on Christmas Day, 1971. Once removed from his irons, he arranged for his two companions to be unshackled as well, though this only lasted for a short time.

  Needless to say, it was an incredibly significant reunion, but we didn’t show it. The first thing we did was get together, though we didn’t say much. For me, it was a reason to have hope. But it certainly wasn’t for Lay and Son. They thought it was a way to make us swallow the bitter pill, and neither they nor any one of my fellow prisoners believed that they were actually letting me go. They all secretly thought that the path I was going to take—the path they were leading me down—was the same one my predecessors went down. Lies were the oxygen we breathed and which we exhaled from our chests. They lied whether they told someone he was going to be released or when they led him to his death. They never told him what was really happening; they denied everything until the very last moment.

  According to the defendant, Bizot’s two colleagues were executed about a year later in another camp.

  “I believe I benefited from the presence of Lay and Son, but it causes me pain,” says Bizot while Duch listens, perfectly still.

  During a recess, Bizot moves toward Duch a little, briefcase in hand. They greet each other from a distance. The two men seem both beholden to one another and crushed that they can’t forget one another. Forty years after Duch decided Bizot’s fate by pleading on his behalf, Bizot’s testimony will help decide the fate of his former jailer. The day he received the summons to testify, Bizot felt a chill run down his back. Yet by the next day, he was calm again. He was ready.

  Bizot points out how during the two months of interrogations, Duch made the kind of “human connection” with his prisoner that no executioner should allow himself to make if he wants to put the prisoner to death without scruple. Duch wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Bizot is convinced that if he hadn’t been able to speak Khmer, he would be dead. Not only that—if he hadn’t had a strong grasp of how to think and communicate in Khmer, he never would have been able to establish a relationship with the camp commander. Knowing a language doesn’t mean knowing how to speak it, remarks Bizot; it means knowing how to communicate in it.

  Finally, it’s highly likely that, had Bizot been captured a little later, in 1972 or after, he would have found himself in very different circumstances—M-13 would have evolved, and Duch would have been far less gentle. In short, Bizot was a rare, youthful blunder in Duch’s career. Most of us are embarrassed when our past transgressions catch up with us. But Duch’s blunder turned out to be a life-saver.

  Bizot’s release was pushed up a day. That evening, his ankles free of shackles, he approached Duch, who was standing by a fire. The two men had an almost normal conversation, chatting about their families. Duch was still single. Bizot was a young father. “Duch asked what had become of Hélène, my little daughter who had been with me in the car but who had remained in the last village, near the monastery. He tried to reassure me about her.”

  It was Christmas Eve. Bizot asked Duch
who beat the prisoners.

  Duch told me right away that he sometimes beat the prisoners when they lied or when there were contradictions in their depositions; he said that he couldn’t stand lies, and that this work—I forget the exact words he used—“made him nauseous,” but that it was his responsibility. It’s what the Angkar expected of him. This work was his responsibility.

  The terror that took hold of Bizot when Duch admitted that he beat recalcitrant “spies” was so great it changed Bizot forever.

  Your Honor, I should say that until then, I had felt reassured. I believed that we were—that I was—on the right side of humanity; that some men were monsters and, thank heaven, I could never be one of them. I believed that this was a state of nature, that some of us were born evil while the rest of us could never be. But that evening, Duch’s response, combined with my perception of him throughout the course of various interrogation episodes, opened my eyes. That Christmas Eve, I had expected to encounter someone inhumane, as we are accustomed to think of such monsters. But I realized that this was far more tragic and infinitely more terrifying, because in front of me stood a man who looked like many friends of mine: a Marxist who was prepared to die for his country and for the Revolution. The ultimate goal, for him, was the welfare and well-being of the inhabitants of Cambodia; he was fighting against injustice and inequity. And even if there was something insidious in the naiveté of the typical Khmer peasant, there was also a fundamental sincerity in his beliefs, as is the case with many revolutionaries. I myself had many friends in Paris at the time who were committed to this Communist revolution and they were looking at events in Cambodia with an outlook that, to me, was horrifying. But in their eyes, the ends justified the means—in this case, Cambodia’s independence, Cambodia’s right to self-determination, the end to its citizens’ misery, and so on. The Cambodians are not the only people that have killed in the name of fulfilling a dream. So here I was, looking for the first time behind the mask of the monster in front of me. His job was to write up reports on the people sent to him to be executed, and I saw that this monster was, in fact, human, which was just as disturbing and terrifying. I was no longer sheltered from this knowledge—we are no longer sheltered—and the worst mistake we could make would be to separate such monsters into a different category of being.

  Bizot’s realization wasn’t an instant one. It was the fruit of a long and silent thought process that reached its culmination, and found voice, the day Duch was found in 1999, more than twenty-seven years after the ethnologist was released from M-13. A year after Duch was arrested, François Bizot published The Gate, in which he told for the first time the story of his captivity and what it taught him about humanity.

  I thought that if there were something to be said, it was that I had known this man when he was a young man, a young revolutionary who had been entrusted by his comrades with a particular mission and who had done his job in a frightening but extremely rigorous and thorough way, and always with a view to doing his job well and fully. I then figured that it was necessary to make known that this kind of tragedy was not committed by a monster, a different category of being, but that this person was a human being like any other. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish what humans do from what humans are. And I also realized that to be guilty of what one has done does not necessarily define what one is. Duch’s situation did not allow him a way out, not just because he feared death—which was certainly a legitimate fear—but also because, with others watching, with the commitments he made by going into the maquis, he was part of a group, a kind of family, and it’s very difficult to get out. The trap closed around him, and that continues to terrify me to this day, Your Honor.

  Early during his captivity at M-13, Bizot managed to get permission to keep a razor and a notebook in which he wrote a few childhood memories, a few poems, and some thoughts on Khmer Buddhism that might persuade his jailer that he was indeed a researcher and not a spy. Duch let him take the notebook with him after his release. Now, in court, Bizot pulls from his briefcase that curious, fragile relic, a sort of schoolchild’s workbook with a big eagle printed on the cover. Suddenly seeing the notebook seems to unsettle Duch; he did, after all, read it closely some four decades ago. Bizot says that he has never managed to reread his prison journal. The few times he has opened it, he felt a great weariness come over him and had to stop. Of course, Bizot’s journal contains no trace of the conversations he held with his captor, or any observations about the camp itself; for the prisoner to have committed such things to paper would have been a fatal mistake. Memory, therefore, is as much a reconstruction for Bizot as it is for the rest of us; he draws his memories through the prism of his “fears and emotions, of the things I felt at the time which have stayed with me for thirty-eight years.” The Gate is of great value to history, to the human community, and to literature. But for the law, it’s troubled waters. The cold but unavoidable burden of proof required by the law means that Bizot’s extraordinary account is next to useless in court. The astonishing conversations that Bizot the prisoner held with his notorious jailer must, like so much else, be thrown out the window. Legally, they are worth next to nothing. Still, Bizot’s testimony reflects part of the truth and elevates the trial: amid all the sordid facts, Bizot’s words reveal our tormented conscience; we hear it hammering as sharply as a woodpecker on an oak.

  I must say that my encounter with Duch has left a mark on my destiny and determined everything I am today for a very simple and tragic reason: I must come to terms with a double reality—that of a man who was a vector, a tool of state-sanctioned killing, and I cannot imagine being in his shoes today with so much horror behind me. On the other hand, there is the recollection that I have of a young man who committed his life and his existence to a cause and to a purpose that was based on the idea that crime was not only legitimate but necessary. I don’t know what to make of this, Your Honor. My experience brought me into intimate contact with this person and I cannot get rid of the idea that what Duch perpetrated could also have been perpetrated by someone else. By trying to understand this, I’m not trying at all to minimize it, or to minimize the reach and depth and horror of his crime. “His crime,” that’s where things get particularly difficult for me. I feel that these crimes were the crimes of a man, and that in order to understand their horror, we mustn’t transform Duch into some kind of monster, but rather acknowledge his humanity, which is just like ours, and which obviously was not an obstacle, unfortunately, to the massive killings that were perpetrated. I fear that we have a far more terrifying understanding of the executioner when we measure him in human terms. And it is this awareness of the ambiguity of humanity that is the cause of my personal ambivalence today, Your Honor.

  Bizot has likely never voiced his doubts nor elucidated his suffering as clearly or as intensely as he does in court. It’s only natural that his account of the facts should drift through the mirages of memory. In his writings, conversations, and solitude, Bizot had found avenues in which to express his pain, but it’s only in the courtroom that he at last finds a way to convey its universal scope, and he does so brilliantly. He needed the solemn intensity of a courtroom to articulate it, he needed his daughter’s presence, and he needed Duch’s. Knowing that Duch was there, Bizot told me after the trial, helped him put his thoughts in order.

  THROUGH THE GLASS PARTITION, Duch gives a wide and radiant smile to a tall and beautiful forty-year-old woman. It’s the first time he has laid eyes on Hélène, who was three years old when her father was imprisoned. Bizot’s daughter isn’t spared the conflicting emotions tearing Bizot apart. Duch is the man from M-13 and S-21. And he’s the man who saved her father’s life.

  I learned in Phnom Penh that many people don’t like Bizot. He’s not a man who takes precautions, and thus easily offends, rouses animosity, or generates antipathy. It’s strange to hear him say that to know a language is to know how to communicate in it when he so often gives the impression of being blithely unconcerne
d by what others may feel.

  One day, in the car taking us to the tribunal, he bluntly posed the following question to a Cambodian friend who had lost her parents under Pol Pot before moving to and growing up in the United States: “Would it shock you if I said that Duch is both the worst of men and a good man?”

  A few long seconds pass.

  “Yes. It still hurts,” says the young woman without bristling.

  “I understand,” murmurs Bizot, with a sudden and touching note of affection and tenderness that he seems able to express only after he has given voice to his more pressing question.

  The first time we lunched together one-on-one, we had hardly sat down when out of the blue he said: “Have you ever been betrayed?”

  Like our Cambodian friend, I needed a few seconds to absorb the blow. I feigned reflection, then looked straight at him and said: “You mean, by a woman?”

  In conversation, Bizot talks as though he’s exempt from the usual conventions of politeness. You can react by either tensing up, replying in kind, and ending the conversation, or you can soften the blow by letting him occupy the position he’s aiming for, appreciate the pain he’s revealing, and agree to reflect on what it inspires. In court, Bizot avoids neither the ambiguity of man and our feelings, nor our thirst for vengeance. “The victims’ screams must be heard, and we must never allow ourselves to think that their screams are too loud. The harshest condemnations we level against the defendant can never be harsh enough.”

  Bizot shows no hint of complacency in his testimony and no unnecessary harshness. Duch had expected the day of Bizot’s testimony to be vital to his cause; instead, it’s the day he realizes that his situation is beyond repair.