The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Yet almost everyone who visits S-21 walks past the photographs of its victims utterly unaware of the ambiguity inherent in many of them, including in the famous, harrowing image of a beautiful woman, understated and elegant, her hair slightly disheveled, her expression one of exhaustion, despair, and resignation, who is holding on her knees a sleeping infant in diapers, its eyes closed and hair slick with sweat. This woman, who was murdered in 1978 at S-21, was herself a revolutionary, the wife of the secretary of the southeast region, one of the regime’s high officials who fell from grace and was eliminated, along with his family, by the regime he had served.

  It is estimated that three-quarters of the victims at S-21 were themselves Khmer Rouge, of high and low rank, all of them destroyed by the regime.

  “Every security-service post in the country, S-21 included, was tasked with imprisoning, interrogating, torturing, and, finally, smashing—that is to say, killing—people. But one principle unique to S-21 was that it was tasked with killing members of the Central Committee,” says Duch.

  Throughout the world, S-21 has become the symbol of the Khmer holocaust, its most famous memorial, an emblem of the massacre for tourists to visit and, now, its judicial epitaph. Yet the bulk of its victims—an estimated 80 percent—were themselves members of the Khmer Rouge. No doubt there were those who were under its thumb, but many gave themselves wholeheartedly to the regime, and would be in the dock today had they not been annihilated by their own party.

  The ledger of S-21 dead provides an X-ray image of the Khmer Rouge’s internal purges. “In single-party regimes, purges are a normal phenomenon, not unlike political crises in France,” said Raymond Aron, with a mix of irony and seriousness. In mid-1977, Cambodia’s central zone was purged. At the end of 1977 and beginning of 1978, it was the turn of the northern zone and then, in the second quarter of 1978, the eastern zone. More than a thousand Khmer Rouge cadres from the eastern and northern zones were sent to S-21.

  Duch’s trial is that of a Khmer Rouge cadre who killed primarily other Khmer Rouges. S-21 was the site of the regime’s centralized purges rather than of mass murder on a national scale. For the millions of Cambodians who were annihilated by a Khmer Rouge regime they never served, there’s a grim irony in this partial misunderstanding. S-21 was the most political of Democratic Kampuchea’s two hundred documented security centers, and one could argue that the crimes committed there should be of lesser priority for the court, if you accept that many of the victims at S-21 had themselves been torturers or accomplices.

  “Were any of them better than the others? Who didn’t have blood on his hands?” says Duch about three victims of S-21 whose names regularly come up during the trial: a member of the Central Committee and the two teachers who introduced him to the Revolution.

  Duch’s trial has done justice to Vorn Vet, Duch’s former boss at M-13 and a member of the standing committee, who was killed just before the Vietnamese arrived; Ban Sarin, one-time head of internal security in the northern zone, who was destroyed in January 1977 after having served the movement for fifteen years; Koy Thuon, former secretary of the northern zone, minister of commerce, who was promoted thanks to the purges of 1972 and who, according to Duch, had the authority to wipe out people before he was himself executed in April 1977; Ney Saran, alias “Ya,” who became secretary of the northeastern zone after serving as Son Sen’s deputy, and who was killed in October 1976; Sy, who was first Ta Mok’s deputy and then secretary of the western zone, executed in April 1978; Ros Nhim, secretary of the northwestern zone, purged the following month; Nath, the former director of S-21; Nun Huy, the former head of S-24; and so on.

  It again befalls Duch to articulate a troublesome fact that many would rather forget. “The life of a Central Committee member equals the lives of thousands of ordinary people. What do you say to that?”

  NOBODY DESERVED TO DIE the kind of death meted out at S-21 and Choeung Ek. Though the two sites can bring out the worst kind of behavior in both visitors and carpetbaggers, S-21 and Choeung Ek remain memorials to the suffering inflicted by the Khmer Rouge and to the crimes they committed. This is not the case at Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge’s final stronghold, where a more extreme version of dark tourism is taking shape.

  CHAPTER 24

  FOR A LONG TIME, THE ROAD TO ANLONG VENG was sufficiently rough and corrugated by rain to dissuade most visitors, including most tourists, from venturing there. The sleepy, remote little town lies at the foot of the Dangrek Mountains on Cambodia’s northern border. Its location appears to serve a dual purpose: on the one hand, it is protected from Thailand by the mountains, but on the other hand, it provides easy refuge.

  Just before the bridge leading into town, a track veers off to the left. The track leads three hundred meters out onto a small peninsula covered in mango trees and jutting out into an area that is both land and water, known locally as “the lake.” The subtle, muted combination of water, wild grasses, and tall, bare trees soaring spear-like into the sky infuses the area with a meditative peace. If you stand on the peninsula and look out over this marsh, you can see the village of Anlong Veng without being seen from it. This promontory suits wise men, thinkers, and soldiers on watch, and it’s here that Ta Mok, the most powerful and brutal of Khmer Rouge military commanders, lived.

  Anlong Veng was the last bastion of the Big Brothers of the Revolution before they all died or surrendered. It’s where Pol Pot and his most faithful associates lived out the last decade of the war, from 1988 until 1998. But Anlong Veng’s true master was Ta Mok. Known within the Politburo first as Brother Number Five, then, with each successive purge or defection, as Brother Number Four, then Number Three, Ta Mok gained a reputation for being the most ruthless member of a cohort in which competition was fierce. It is said that a small house once stood on one of the strips of land jutting out into the middle of the lake, opposite Ta Mok’s house. That is where Pol Pot is said to have stayed whenever he came down from the Dangrek Mountains to pay a visit to the region’s strongman. All that remains of it now is the outhouse.

  In 1997, Ta Mok had Pol Pot arrested, summarily judged, and placed under house arrest. Pol Pot had just ordered the deaths of Duch’s old boss Son Sen, Son’s formidable wife, and eleven members of his family. “Paranoia moves at a gallop; it never stops. Nothing appeases the paranoid man,” says the court psychologist.

  For his own friends, Brother Number One was clearly becoming too dangerous. Only Ta Mok could take him down. Pol Pot died less than a year later, in April 1998. By the end of that year, Ta Mok was the only remaining Khmer Rouge leader not to have surrendered. He was eventually captured in early 1999. Ta Mok was the only Khmer Rouge leader—along with Duch, who was terrified of him—to be imprisoned. In July 2006, exactly ten days after the international tribunal with the jurisdiction to prosecute him was officially established, Ta Mok died, effectively thumbing his nose at humanity and its bourgeois system of justice one last time.

  The first time I visited Anlong Veng, Nhem En was deputy district governor. Nhem En joined the victorious Khmer Rouge Army in 1975, at the age of sixteen. The conflict was still going on twenty years later, but by then Nhem En had realized that the army he’d joined, which was, once again, a guerrilla force, had crumbled. The Cold War was over. After ten years of occupation, the Vietnamese Army had gone home. In 1991, all of Cambodia’s other political forces had agreed to a peace settlement; the following year, the UN’s largest-ever peacekeeping operation was established in Cambodia. Elections were held in spite of the war. The Communists installed by the Vietnamese and loyal to Hun Sen now shared power with the royalists. Like many former Communists, they turned toward the most ferocious form of capitalism. Only the Khmer Rouge rejected both the peace process and the free-market economy, which in the eyes of many made them a tiresome and disconcerting anachronism. There was also, of course, the terrible burden of their blood-soaked past. Defections spiraled. It was time for the waning Revolution’s cadres and soldiers to take advant
age of the amnesty agreement signed by the king, and of the national reconciliation promised by Hun Sen. The Khmer Rouge was in its last throes, its old, paranoid heavyweights settling scores between themselves: Pol Pot murdered Son Sen, Ta Mok arrested Pol Pot, and so on. It was time to jump ship. Twenty years after embracing the Revolution, Nhem En bade it farewell.

  While Duch slipped into another identity, Nhem En weaned himself of his revolutionary habits. But whereas Duch knew that his past at S-21 would prove fatal if discovered, Nhem En found that his past could bring him glory and, he hoped, income.

  In the mid-1990s, S-21 was already famous throughout the world, not because of Duch but because of the photo portraits of its victims. Professionals studied and praised the particular artistic quality of those thousands of black-and-white images. It wasn’t long before their creator was found: Nhem En, fresh from the jungle, was dubbed the “S-21 photographer.” Soon he was decorated by the American ambassador and invited to New York; media outlets competed for interviews. Nhem En believes he granted between one and two hundred, for which he charged as much as he could get away with.

  In the three years following his return, while giving all those interviews, Nhem En also worked for the ministry of the interior on the demobilization and reintegration of his former brothers-in-arms. But in 1998, the war was finally over and Nhem En found himself out of work. He left for the rural seat of Anlong Veng, where he joined the royalist party and became its local representative. In 2005, though he became deputy governor, he realized that the real power was no longer in the royalist party’s hands. What’s more, three years previously, one of his sons had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison for murdering his wife. Nhem En told me that he needed between $10,000 and $15,000 to pay off the judge and get his son out. If he wanted to help his son, and if he wanted to help himself, then his interest indubitably lay in joining the real winners of both the war and the postwar period: the Cambodian People’s Party, led by Hun Sen, which has been in power since 1979. So, in 2006, in a move typical of Cambodia’s pragmatic, fickle politicians, Nhem En switched sides again. He had been a member first of the Khmer Rouge, then of the royalist party. Now he is a member of the party that defeated, subdued, or absorbed them both.

  A deputy governor earns a salary of $35 a month, at least in theory, Nhem En tells me. He lives in a modest house across from a school built by Ta Mok. The walls of the entrance hall are papered with photographs, including one of the American ambassador awarding him a prize for his photography at S-21, and with Khmer Rouge propaganda posters, whose proletarian realism seems long out of date. Nhem En has accumulated around two thousand photos linked to the Khmer Rouge, which he keeps in albums at his home. Most of them weren’t taken by him; he collected them from other sources. Though many are of a very average quality, they often have a documentary value. These aren’t photos of S-21, obviously—those were left behind when the staff fled the prison. What Nhem En has is a mixed bag of images, some well-known, others less so. Many are of bodies: the murdered Son Sen and his wife covered in their own blood, Pol Pot and Ta Mok lying peacefully on their deathbeds. Nhem En took the photos of Ta Mok. It becomes clear to anyone looking at these pictures that it’s highly unlikely that Nhem En was ever the chief photographer at S-21.

  Nhem En has tried to sell his albums, but in vain. He needs money. He would like to make more profit from his past at S-21, his biggest asset for the past ten years. He became aware of the media’s interest in genocide very early on. He tasted a few of the rewards. Now he would like to develop what he sees as Anlong Veng’s tourism potential. After all, three of the most famous and most cruel leaders of Democratic Kampuchea are buried there: Pol Pot, Ta Mok, and Son Sen. It’s the end of 2007, and Nhem En is planning to build a museum devoted to the Khmer Rouge.

  It’s hardly an outlandish idea. In December 2001, a government directive promised to “examine, restore, and preserve existing memorials, as well as investigate and study other remaining mass graves so that all such places may be transformed into memorials with fencing, trees, and information panels for both citizens and tourists.” Local authorities intended to create a “national region of historical tourism” in the mountains of Anlong Veng, which had been the setting for the “final stage of the political lives of the Khmer Rouge leaders and military organization.” Nhem En is only positioning himself in the new dark-tourism market, a market which, in Anlong Veng, is taking its most eccentric form: here, tourists are invited to make pilgrimages to the tombs and homes of Cambodia’s mass murderers.

  Nhem En thinks big. He calls for an investment of $2 million, including $300,000 for the museum. “It’s a good project. It would be useful to generate money for my region,” he tells the press. “I think that international tourists will want to see the portraits of the Khmer Rouge leaders. We also need further advice: should the museum be devoted only to the Khmer Rouge leaders, or should it include other things, too?”

  Nhem En thinks Anlong Veng could become as well-known as certain places in Germany or Vietnam, because “Ho Chi Minh, Hitler, and Stalin are all heroes of something, whether good or bad,” he says. He tells me that he’s seeking both technical and spiritual support.

  Above all, he’s seeking money. He introduces me to his business partner, a wealthy jeweler from Siem Reap, gateway to the temples at Angkor and one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations. Nhem En has convinced her to purchase a large parcel of land by the road leading into Anlong Veng. This is where he hopes to build his Khmer Rouge museum, using the hundreds of random photos in his possession as the basis of its collection.

  The jeweler is a seductive, elegant, slightly eccentric divorcée. She built for her children an enormous house in the shape of a cart drawn by two bulls. There’s a confident and intelligent gleam in her eyes, and she clearly manages her business with authority and success. In any case, you can’t lose money on property in Cambodia, where one of the main causes of social and political violence is the frenzied, brutal land rush taking place. In Cambodia today, people are no longer killed or deported for their ideology. Instead, people are violently expelled from and killed for their land. Some Khmers Rouges have become today’s “Khmers Rich,” their greed, racketeering, and corruption equal to the vices of the ruling class of the 1960s they so scorned.

  Whatever becomes of the museum, it will only be a small part of the jeweler’s portfolio; she says she wants to build it on only one hectare out of the parcel’s fifty-five. She knows that the road between Siem Reap and Anlong Veng is to be rebuilt within two years, after which the journey linking the two will take only an hour and a half. The businesswoman believes that Anlong Veng could then be offered as an additional destination to the million tourists who visit Angkor each year.

  “While visiting Angkor Wat, they could also learn what happened in Cambodia. I’ve discussed it with travel agents and they support us,” she told me.

  If tourists visiting Phnom Penh have made S-21 and the killing fields at Choeung Ek obligatory stops on their itineraries, why wouldn’t at least some of the crowds that flock to the splendors of Angkor every year consider visiting the graves of Cambodia’s mass murderers? Neither to revere nor to revile, but simply to see?

  Nhem En has been thinking about his museum since 2000. On the day I visited him in November 2007, he told me that he had just signed a contract with the governor; he believed he was getting closer to his goal. But the beautiful jeweler and the twisted photographer were always an unlikely team—a few months later, she pulled out of the project. Nhem En again came into the spotlight when he announced that he was selling all his treasures for half a million dollars, including a pair of sandals which, he claims, belonged to Pol Pot, as well as a piece of the former tyrant’s toilet.

  NHEM EN, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, does not speak the “whole truth and nothing but the truth.” During those years when he passed himself off as the head photographer of S-21, he didn’t mention that there had, in fact, been six photogr
aphers working at the prison and that, at seventeen, he hadn’t been their boss. The story he gave in his paid interviews suited him; but after a while, the well began to run dry, and his credibility with it. It’s likely that it will suffer even more with the trial, since two other photographers are still alive, and one of them has already been interviewed by the investigating judges.

  One day, I found myself in a car with Nhem En at the wheel. While negotiating the ruts and potholes, he admitted that someone else had been the chief photographer at S-21. Speaking of Duch, he told me that “those who commit such crimes always have a reason to conceal the truth and to lie.” There’s no question he knows what he’s talking about.

  Each step of how S-21 operated is described during Duch’s trial: how a person was arrested, registered, and locked up in a cell; how a person was interrogated and tortured until he confessed; how a person was taken to the killing fields. The only stage for which no former member of S-21 has been summoned is the one without which S-21 wouldn’t be the world-famous museum it is today: the moment when the prisoner was photographed. Among the photographers who were interviewed during the trial’s investigative phase, Nhem En was the only one whose deposition was read in court. He wasn’t even called to testify. By now, few people still take him seriously.