The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  What few family photographs have survived appear on the TV screens. There’s one of Phung Ton and his wife on their wedding day, by the Seine in Paris; one of their seven children; one of the professor in his dean’s office at the Royal University; another of him with two friends at a campground; and the last one ever taken of him, with the infamous card hung around his neck. Number 17.

  The professor’s daughter has been waiting for this moment for years. She and her mother have sat in the gallery every day since the trial began. They and Chum Mey are the only ones who haven’t missed a day. And yet, even after having thought about it for years and years, when the time comes for her to testify, the clarity of her thinking succumbs to the chaos of her emotions, and her story drifts.

  It was in October 1979, while buying palm sugar wrapped in newspaper, that she and her mother learned that her father had been killed at S-21. The newspaper had reprinted the photo of Phung Ton with the number 17 around his neck, which had been found in the prison’s archives. The prison was already being converted into a genocide museum.

  In the daughter’s eyes, Duch is a “twisted” person who is still trying to shirk his responsibilities. Who decided to transfer her father to S-21? Who decided to kill him on July 6, 1977? What kind of torture was inflicted upon him? Duch says he can’t answer the first two questions; as for the third one, he says that the professor couldn’t have been tortured, since “torture didn’t produce this kind of confession.” But the professor’s daughter is convinced that Duch knows how, when, and where her father died. A brave man would admit it, she opines.

  Of the six individuals for whom Duch says he had the most respect before 1970, four were killed by the Khmer Rouge, two of them at S-21: professors Chao Seng and Phung Ton, both of whom returned from France on the same plane. Yet Duch is adamant that he had no idea Phung Ton was incarcerated in his prison. The face-to-face between the torturer and the victim’s daughter ends in stalemate. With cold reserve, she looks into his eyes, then turns her back on him forever.

  THERE WERE SEVEN CHILDREN in the Tioulong family, all girls. Their father was an eminent member of Phnom Penh’s aristocracy. He was an ambassador, a minister, head of the government and head of the royal army. The family had close ties with Prince Sihanouk. Tioulong Raingsy was the second-born of that well-established family. She married Lim Kimari, an executive at the Cambodian Commercial Bank and a black belt at karate, very young. She had a job as a representative for a major Western laboratory and another as a presenter on a French-language radio station. When the civil war worsened after the coup of March 1970, the young couple sent their children to Paris, though they themselves stayed in Cambodia because, they said, they would have had a lower social status in France. They spent the summer of 1974 on holiday in France with the rest of their family, who had sought refuge there. At the end of the holiday, they made plans to return to France the following summer. A photo of Raingsy shows her soft, shiny hair and beautiful smile, though you can see the anxiety in her eyes. On March 28, 1975, from the besieged Cambodian capital, she wrote to her father:

  What advice do you give me? Should we leave as soon as possible? Or should we stay until June?

  Maybe she decided the situation wasn’t so bad after all: sure, the fearsome Communist guerrillas were on the verge of taking over; but Prince Sihanouk was also returning, and that was reassuring. Three weeks later, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and the country was locked down. The window of opportunity was gone.

  Like everyone else, the couple was forced out of the capital as soon as the revolutionaries entered it. They went to a village and lived normally until November. Raingsy and her husband were quintessential “new people,” the sort that the Revolution handed over to the “old people,” or “base people,” for reeducation or execution. Revolutionaries spied on the couple in the evenings. They heard Raingsy speaking French, a death sentence in itself, and realized that she had no labor background. They interrogated her. She told them everything.

  An S-21 document states that Tioulong Raingsy died on “April 31st” 1976. Clearly, the former math teacher’s organization wasn’t without flaw. April has never had so many days, not even at a time when each one felt interminable. The cause reads: “Beaten to death.”

  Tioulong Raingsy was tortured for months. In her parody of a confession, she said she was recruited by the CIA in 1969. Her missions included mobilizing the people to claim land, stealing water buffalo, and having a private life. She said that the network of traitors to which she belonged included Paul Amar, a journalist who, years later, had a successful career on French television. In the mountain of absurdity that is the S-21 archives, where the grotesque vies for pride of place with the horrific, his name is written “Pole Hamar.” Just like the young sailor Kerry Hamill, Tioulong Raingsy mocked her tormentors by giving them names of people who were impossible to find.

  At first, Raingsy’s family in Paris wasn’t too worried. French newspapers called the Khmer Rouge victory la victoire rose [the pink victory]. But with the victory came silence, and that silence grew heavier. It lasted four years, until the day when, after the Vietnamese had liberated the country, Raingsy’s family learned about S-21. The archives contain Raingsy’s interrogation documents, her photo, in which her hair looks ruined and the beauty is gone from her face, and a photo of her husband, Lim Kimari, who was executed one month after his wife.

  What torments Raingsy’s sister, who has come from France to testify before the court, is the guilt she feels over the confusion she imagines her sister and brother-in-law must have experienced when their family didn’t come to their aid, and when the French weren’t able to drive the Khmer Rouge from power.

  The youngest of the seven sisters has come to speak on behalf of the family. Holding up the photo of her sister taken in 1974, she says she wants to show Duch what Tioulong Raingsy was like before. She wants to do this even if it makes no difference to him.

  “I want to show him what he destroyed with his own hands.”

  The little sister doesn’t believe the executioner’s remorse. She thinks that, unlike his victims, he was lucky enough to get a fair trial. She says she will never forgive him.

  “Never, never, never.”

  The children of the murdered couple grew up as best they could, she says. At the age of eleven, their son was diagnosed with neurological problems and epilepsy. Psychologists said that these were linked to the trauma he suffered. In the 1990s, he returned to live in Phnom Penh. One day he had a seizure while driving and was killed when he crashed into the Independence Monument roundabout downtown. One of his sisters also suffers from psychological issues. As for Raingsy’s parents, theirs is a silent grief. Her mother still asks why the Khmer Rouge killed her daughter. In the early ’90s, her father, who remained loyal to the king, had to negotiate peace with various parties, including the Khmer Rouge. He kept his feelings to himself.

  CHAPTER 32

  VICTIMS OF STATE-SPONSORED CRIME OFTEN FEEL AS THOUGH what they went through was the worst and most horrific crime imaginable. Though it’s a pointless comparison that can only distress survivors of other crimes, victims tend to feel that their suffering is so great it can’t be matched by that of others. For Tioulong Raingsy’s little sister, “what happened under the Nazis happened here, except magnified, because here it was Khmer against Khmer.” It was similar but worse “than that which the Nazis made the Jews endure” because, she says, the gas chambers were swifter. There’s no reasoning with pain.

  During the few days when the victims’ families take the witness stand, there’s no room left to reflect upon the banality of evil. To see the criminal as a man among men is a necessary scruple, the bitter fruit of appeased minds. But for those few days, that particular thought curls up and hibernates. Nothing resists the flood of grief, devastation, anger, disgust, indignation, and, sometimes, hatred. The victims’ pain and wrath have us sinking deeper into our chairs like stakes being piled into soft ground. There’s
no question of forgiveness or reconciliation. There’s no such thing as redemption. All that matters is punishing a torturer. A trial is an emotional dead end: when the defendant denies responsibility, the victims suffer; when he admits it, they suffer. Either way, they can’t escape. To attend a trial is to experience a sort of asphyxiation.

  Ou Windy was arrested as part of the same group as Tioulong Raingsy and Lim Kimari. They all came from the same privileged milieu. After the Khmer Rouge victory, they all found refuge in the same village. At thirty-one, Ou Windy was a civil servant in the ministry of foreign affairs, on secondment in the prime minister’s cabinet. A married father of three, Windy was a graduate of the Cambodian National School of Administration and the first-born of a group of siblings who had all the advantages and were destined to succeed. His date of entry to S-21 is listed as February 13, 1976. His date of execution: May 20, 1976. His little brother has been thinking about it for thirty years. For 10,950 days and nights, he says.

  I attended this trial because I wanted to try to experience what my brother went through; I wanted to share his suffering and fear, in my own way. I wanted to imagine the pain that you feel when someone hits you, when someone tears out your fingernails, when someone electrocutes you, when you’re starving, when you’re chained up. Your Honor, I thought I had no more tears. But I see now that I have more.

  The brother’s testimony, given via satellite from Paris, falls at Duch’s feet like a cast-iron block: a thud, followed by an endless echo. The dreadful tension only dissipates when the satellite link between Paris and Phnom Penh fails. The court examines a problem with the dates on the S-21 documents concerning Ou Windy. His entry date is later than the date on which his biography is registered. The victims’ families turn over every detail in their minds the way a farmer tills every inch of his field. To them, everything matters, particularly details like these. Duch is asked to clarify the discrepancy. He has a perfectly coherent explanation for Ou Windy’s little brother. “He would have been put in the special jail. That’s why the entry date is different. The list of entry dates isn’t always correct. The date of registration for his biography is more reliable.”

  Ou Windy’s brother, like the parents of the victims, is haunted by what tortures he imagines might have been inflicted on his older brother. Yet he says he thinks Ou Windy’s confession is written with “so much self-assurance and harmony” that he cannot see how it could have been written by someone who had just been tortured. The English-language interpreters muddle Duch’s explanation for a moment, leaving everyone confused. Then he clarifies, in a clever understatement: “If I try to reassure Mr. Ou that there was no torture, people might think I’m avoiding the issue. I don’t want to use this occasion to try to apologize for my crimes. So, to the extent that I’m not precise each time this subject comes up, I should like to repeat that torture was used only when it was unavoidable. The interrogators were all different. Some would quickly turn to torture, some wouldn’t. I’m not going to say that torture wasn’t used against your brother just to please you.”

  In 1992, Ou Windy’s brother visited the haunted rooms at S-21. The youngest of the family, he is a successful businessman in Paris and a modest and reserved person. Like all Cambodians, he says, he keeps his emotions inside. At first glance, his expression looks severe. Yet his face lights up when he greets you, showing both warmth and reserve. There’s something reassuring and calm about him, concealing his 10,950 nights of terror. In court, he describes his visit to the country:

  One evening, at a friend’s house, I met a young woman who had a gift: she could communicate with spirits. I told her about my brother, and she contacted him. We Cambodians believe in this kind of thing. I don’t know how to explain it. The young woman told me that she was in touch with my brother and that he was sad and terrified, that he had suffered greatly in the world of humans, and that he didn’t want to be reincarnated. He said he was very frightened and that his soul had taken refuge in a pagoda; and he said that he had placed himself under the protection of the monks. The medium—I mean, the young woman—said the pagoda’s name. The next day, I went to that pagoda with my sister and we held a ceremony. A very strange thing happened: inside the pagoda, I kept looking up at the ceiling and I felt that my brother’s soul was there. So now, whenever I go into a pagoda, I’ll look up at the ceiling, because perhaps my brother isn’t the only soul who took refuge up there, to avoid reincarnation and ask for Buddha’s protection. Now, my niece is pregnant. When the child is born, we shall go together to that pagoda, to introduce my brother to his grandson.

  PARIS WAS STILL RECOVERING from the student riots of 1968 when young Ouk Ket arrived on a scholarship to study engineering. He, too, was a member of Cambodia’s privileged class; his family lived at the Royal Palace. After the 1970 coup, Ouk Ket answered Prince Sihanouk’s rallying call and, quite naturally, joined the former sovereign’s alliance, which included the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. That same year, he met a young Frenchwoman in Paris. They were married in October 1971, at the same time that, in a distant corner of the Cambodian forest, François Bizot was standing face-to-face with Duch.

  A few months later, the young couple moved to Dakar, where Ouk Ket had been named third undersecretary at the embassy. Ouk Ket’s wife gave birth to a son in 1973 and a daughter two years later. The young civil servant wasn’t Khmer Rouge—his loyalty was to the king—but he appeared enthusiastic about the new regime he represented, whose dream of a better tomorrow he embraced.

  In Cambodia today, everything has been swept clean, everything is as clean in the city as in the country. There is complete security and guaranteed social equality. There is nobody on our backs exploiting us, and none of us shall be exploited. Therefore nobody will be rich and nobody poor. That is to say, it will be all for one and one for all. The factories will start working again, from the smallest workshops to the oil refineries. All the houses will be rebuilt, the schools reopened. Very soon, our children will have [a] radiant future.

  Ouk Ket wrote this to his father-in-law in December 1975, delighted to be “returning to a country benefiting from all this prosperity.” In April 1977, a message from headquarters told him to return to Phnom Penh at last. The family spent three weeks in Paris. On June 7, still enthusiastic about the new regime, the diplomat flew via Beijing to the capital of Democratic Kampuchea.

  “Ket was very happy to return to Cambodia to participate in national reconstruction,” his wife says from the stand.

  He seemed confident. On the bus, I was looking at his very handsome face when I intuitively said, “If one day someone comes to tell me that you’re dead, I’ll know that it will be because you’ve been murdered.” He patted my cheek and said, “Cambodians aren’t savages.” Then he said, “Maybe I’ll have to work in the fields a bit.” That must have been the worst thing to him, I mean, the thing that seemed the hardest to him. Who goes back to their country knowing that they’re going to be killed? He went home confidently, in high spirits.

  Ouk Ket sent a postcard from Pakistan and another from China, from where he wrote that he would land in Phnom Penh on June 11. After that, there was no more news. His wife heard nothing for two years. In December 1979, she asked the Cambodian representative to the United Nations for news of her husband. He told her, “Don’t put your life on hold for him.” Later, she learned about the existence of S-21, and that Ouk Ket’s name was in the prison’s archives. In 1991, in the middle of the peace negotiations then taking place under the aegis of the UN, she went to Cambodia for the first time, taking her two children with her. The family went to S-21 and to Choeung Ek. They searched the archives. On the forty-third line of a list of people executed on December 8, 1977, they read: “Ouk Ket, thirty-one years, Foreign Affairs, Third Undersecretary. Date of entry: June 15, 1977.” He had been in cell 23, room 2, Building C.

  Ouk Ket’s widow describes how she decided then and there that the crime would not go unpunished. Usually, it’s the victors rather than th
e victims who decide such things. But now, at long last, she can stand before the court and ask for justice, though of course nothing will ever satisfy that need. Neither Ouk Ket’s widow nor his daughter refers to Duch by name from the stand. They refer to him as “Case Number One,” which is what the tribunal designated his trial, its first case. Throughout their testimonies, the two women, in turn, use only this case number to refer to the man who reduced their husband and father to a number.

  TIME RESOLVES NOTHING, particularly for the parents who come to testify before the tribunal. In the wake of any mass crime, there is always a small number of victims for whom speaking and condemning the perpetrators are vital processes. The vast remainder, including Ouk Ket’s eldest son, stay silent. No one witnesses their suffering; nobody can sooth their enduring pain. For some victims, expressing their anger is a step along the path to healing. Yet that anger can seem like a river overflowing its banks. The need to talk about their suffering is endless; the story of their loss cannot be recounted too many times. Sometimes, the more they tell it, the sicker they become.

  One rainy October day, I went to a provincial forum organized by the tribunal’s office for the civil parties in its second case, in which the regime’s four highest-ranking, still-living leaders were to be tried. The regional governor was to open the forum. She had hardly begun her speech when she burst into tears. Her father, husband, and son had all disappeared in Khmer Rouge “cooperatives.” Her emotion was undiminished thirty years on. Then a Cambodian lawyer, only recently recruited to represent victims, declared that she, too, had been persecuted. She sobbed uncontrollably. Someone else admitted to having suffered psychological trouble and having had to consult specialists. An old Muslim man at the back of the hall got to his feet: “I am a victim of the Khmer Rouge. Is there a medicine to treat my mental problems?” Then, referring to the cases before the tribunal, he said: “We are dealing with only one germ. We all have all the other germs in our bodies.”